Hallowed ground nearing depletion
Among headstones at West Point Cemetery, a visitor strolls. After almost two centuries and souls of soldiers from every U.S. war, the burial site is close to full. The U.S. Military Academy is taking steps to expand its resting place. (MIKE GROLL / AP)
Hallowed ground nearing depletion
Among headstones at West Point Cemetery, a visitor strolls. After almost two centuries and souls of soldiers from every U.S. war, the burial site is close to full. The U.S. Military Academy is taking steps to expand its resting place. (MIKE GROLL / AP)
West Point making room for more war dead.
WEST POINT, N.Y. - The West Point Cemetery has taken in graduates of the Long Gray Line from the age of the cavalry charge to the dawn of drone strikes. Headstones etched with names like Custerand Westmoreland stand near plots with freshly turned earth.
And after almost two centuries, the 12-acre cemetery is close to full.
The U.S. Military Academy and its graduates are taking steps to make more room with new niches for cremated remains and an eventual expansion of the burial grounds. The work will update a resting place for more than 8,000 people - the most hallowed ground at the nation's the most venerable military academy.
"I would challenge you to find more valor in a smaller amount of space," says cemetery administrator Kathleen Silvia, who notes that 16 Medal of Honor recipients lie here.
Marquee names here include Lt. Col. George Custer, U.S. commander in Vietnam Gen. William Westmoreland and - buried just this winter - Gulf War commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. But it's the rows of graves of never-famous soldiers that give the cemetery its quiet dignity.
Walking among the headstones recently, Silvia - who was among the first female West Point graduates in 1980 - points out Revolutionary War dead and stoops down to tidy the marker for a recently deceased colonel she admired.
Though a military cemetery since 1817, not all the graves are uniform. A few older ones are extravagant. The headstone of celebrated Army football coach Earl "Red" Blaik is shaped like a football ready to be kicked off. Egbert Viele, a Civil War veteran, rests in a two-story pyramid guarded by two stone sphinxes. It is said that his fear of being entombed alive was so great, his mausoleum was rigged with a buzzer.
There is no record of it being used.
The grounds on a tree-sheltered promontory near New York's Hudson River are reserved for West Point graduates and cadets, soldiers who die while assigned to the academy, and immediate family members. While graves of famous alumni like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur are elsewhere, about 140 to 200 people are laid to rest here each year.
Some are old soldiers whose feelings for West Point never faded away. Vietnam veteran and retired Lt. Col. Freed Lowrey, a 1967 graduate, says he will be buried here among the historic figures and his classmates who were killed in that war. "I want to be among soldiers. I want to be among people of my own kind who have served and done so much for the nation," Lowrey says. "I could be in Arlington, I could be in any national cemetery, but this is . . . I mean, West Point's almost my soul."
Lowrey, who returned to live in nearby Fishkill, now works for the West Point Association of Graduates, which has raised more than $1.5 million for a wall with niches for cremated remains.
Silvia expects construction on the cremation niche wall to begin this spring. She also is enthused about plans for a smartphone app that will allow people to locate a person's grave.
"These are lifelong friends of ours," she says, "and it's a very special honor for me to provide the final salute."
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