This article by Christian Davenport of the Washington Post is as dry as used cooking parchment and could have been taken from the pages of a contemporary American novel. Nice one Christian. His story of military incompetence and corruption in the burial of the dead and the subsequent scandals over favoured reservations has to be seen as an allegory of modern American life…..you can’t get away from these issues even when you die for your country.
Officials at Arlington National Cemetery — still unable to fully account for who is buried where at the nation’s premier military resting place — are struggling to determine who has reserved plots and whether some of those grave sites are already in use.
Years of sloppy recordkeeping have left officials with no reliable data on how many reservations have been made for plots in the 624-acre cemetery. The problem — along with the discovery that an unofficial reservation system for VIPs continued for decades in violation of Army regulations — is yet another challenge for the cemetery’s new leaders.
Last year, Army investigators found that graves were mismarked and unmarked, that burial urns had been unearthed and dumped in a dirt pile, and Read More
