Category: Virginia
After 34 Years Missing, A Hero is Finally Laid to Rest
ARLINGTON, VA., April 13 – A long blue line of soldiers wound is way through the sun-filled green fields of Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday, passing stones that mark the resting places of those who fought and died in the nation’s wars since the 1860s. Behind the procession of the 3 rd Infantry Division honor guard, a caisson drawn by six white horses carried the flag-draped coffin of U.S. Army Col. Sheldon Burnett, who was finally brought home to rest 34 years after his death in Laos.
“He’s finally home and not lying in a shallow grave all alone,” said Burnett’s daughter. Trish, who was just 6 years old when the helicopter her father was riding in was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. “I wish we could bring every single one of them home.”
On March 7, 1971, Burnett and three other soldiers were flying along the border of Vietnam and Laos on a mission to provide support to American troops fighting the North Vietnamese there. Their helicopter was hit and crashed near the landing zone. Burnett, a New Hampshire resident, and Warrant Officer Randolph Ard, the pilot, were pinned alive under the wreckage.
The two other passengers, who survived and escaped, reported that Burnett and Ard were alive but severely injured when they were last seen. When South Vietnamese troops arrived 11 days later, Burnett and Ard were gone and presumed missing, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Department’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
Wednesday’s burial was an honor Burnett’s children had fought to bestow on their father. It was a fight started by their mother, Margaret, who wrangled for years with the government, filing freedom of information requests atop freedom of information requests to uncover some tidbit of information that might reveal where Burnett lay and what happened all those years ago.
When Margaret Burnett died in 1998, the torch was passed to her children, who continued to track government efforts until last fall,, when investigations by the Laotian, Vietnamese and American governments discovered Burnett’s and Ard’s shallow graves in the Laotian jungle.
Wednesday, daughter Leigh, 48, said her mother “would have been awfully proud” at the sight of the ceremony, which she said showed “the kind of respect she thought he deserved.”
It was a funeral of full military honors. A riderless brown horse, with a pair of boots backward in the saddle’s stirrups, followed the caisson, an honor reserved only for those of the rank of colonel or above.
At the gravesite, Trish, Leigh, their brother Mike and their families wept as three volleys of gunfire rang out from the seven-member firing party of “Old Guard” soldiers and Taps was played by a lone bugler.
With mechanical precision, the eight military pallbearers folded the flag into a triangle and handed it to the chaplain, who, kneeling before the family, presented the flag to the siblings “on behalf of a grateful nation.”
“It was a nice ceremony,” Mike, 49, said afterwards. “I thought he deserved that. It was nice to see that they went all out.”
Mike said he was also touched to see that 20 members of Rolling Thunder, an organization of Vietnam veterans that works to bring home prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action, came to pay their respects.
The veterans, who followed the procession on their motorcycles behind the cars of family and friends, presented the family with a plaque marking the recovery of Burnett’s body and his burial. Then one by one, they stepped beside Burnett’s coffin and laid on it strings of purple, green, white and yellow beads symbolizing the Purple Heart and the Vietnam campaign ribbon. The group comforted the tearful Burnett family with hugs and handshakes.
“It’s just an honor bringing these people home, and it’s our honor to be here,” said Ted Daniels, the sergeant at arms for the group’s Virginia Chapter Three. “I hope it makes the family feel good to know they have someone behind them.”
Wednesday’s burial does not mark the end of the family’s struggle to uncover the mysteries surrounding Burnett’s disappearance. Trish and her siblings still have questions. Why was he in Laos and what does the Ard family know about what happened that day? These are questions that the stacks of censored documents failed to answer.
Ard was buried in Alabama last month, the Pentagon said.
Despite the missing answers, there is a sense of “resolution,” Leigh said. “It’s more clear now what happened, when it happened and where he’s been for all these years.”
“Relief,” Trish added. “I can’t believe he is home.. It’s almost disbelief.”
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South Coast Soldiers Killed in Iraq Among 1,300 Portraits at Arlington
ARLINGTON, VA. - Killed less than a year apart; the two men - both fathers, both husbands and both from the SouthCoast - stand among the more than 1,300 faces depicted in the "Faces of the Fallen" exhibit at Arlington National Cemetery.
