On Hallowed Ground (30 page)

American servicemen had not forgotten. They fought with determination and distinction in Korea, even as patience faded on
the home front and the first waves of war dead arrived at Arlington. Among those who joined Walker at Arlington were Marine
Pfc. Walter C. Monegan Jr., who single-handedly took out two enemy tanks before he was gunned down near Sosari; Army Sfc.
Charles W. Turner, who dashed through hostile fire, took an exposed position on a tank, and repelled enemy troops until his
platoon could safely regroup for a counterattack near Yongsan; Marine Staff Sgt. William G. Windrich, twice wounded and refusing
evacuation near Yudam-ni, where he guided his platoon to a strong defensive position and held the ground until he lapsed into
unconsciousness; Navy Hospital Corpsman Francis C. Hammond, who exposed himself to enemy fire while treating wounded Marines
near Sanae-dong—all perished in the Korean fighting, all came to rest in the hills of Virginia, all earned the Medal of Honor
for their heroism.
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They had not won the war, but they helped turn back the threat to South Korea, which finally made its uneasy truce with the
North in 1953. When the shooting stopped, the army’s identification specialists continued searching for the dead in South Korea, in due course recovering 30,425 American service members and identifying more than 29,500. The low proportion of unknowns—less than 3 percent of those recovered—was unprecedented, a tribute to the growing professionalism of the army’s specialty teams. Identification experts established a modern laboratory near Yokohama, Japan, where they collected and collated information for each dead serviceman, including his dental profile, hair color, height, shoe size, skin pigmentation, and fingerprints. X-rays were taken for each of the dead, which revealed old injuries and helped identify some of them.
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Another 8,100 combatants were listed as missing in action, presumed to be buried in North Korea or held as prisoners of war when the truce was declared.
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The few Americans who ended the war as unknowns—there were 848 in that category—were held at the allied mortuary near Yokohama.
There they remained, stripped of their identities and unclaimed by loved ones until 1956, when officials began to cast about
for a suitable burial site. The army, designated as the lead service for handling the dead from Korea, first proposed that
the unknowns be interred at the United Nations cemetery near Pusan, South Korea. This idea was abandoned when the fragility
of the truce was considered; North Korea had overrun the South in earlier fighting, and it might do so again. Officials next
considered moving the unknowns to the Philippines, where the United States maintained a cemetery for the dead of World War
II; this suggestion was discarded as a hard sale for the American public. The next proposal was to send the Korean unknowns—all
of them—to Arlington, which proved unworkable; the cemetery was already cramped for space and it was thought that the mass
interments of Korean war dead would detract from the Tomb of the Unknowns. With all other options exhausted, the Army finally
decided to bury the Korean unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, an old volcanic crater known
locally as the Punchbowl for its scooped-out topography. There, in May 1956, all of the unknowns from the Korean war were
buried, taking their berths alongside more than two thousand unknowns from the Second World War.
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The uneasy truce along Korea’s demilitarized zone allowed the United States to resume the unfinished business the conflict
had interrupted—namely, the burial of an unknown serviceman from World War II at Arlington. In August 1955, responding to
requests from veterans’ groups, the secretary of defense asked the Army to find an unknown from the Second World War for Arlington
honors; the next year, in August 1956, Congress authorized the burial of an unknown from the Korean conflict. To simplify
matters, both would be repatriated in a joint ceremony at Arlington on Memorial Day 1958.
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Plans for the World War II Unknown had originally called for construction of a new sarcophagus on the amphitheater terrace.
With two Unknowns scheduled for burial on the plaza in 1958, the Army revised its original plan, deciding instead to excavate
crypts for the two newcomers at Arlington, each of whom would have his grave marked by a flat marble slab to be placed in
the shadow of the World War I monument. While construction began at the amphitheater, specialty teams scattered overseas to
exhume a number of nameless servicemen from both wars, reexamining each candidate for any identifying features or personal
effects, and destroying all paperwork associated with the burials to guarantee the anonymity of the selection.
