Grim Duty in Section 60 – By Brigid Schulte

by

 

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 7, 2007; Page C01

The Arlington Ladies are used to honoring elderly veterans and comforting their families graveside. The mounting death toll of young service members in Iraq and Afghanistan is making the mission harder.

On a winter day when the rows and rows of white headstones were shrouded in a band of low-lying mist at Arlington National Cemetery, Jane Newman took her place in the white-gloved military honor guard. As the ashes of the latest fallen soldier arrived, she placed her hand over her heart in the civilian salute.

She didn’t know this soldier or the family that shuffled behind his urn, shoulders stooped in grief. As usual, she knew only his name, Keith E. Fiscus. His age, 26. His years of service in the Army, four, and the names of his next of kin. Yet when she went through the paperwork that morning, she felt a pang. He was one more soldier killed in Iraq.

When she was invited five years ago to become an Army Arlington Lady, Newman, the wife of a 30-year Army artillery officer and herself a retired Army nurse, was drawn to the group’s mission: No soldier is ever buried alone. Every fourth Tuesday of the month, she spends the day at Arlington, standing graveside, hand over heart, at up to six funerals a day.

When she started, most of the soldiers she was burying were World War II veterans or soldiers who had lived long lives. Handing a condolence card on behalf of the Army chief of staff and saying a few kind words from the “Army family” to a grieving widow was never easy. But these days, as the death toll from the Iraq war has topped 3,000 and many of the buried are young soldiers, Newman and other Arlington Ladies are finding it difficult to do their solemn duty. Some have asked to be excused.

“I find myself saying, ‘Stiff upper lip, Jane,’ ” she said after a funeral. ” ‘Stiff upper lip.’ “

An Arlington Lady does not cry. An Arlington Lady is not a professional mourner. She is not a grief counselor, according to their strict Standard Operating Procedure. She is there simply so that somebody is. Since 1973, when the Army chief of staff’s wife saw a veteran’s funeral with no one attending, an Army Arlington Lady, in muted civilian dress and often muddy pumps, has stood graveside at every funeral at Arlington as the personal representative of the chief of staff. Occasionally, she is the only one there.

She is part of a society open only to military wives or widows and then only to those invited to join. The Navy ladies formed in 1985. The Air Force had Arlington Ladies as far back as 1948. Now, the Navy, Air Force and Army have about 50 Arlington Ladies each. The Marines do not want to participate. The Marines take care of their own, the groups have been told.

Arlington Ladies adhere to a strict dress code — no slacks, no bright colors. Sunglasses are permitted at all times. They stand at attention with the honor guard. Their role in the ceremony is brief: When the flag has been presented to the grieving family, they approach, offer a few words of comfort and a handwritten note and back away, never once turning their backs on the flag.

“We add a little more personal touch to the military funeral,” explained Margaret Mensch, chair of the Army Arlington Ladies. “Yet not too personal.”

Getting too personal got one Arlington Lady in trouble last year. After a particularly emotional funeral in Section 60, where the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, she kissed the foreheads of the widow and mother. “She was reprimanded for that,” Mensch said.

But it was just that gesture that Cindy Upchurch, the mother of Specialist Clinton Upchurch, who was killed by a makeshift bomb in Iraq, needed that day. “It was a blessing,” she said recently. “I don’t remember who the Arlington Lady was, but she was elderly and she was so kind. You could tell she was heartbroken. And at that point in a mother’s life, when you’ve lost a child in a violent death, in a war, you need some human touch.”

Lieutenant Colonel William Barefield, Arlington’s senior Army chaplain, says he sees Arlington Ladies as healers. “I watch the families. After we present the flag, you sense a little bit of sadness, like ‘Oh, it’s over,’ ” he said. And that’s when the Arlington Ladies walk into what he calls the “eye of the storm — the unbelievable sorrow for a death in war. They represent someone at the highest level of government. It’s an acknowledgment that this life was one of a kind.”

Their duty days are still filled with the funerals of old veterans. Of all the troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, fewer than 300 are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. “Some are so young,” Mensch said, “the families want them closer to home.”

Mensch has been attending funerals, stoic and tearless, for nearly 30 years. But the young ones killed in combat are difficult. When one of the dead on her schedule one day turned out to be her former honor guard escort, killed in Iraq, she had to steel herself. “You are still. You just don’t cry. When I got there, I thought, ‘Just concentrate on that leaf on that tree over there,’ ” she said. “A military funeral is very dignified. Very precise. It may sound cold, but that’s the beauty of it.”

Alba Thompson, an Army Arlington Lady, gets down on her knee and touches the hand of the widow or mother. It’s hard, regardless of age, to approach what she calls this “sacred space.” But it’s especially hard when it’s a young widow. Once, a widow wore a strapless dress. She caught herself wondering: Had she never been to a funeral before? Or was this his favorite dress?

“I tell them, ‘I don’t know what I can say right now to make you feel better. Just remember that thousands of people come through here, and when they see the name of your husband or your son, they’ll know he was a good and honorable man. They’ll know he served his country,’ ” she said. “Some of them nod, and some of them are bitter.”

Only the Navy Arlington Ladies will meet the families before the service and send follow-up notes several months later to see how families are faring. The Army is just so much bigger — and soldiers make up the majority of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — so the Army Ladies can’t, Mensch said. Nor does she want to intrude on families. “We’re strangers to them.”

On that December morning, Jane Newman found herself tearing up as six soldiers in dress uniform carefully smoothed and folded the American flag that had been draped over Fiscus’s ashes. And taps always makes her catch her breath. When the flag was presented to Fiscus’s mother, who collapsed over it, and the acrid air burned from the three volleys of rifle fire, Newman approached the mother. Perhaps it was better, she said later, that she didn’t know Sgt. Fiscus once called his mother “as tough as woodpecker lips” and his hero. Better not to know, as she later read in the newspaper, that Pamela Fiscus had asked her son not to go to this war.

She draped her hand over the woman’s shoulder and told her, with a quiver in her voice, that the nation was grateful for her son’s sacrifice. The mother continued clutching the flag, head bowed and weeping.

And because this is a controversial war, because recent polls show that the majority of Americans, including Pamela Fiscus, oppose it, Newman finds it difficult to say that sometimes. “It’s particularly hard when the family is wondering, ‘Are they dying in vain for this?’ “

Those fears, said Paula McKinley, chair of the Navy Arlington Ladies, are not new. “They have permeated every war since World War II.” And all the more reason that an Arlington Lady be present. “We have to understand that every person buried at Arlington was a hero to someone.”

As they sit at their desks between funerals, the Arlington Ladies keep their politics to themselves. They are military wives. They do their duty. And sometimes, not everyone comes out alive. Having been wives or mothers of soldiers, pilots and sailors, the Arlington Ladies know what it means when a commitment is made to serve.

As Keith Fiscus’s family remained at the columbarium to mourn in private, Newman and her escort returned to the administrative building to warm up. “She was so upset,” Newman said of Fiscus’s mother. “It’s a son. And you’re not supposed to bury your children.”

Later that day, the Defense Department announced that another soldier had died in Iraq.

 

Read our general and most popular articles

Leave a Comment