PDA

View Full Version : Marines take care of veterans' graves



thedrifter
08-12-07, 06:34 AM
Posted on Sun, Aug. 12, 2007
Marines take care of veterans' graves
Corps members, both future and retired, tend to tombs at Pine Island Cemetery
By Jonathan Tressler
The Sun News

Don Barvilchak, 56, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a bleach-soaked hand and took in the scene at Pine Island Cemetery: a batch of new U.S. Marine Corps recruits working hard in the Saturday afternoon heat cleaning the graves of veterans buried there.

"They're impressive, but that's why Marines are Marines, you know?" said Barvilchak, a retired Marine who served in Vietnam in 1969. "We're not just trigger-squeezers, you know. We like to help out, too."

Barvilchak and 20 Marine Corps volunteers were cleaning the graves of 41 veterans of various wars, some dating back to the 1940s.

Some of the headstones have become weathered and stained so badly over the years as to render them practically unreadable. Others settled and were partially buried.

Barvilchak and others from the Myrtle Beach chapter Military Order of the Purple Heart, an service organization of veterans injured in combat, organized the clean-up.

They enlisted the help of the Carolina Forest Marine Corps recruiting station and about 20 new recruits to spruce up the small, out-of-the way cemetery, which does not have perpetual care.

The recruits, who are in the Marines' delayed-entry program, which allows recruits to postpone their initial active duty training for up to a year, ranged in age from 17 to 25, Sgt. David Langlais said.

"It means a lot, as Marines today, that we remember our airmen, Navy men and soldiers who came before us," Langlais said. "We always want to honor them."

The recruits worked about 3½ hours Saturday, edging around the stone vaults; sweeping and brushing around them and treating the head stones with a water-and-bleach solution in the scorching, midday heat.

"I'm glad we're out here doing this," said Jared Schmitz, a senior at Socastee High School in the delayed entry program.

Schmitz has a history of military service in his family, he said; his mother served in an airborne unit in the Army, his great uncles served in the Army and two of his grandfather's brothers were killed in World War II.

Dane James, 21, a Marine recruit from Aynor, said he's proud to be able to do something practical to honor the group of men and women buried at Pine Island Cemetery.

"It's a good thing to do. It makes me feel good that there are still people out there who still care, who still want to honor veterans," he said. "There are lot of people out there who just don't care, who forget. I feel like being in the military is one of the highest honors you can have."

By about noon, the veterans, recruiters and recruits had cleaned and bleached all the veterans' grave sites and, to Barvilchak's surprise, had started in on others. "We've got every one of 'em done," he said. "And look, they're doing other ones now, too."

Contact JONATHAN TRESSLER at 444-1723 or jtressler@thesunnews.com.

Ellie