Thousands of families are having to wait months to bury family members in Arlington National Cemetery, officials said.
Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis told The Examiner that he knows families who have waited up to three months to bury veterans at Arlington, which averages 30 funerals per day.
“For a retired Army colonel — a friend of mine — the family had to wait three months” to bury him, Davis said. “That means your loved ones’ remains are in a warehouse somewhere all that time.”
A spokeswoman for Arlington National, Kaitlin Horst, said nearly 7,000 families waited an average of two months to bury their loved one there last year.
The number of veterans buried each year in the 612-acre lot has increased by 500 since 2004, Horst said.
And burial delays have been increasing since the beginning of the Iraq War, according to Davis.
“The Old Guard provides the soldiers for the burial details. Those soldiers are also in the rotation mix to go to the Iraq war,” he said. “That means there are fewer soldiers to provide honors.”
Horst attributed the delays to World War II veterans, who are dying at a rate of 1,200 a day.
On top of that, she said 10 percent of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are sent home to be buried at Arlington National.
“Because of the nature of the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan we do our best to schedule those burials as soon as possible, but we don’t give preference to anyone,” Horst said.
She also said delays are longer for veterans who are eligible for certain honors — meaning the higher-ranking veterans are, the longer their families will have to wait.
Meanwhile, their loved ones could be packed into an unrefrigerated garage, in hallways or on makeshift gurneys — where a former embalmer said veterans’ corpses were stored while awaiting burial at the national cemetery last year.
Steven Napper, a retired Maryland trooper who worked at the National Funeral Home in Falls Church for nine months, told The Washington Post in April that the home mistreated more than 200 veterans’ corpses during his employment.
It might not be coincidental, then, that cremations are on the rise as the wait list for burials grows.
“We have definitely seen an increase in cremations over the past few years,” Horst said. “More than 60 percent of all funerals are for cremation.”