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For World War II candidates, the Army picked finalists from the transatlantic and transpacific theaters to ensure that the
main regions of fighting were fairly represented. They exhumed thirteen of the dead from military cemeteries in North Africa
and Europe; those thirteen were sent to the U.S. cemetery at Epinal, France, where one unknown candidate was chosen and shipped
across the Atlantic on the U.S.S.
Blandy
, one of the Navy’s newest destroyers, in mid-May 1958.
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While these proceedings went forward, a second candidate for World War II honors was chosen in ceremonies on May 16 at Hickam
Air Force Base in Hawaii from unknowns exhumed at the Fort McKinley American Cemetery in the Philippines and from the Punchbowl
on Oahu. The Pacific candidate joined the Korean Unknown, already designated on May 15, for the long flight to Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba. From there the two servicemen were transferred to the U.S.S. Boston, which steamed northward for the Virginia Capes to complete the selection. The Boston met the
Blandy
offshore on May 26, when the Unknown from World War II was chosen by Hospital Corpsman 1st Class William R. Charette. Charette,
a Medal of Honor winner from the Korean conflict, placed a wreath on one of the World War II caskets, saluted smartly, and
stepped back. The runner-up was taken eight miles out to sea, wrapped in the traditional sailcloth shroud, and committed to
the deep; he hit the water, slid under the waves, and disappeared to the sound of Taps.
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With these rituals accomplished, the Unknowns remaining—one from Korea and one from the Second World War—were ready for the
last phase of their journey. Side by side, their flag-covered caskets were settled onto the
Blandy
and, watched over by honor guards and with sailors lining the rails, motored up the Potomac for Washington, following the path their comrade from World War I had pioneered more than thirty-six years before.
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For three days thousands of citizens converged on the Capitol Rotunda to pay their respects. Foreign dignitaries brought flowers
and expressions of thanks; comrades with gray hair filed through the echoing marble hall; hundreds of families still missing
loved ones stood under the dome, stared at the flag-covered caskets, and allowed themselves to think that one of their own
had returned home. They joined some one hundred thousand mourners who turned out to see the Unknowns bound for Arlington on
Memorial Day, May 30, 1958.
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At precisely one p.m., just as the caskets were borne down the Capitol steps with the Unknown from World War II in the lead,
an artillery battery at the Washington Monument commenced the booming salutes that would punctuate every minute until the Unknowns arrived at the amphitheater.
Silent crowds gathered along the sidewalks with heads bared to watch the procession roll down Capitol Hill, along Constitution
Avenue, around the Lincoln Memorial, and over the river to Arlington. The matching black caissons, each draped in velvet and
pulled by six gray horses from the Fort Myer stables, rode side by side, preceded by the national colors. At the cemetery
gates, the procession halted, the World War II Unknown swung into the lead, and the cortege resumed its unhurried progress
in a single column, ascending the green hills as twenty fighter jets and bombers rumbled overhead, each group flying the missing
man formation.
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When the caskets were settled into the apse of the amphitheater and VIPs had filed into their seats, the nation’s most prominent
World War II veteran, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, took his place as chief mourner. The sun blazed high, raising the temperature
to eighty-two degrees and sending waves of heat rippling up from the bowl of the white marble amphitheater. Several hundred
spectators swooned, including an associate justice of the Supreme Court. For his part, President Eisenhower, dressed in a
black suit and accustomed to state ritual, soldiered on through the heat and glare, impressing at least one reporter that
afternoon.
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“The President’s capacity for standing at attention and sitting in prayerful attitude during the long ceremonies was notable,”
the
New York Times
reported. “Others fanned themselves with their programs. Many did not display the sixty-seven-year-old President’s stamina.”
