New Graves, Fresh Grief

Even the names on the headstones sound youthful and vibrant: Megan, Jesse, Heath, Blake. They are names that seem better suited to text messaging -- LOL, BFF -- than to the abbreviated code of the graveyard -- CPL, BSM.

"I find a need to be there," says Teresa Arciola, who drives from New York's Westchester County every other month to place iPod earbuds on her son's grave and play for him the Temptations and Eminem. She brings him Black Forest gummy bears and, on his birthday, beer that she pours into the ground. At every visit, she sits on his grave and reads aloud from his favorite baby book, "Corduroy." He had just turned 20.

"I feel good while I'm there," Arciola says. "But I don't think there's comfort."

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T he graves come quickly.

One mother visits the grave of her casualty officer, the man who was there for her when she first learned that her son had died in 2005.

The funerals require an extra level of choreography.

Two were held Wednesday, back to back. Overhead, thunderstorms threatened, the sky was the color of dark cement and the wind blew flower arrangements to the ground.

By the time the first man was buried -- Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec, a 34-year-old Marine known as the Lion of Fallujah -- the backhoe beside his grave had begun to dig for the next funeral. More than 50 mourners remained near Zembiec's grave site.

Some wandered, visiting other graves. A man in a dark suit sought out two other headstones. A Marine officer spent 20 minutes crisscrossing the section, stopping regularly.

And the backhoe continued to dig. Every mound of dirt scooped from the newest grave was used to finish burying the officer whose funeral had just ended. Rites for Army Spec. Matthew T. Bolar were to begin in an hour.

To stand at the edge of where the graves begin is to see exactly what the war has meant -- what has been lost, what has been sacrificed. The headstones' dark, black lettering seems to endlessly repeat the vague circumstances of each death: Operation Iraqi Freedom . . . Operation Iraqi Freedom . . . Operation Enduring Freedom . . . Iraqi Freedom . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Enduring . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Enduring . . .