New Graves, Fresh Grief

"Freedom is not free," say the hats and bracelets worn by some visitors to Section 60. And the rows of headstones -- from the just-dug graves back to the those of World War II, Korea and Vietnam veterans who died of old age -- are stark, white reminders of how much that freedom has cost.

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T he graves spread in every direction, as orderly as crops in early June, lines and diagonals as reassuring as they are mesmerizing.

Although more than 300,000 veterans from every American war since the Revolution are buried at Arlington, the cemetery gained worldwide prominence after President John F. Kennedy was laid to rest there in 1963. It is celebrated as sacred ground for military heroes.

Arciola remembers first going to visit her son Michael after he died in Iraq in 2005. Seeing another mother in a chair nearby, Arciola approached and asked, "Does it get any better?"

Answered the woman, whose son had died about two years earlier, "No."

This is the place where all of the grief, anger and pride at what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan come together. Children chase each other through the headstones and try to pry rocks from the dirt of freshly dug graves. Their parents stand nearby, introducing themselves and exchanging e-mails and phone numbers.

"They tell me they don't want to go to any more grief counselors or priests. They want to be with people who are going through hell themselves," says Carol Thomas, who stops by regularly and has befriended many of the regulars. Her husband is buried elsewhere in Arlington, and she sees the Iraq and Afghanistan war dead as "all my boys." She sees their mothers and fathers, widows, uncles, best friends and others as "my great friends."

In this place bordered by a canopy of trees, with distant church bells ringing like deep amens to a prayer and a pair of wind chimes sounding like a summertime back porch, mothers call to each other from afar: "How have you been?" "It's good to see you!" They hug and squeeze hands, holding tight and saying silently what no one has to articulate.

"Has the Muslim family come today?" asks regular visitor Joyce Ward on the afternoon of Mother's Day.

"No. I haven't seen them," answers Anderson, whose eldest son died in Iraq a year ago in June. She misses him so completely that the words of his tombstone are repeated across the back left window of her sport-utility vehicle and on a bracelet she wears daily: "In loving memory of My Beloved Son Cpl. Andy D. Anderson." She has spent all day here, filling vases by his gravestone with mums and daisies.