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Looking cool and crisp, Eisenhower stepped across the stage to speak for the two honored warriors who had endured so much
and traveled so far to reach Arlington: “On behalf of a grateful people I now present the Medal of Honor to these two Unknowns
who gave their lives to the United States of America,” he said, placing the first medal, mounted on a velvet board, atop the
flag-covered coffin of his comrade from World War II; he followed suit for the Unknown from the Korean conflict. Then ceremonies
moved onto the terrace, where hundreds of servicemen stood rigid in the sun, bayonets fixed, medals shining, young faces incongruously
set and stony.
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Casket teams lowered the Unknowns onto rails over their crypts and lifted the flags from each, holding them taut. Watching
solemnly, President Eisenhower stood at the World War II Unknown’s grave, while Vice President Richard M. Nixon took his place
before the Korean Unknown. Chaplains from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths stepped forward to read the burial service,
each in his way and each in his turn. A battery from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, positioned over the next hill, shook
the warm afternoon with their twenty-one-gun salute, which was still reverberating when a firing party shouldered their rifles
and delivered the traditional three-part volley. A lone bugler sounded Taps. Dusk eased down on Arlington, and workers lowered
two honored warriors beneath the terrace.
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With their arrival, each of the century’s major wars took its place on the amphitheater plaza, where three tombs symbolized
a distinct phase of the nation’s evolution—one from the era of Black Jack Pershing, biplanes, and doughboys; one from the
time of Pearl Harbor, Ike, Normandy, and the mushroom-shaped cloud; and one from the false hope of Inchon and the confusion
of night fighting, long retreats, and limited war. Having used the ultimate weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the
United States could not easily unleash it again—nor, for that matter, could the growing number of nations in possession of
that power. The specter of nuclear holocaust, hovering just over the horizon, ensured that the last wars of the century would
be small, costly affairs of containment, limited in scope and unsatisfying in outcome, with few obvious winners.
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Total war was unthinkable, the future uncertain.

That future, and all that the nuclear age implied, were made obvious at Arlington within three days of President John F. Kennedy’s
inauguration in 1961. That is when a C-54 transport touched down at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington at three thirty on the morning of January 23, taxied to a secure area, and rolled to a halt in the dark. Guards kept vigil
around the plane until daylight, at which time the transport’s cargo door heaved open and a forklift ventured across the tarmac.
A bulky vault was removed from the plane and loaded onto a flatbed truck. The truck proceeded to Arlington, thirty minutes
away, and stopped in front of a little-used chapel. Soldiers appeared there and gingerly took the vault inside, while a technician
swept the truck’s cab with a Geiger counter, detected a few harmless millirems of radiation, and sent the flatbed on its way.
An Army guard was posted at the chapel’s door, along with a health physicist from the Atomic Energy Commission. Nobody was
allowed to approach the vault inside, which held the badly burned remains of Spec. Four Richard Leroy McKinley, twenty-six,
a casualty of the nation’s first nuclear accident. Saturated with radiation, McKinley was kept in isolation as he awaited
burial, double-sealed in a lead-lined casket and concrete vault.
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McKinley, a career soldier who had survived the fight for Korea, was one of three technicians killed on January 3, 1961, while
performing maintenance on the nuclear reactor known as SL-1, the Army’s Stationary Low Power facility some forty miles west
of Idaho Falls, Idaho. The small, isolated experimental station, a two hundred–megawatt plant, was the prototype for power
plants the Army hoped to build for its remote radar outposts in the Arctic. But SL-1 had exploded when one of McKinley’s comrades,
Army Spec. John A. Byrnes III, had pulled the reactor’s central control rod too far out of its seat, producing a power surge
and explosion inside the containment vessel. Byrnes, standing over the reactor, was thrown onto the ceiling of the containment
chamber and impaled there by the power rod. McKinley and another serviceman, Navy Electrician’s Mate Richard C. Legg, were
scorched and killed. Both were so thoroughly irradiated that rescue teams wearing lead-lined suits could handle the dead men
for only a few minutes at a time. Legg and Byrnes were returned to their home states for burial—consigned, like McKinley,
to lead-lined caskets inside sealed cement vaults.
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