Salon.com MobileWhat happened to Master Sgt. Marion Grabe, says a source, is a clue "that there may be thousands of these problems"
Air Force Master Sgt. Marion Grabe passed away on Christmas day in 2007. She had served 26 years as an operating room nurse in the Air Force she loved, including 17 months in a Manila hospital treating wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War.
In death, Grabe wanted to mark her service to her country with a suitably honorable burial at Arlington National Cemetery. "She wanted to be buried there so bad," recalled Grabe's sister, Dorothy Nolte. Thinking of the fiasco that ensued with Grabe's burial at Arlington, Nolte added sadly, "She deserved better."
On Jan. 28, 2008, the cemetery interred Grabe's cremated remains in the wrong plot, on top of the casket of another deceased service member. The Army then moved Grabe's remains without requesting permission from Nolte, her next of kin -- despite cemetery regulations urging efforts to obtain permission from family -- but later claimed to Salon that it had notified the next of kin. The official who moved Grabe without family approval is the same official who may bear primary responsibility for the poor record keeping at the cemetery, which has already resulted in at least one "unknown" grave, as previously documented by Salon, in a cemetery that is supposed to have no new "unknowns." And the mistake is part of a pattern of errors at the cemetery, where several current and former cemetery employees tell Salon there may be a large number of similarly misplaced remains.
Arlington has more than 300,000 graves. Some cemeteries of similar size began tracking grave locations and burials years ago via electronic records and satellites. Despite paying nearly $6 million over the past decade to a clutch of contractors with ties to cemetery managers to create a similar system, Arlington has almost nothing to show for the money. As a result, the cemetery still tries to track around 30 burials a day with paper records and more than 100 paper maps. Preventable mistakes occur, current and former cemetery staff say.
In Grabe's case, the cemetery buried her urn in Grave 2133 in Section 67, a stretch of grass on the southern edge of the cemetery near the Pentagon and, fittingly, with the shining, curving spears of the Air Force Memorial rising up into the sky in the background, just off the cemetery grounds. It would have been an apt resting place for the 63-year-old former nurse who enlisted in the Air Force in 1963.
In a paperwork foul-up, however, cemetery officials forgot that a staff sergeant named Doe had previously been buried in Grave 2133 of Section 67. (Doe is a pseudonym; Salon knows the individual's name but is choosing not to use it.) His casket was 7 feet down, and engineers did not even see it when Grabe's urn went in the same spot, buried under 3 feet of earth. The cemetery buried Grabe directly on top of the unrelated staff sergeant.
Arlington then placed Grabe's headstone above her remains, leaving Doe beneath her, unmarked. (It remains unclear what happened to Doe's headstone. Perhaps it never arrived at the cemetery in yet another foul-up.)
That's how it stayed for four months. It might have been like that forever, current and former cemetery staff say, just like many other mistakes. Most of the errors are invisible to the naked eye, buried beneath the straight lines of perfectly aligned headstones that imply a military precision to the burials at Arlington despite disarray under the ground.
Salon recently reported on another case where the cemetery went to bury someone, only to find unknown, unmarked remains already in the grave. The cemetery kept that quiet for six years, leaving those remains unmarked under just a patch of grass until Salon exposed it. The cemetery's solution was to place a stone marked "Unknown" on the grave -- effectively creating a new unknown soldier, in an era when DNA testing has made such a designation obsolete -- rather than dig up the grave to identify the occupant.
In Grabe's case, however, it was the relative of someone buried at Arlington who noticed a problem. On May 15, 2008, Staff Sgt. Doe's widow visited her husband's grave, 2133 in Section 67, but found Grabe's headstone there. In a panic, she visited the Arlington visitor center, where workers could not explain the situation. By the time she reached the cemetery's nearby administrative offices, the widow was in "full boil," according to one official familiar with the events of that day.
Cemetery and Army officials say they immediately dug up Grabe and moved her that day or the next, though this mistake, like others, has been kept quiet. This is the first time the error involving Grabe's remains has been made public.
