From staff, AP reports
news@joplinglobe.com
JOPLIN, Mo. —
Local military veterans are disgusted by the mismanagement of Arlington National Cemetery, where thousands of grave sites may have been incorrectly identified, said Bill Rowe, commander of Joplin Post No. 534, Veterans of Foreign Wars.
He made his comments by phone in Joplin as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held hearings on the problem in Washington. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., is chairwoman of an oversight panel on the committee.
Click here to learn more about Arlington National Cemetery and see a gallery of photos.
“They’re (local veterans) disgusted with how the maintenance is done and by the slipshod way the cemetery is managed,” Rowe said of the national cemetery.
He said it’s a reflection of the attitude of the American work force.
“They care nothing about service,” Rowe said. “All they care about is payday and quitting time.”
Rowe said he doesn’t know how the situation can be resolved.
‘Disgrace’
“It is a disgrace that they’ve operated the way they have,” Rowe said. “I have no idea how they’re going to identify the graves or the remains” that have been misidentified.
He said he thinks replacing the entire management at Arlington may be required.
Cemetery Superintendent John Metzler Jr. was forced out in June and was the subject of Thursday’s hearing.
Jenny Mansfield, of Carthage, said her nephew, Patrick Kelly Connor, is buried at Arlington. Connor, of Columbia, was 25 when he died during the first Gulf War on Feb. 2, 1991.
Mansfield said the family was there when her nephew was placed in his grave, so the members know where he is buried. She said it would be frustrating if they didn’t.
“I would feel bad for any family who has questions,” Mansfield said of the misidentified graves. “If it were my child, I would be very angry and upset. Where’s my child? Where’s my soldier? And what else have you lied to me about?”
Mansfield said in some regard, the mix-ups aren’t surprising because letters sometimes don’t arrive at the correct address even when they are mailed in the same town.
“It’s your federal government at work again,” she said.
Estimates of the number of graves potentially affected by mix-ups at the cemetery grew to as many as 6,600 on Thursday, as Metzler blamed his staff and a lack of resources for the scandal that forced his ouster.
‘Full responsibility’
Metzler, who ran the famous military burial ground for 19 years, said he accepts “full responsibility” for the problems.
But he also rebutted some of the findings of Army investigators. And he suggested that cemetery employees were to blame for mix-ups because the system for tracking grave sites relied mostly on a complicated paper trail vulnerable to error.
“Personally it is very painful for me that our team at Arlington did not perform all aspects of its mission to the high standard required,” he told the Senate panel. He was subpoenaed to testify.
McCaskill said Thursday that her investigation has revealed far higher estimates of the number of graves affected than cited in a previous Army probe. McCaskill said she believes that between 4,900 and 6,600 graves may be unmarked or mislabeled on cemetery maps. And she blamed Metzler.
He provided an often confusing defense, saying that internal working maps used by cemetery employees were mislabeled but that those discrepancies wouldn’t necessarily affect operations.
He also said any problems that popped up over the years were quickly fixed and suggested he was surprised by the findings of the Army Inspector General Agency.
His testimony angered lawmakers.
“The notion that you would come in here and act like you didn’t know about it until a month ago is offensive,” McCaskill said. “You did know about it, and you did nothing.”
A visibly frustrated Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., abruptly ended his questioning.
“I’d have a lot of fun with you in a deposition because I don’t think we’re getting straight talk here,” Brown said.
Thurman Higginbotham, Metzler’s former deputy, testified in general about his tenure at the cemetery but left the hearing early after asserting his Fifth Amendment right not to respond to many of the lawmakers’ more pointed questions.
When asked whether he was aware of problems at the cemetery, Higginbotham said: “It was always conceptual that anything done by hand for 40-plus years that there would have to be some errors somewhere.”
Forced retirements
John Metzler Jr., superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery, and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham, were forced to retire in June after Army investigators found that as many as 211 graves were unmarked or misidentified.
