Among the carefully tended gardens of Arlington National Cemetery, Shawn Dostie of Lewiston made his final journey.
On Jan. 11, a horse-drawn carriage bore his flag-draped coffin through the cold and windy Virginia morning. An honor guard gave him a 21-gun salute. A bugler played taps.
Dostie, 32, was killed Dec. 30 in Iraq. He was buried among presidents, astronauts and the fallen soldiers of every U.S. conflict since the Civil War.
“I was very honored,” said Dostie’s mother, Delaine Fugere. “He’s there among all the heroes that had gone before.”
Like Dostie and his family, some are driven by patriotism to choose a military burial place. Others choose to bury loved ones close by, where they can visit regularly.
Lisbon native Beau Beaulieu was buried at the Maine Veterans Cemetery on Mount Vernon Road in Augusta. Lewiston native Daniel Cunningham was buried in a private cemetery here in Lewiston. And Nicholes Golding, the Addison native who was killed in Afghanistan, was buried on the hill overlooking his tiny Washington County town.
About 11 or 12 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have chosen to be buried at Arlington, said Tom Sherlock, the cemetery’s official historian.
It’s a number that has remained fairly constant since the advent of air travel, he said.
“Simple,” he said. “It made it easier for people far away to visit.”
During the war in Vietnam, when anti-war sentiments discouraged people from burying their relatives at Arlington, the number was only slightly less, said Sherlock, “perhaps 10 or 11 percent.”
Cemeteries expanding
As of Thursday, 221 veterans from Iraq and 28 from Afghanistan were buried at Arlington, said Sherlock.
However, they are a tiny minority of the country’s most prestigious cemetery, where 300,000 have been buried.
The day of Dostie’s burial, 27 others, veterans and their spouses, were interred in the ground overlooking the Potomac River or placed in Arlington’s columbarium, a tomb for urns with cremated remains.
Most were old men and women, veterans of World War II and Korea. Their numbers are increasing.
Nationally, an estimated 1,800 veterans die each day.
To keep up, Arlington is growing. A $40 million, 40-acre expansion will add 26,000 graves.
Similar expansions are happening at national and state veterans cemeteries across the country and here in Maine.
The work will supply space for decades, say officials. Planned work at Arlington could keep it open for another 60 years.
Maine is working on a similar time frame.
Construction on a new state cemetery in Springvale will begin this year. Two others, in Augusta and Caribou, were added in the past five years.
“We never want to run out of space for our veterans,” said Peter Ogden, director of Maine’s Bureau of Veterans Services. “This is the last benefit we can give them.”
Final benefit
Any veteran with an honorable discharge can be buried at a veterans cemetery. So can their spouses.
The burial benefit has been around since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln created Arlington and several other national cemeteries for that war’s casualties.
It has evolved into a big machine. The Department of Veterans Affairs created the National Cemetery Administration, which operates 122 cemeteries across the country. Nine more are planned.
In 2005, Maine lost an estimated 3,700 veterans. About 30 percent of them were buried in a state cemetery, Ogden said. Nationally, the number falls to about 20 percent.
Maine veterans, as they do with other benefits such as health care, seem to use their burial benefit at a higher rate than people nationally.
“They all deserve it,” said Ogden. “Every one of them.”
Many Mainers have already signed up for spaces in state cemeteries. About 10,000 veterans have been preapproved for plots, having already proven their eligibility for burial. Ogden estimated that as many as 6,000 spouses may be buried alongside them.
Approval doesn’t mean that’s where they will end up, though.
For the families, such matters are often intensely personal.
Dostie, the Maine man who recently died in Iraq, wanted to be buried in Arlington, his mother said.
There’s always something different about ceremonies for the young men and women, said Arlington’s Sherlock, who has been to many such funerals over the past three years.
“The vast majority of people here lived long lives, and they’re all important,” he said. “But the feeling is quite a bit different when you see little children or a 25-year-old widow,” he said.
“It’s just sad,” Sherlock said.
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