Staff Sgt. Joseph Camara and Sgt. Peter Gerald Enos were both killed in action in Iraq and are now being memorialized in portraits of each man and woman killed since the war began through Nov. 11, 2004. The portraits were done by more than 200 artists from across the country and vary from brightly colored painting to black and white sketches, from actual images to flowers representing the person.
Sgt. Camara was killed on Sept. 1, 2003, near Baghdad when an explosive device ignited under his vehicle. The New Bedford Police officer and member of the Rhode Island National Guard was 40.
Army Sgt. Enos was killed on April 9, 2004, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his patrol vehicle in Bayji, about 120 miles north of Baghdad. The 24-year-old was promoted from specialist to sergeant posthumously.
The exhibit, which opened on March 22 and will close on Nov. 11, displays portraits arranged in order of the soldiers' deaths, surrounded by objects visitors have left behind, such as photos, dog tags, flowers, poems and messages from loved ones or comrades.
Visitors to the exhibit walk slowly along, pausing for a moment to lean forward or bend down for a closer view, commenting on the artwork and often on how young the soldier was.
Some of the portraits show the soldier in uniform, others in casual clothes. One portrayed a soldier in a James Dean pose, smoking a cigarette and leaning off to the side. Others were images of part of the soldier's face standing out on the cream canvas.
Susan Carney and Sarah Huntington collaborated on Sgt. Enos' portrait to create a collage with layers of words and paint and an image of Sgt. Enos' face in the middle, tilted to the side with his name, age and hometown written below the image.
The collage includes the words "Six Nations," which is from an old treaty between the federal government and Indian tribes, Ms. Carney said.
Ms. Carney, a painter and printmaker from Shepherdstown, W.Va., said she used the treaty to symbolize the correlation between America's involvement in Iraq and its connection with Native American tribes, and specifically the process of bringing democracy to a country that has never had it before.
She said the idea came to mind after she first sat down to work on the portraits.
"When I started doing this project, the first thing I did was I sat down and tried to make it clear in my mind why they had died," she said.
Each artist was given photos or images of soldiers killed in a 24-hour period, and told to create a portrait of each soldier.
"It was a very meaningful experience to portray 10 people that way that we'd never met," Ms. Huntington, of Lincoln, Va., said, adding that she will always remember their faces. "You did feel like you sort of got to know them a little bit."
Ms. Carney agreed, saying she felt very attached to the men whose portraits she worked on even though she had never met them.
"It certainly made the war more real for me," she said, adding that she still had the soldiers' photos in her journal.
Ms. Carney said she tried to show how the soldiers she portrayed were related by adding a rope in the background of the 10 she depicted
"Even though they didn't know it, they had that kind of strange bond that they all died on the same day," she said. "If you put them all in a line--a straight horizontal line--you can see the rope."
Ms. Huntington said although she and Ms. Carney "don't agree with the war, [they] tried not to put that in the artwork" out of consideration for the families.
"I just think you have to respect the family's feelings; no matter how they felt about it they lost somebody," the photographer said. "I tried to keep my politics out of it."
Jenny Freestone, a printmaker from Takoma Park, Md., created Sgt. Camara's portrait by doing a detailed pencil drawing and also making a black and white copier transfer of him wearing his New Bedford police hat.
Ms. Freestone said she would remember most the vulnerability of the soldiers, both young and old, because it was something that was very upsetting to her.
Her greatest struggle in creating the portraits, she said, was "the emotional difficulty of realizing what you are trying to draw."
She said she focused most on the eyes. "They were very important to me because that's where you connect with me."
She also said she "tried to tease out personalities from faces" she worked on but found it "difficult to do them justice."
"Obviously you start to think about the person, who were they, what were they like," Ms. Freestone said. "It kind of helped to think about the person as a person and try and put that back into the drawing, but the bottom line was that you knew that you were drawing this son, this husband, this brother, this sister for the family left behind."
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