On hallowed ground: Tales from Beaufort National Cemetery

Behind a brick wall along Boundary Street, America’s past lies in tidy rows.

Union soldiers lie near Confederate soldiers. Liberators of World War II’s concentration camps rest just rows away from prisoners of war who themselves languished in foreign pits. Heroes from nearly forgotten Korean War battles are next to celebrated Medal of Honor recipients who cameoed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

They all are united in this place.

As Americans.

As heroes.

From a bench in Beaufort National Cemetery, Skipp Middleton, a seven-year employee and Army veteran, recently gestured to the graves that fan out in a wagon wheel pattern.

The cemetery changes visitors, he said.

Once they enter the gate, their backs straighten.

Their chins rise.

Their attitudes mellow, grow softer in this congenial place.

And the click in their heads is almost audible.

“No matter what background you come from, when you come in here, we’re all one,” he said.

NOT FORGOTTEN

It is a place of remembering.

Visitors, their arms filled with flowers and flags, find their loved ones lying beneath the ancient oaks.

This Memorial Day, there are more than 21,000 of the fallen to remember.

Among them are Benjamin Hays Vandervoort, a a 29-year-old enlisted man who hit the ground in Normandy on D-Day and later became one of World War II’s most decorated soldiers. “I feel that I have very little for posterity at the moment,” he told Army debriefers two months after D-Day.

Ralph H. Johnson is there, too. At 19, in Vietnam, he used his body to smother a grenade blast after calling out a warning to fellow Marines. The Charleston native was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.

It’s a place for discovery, too.

Last year, a North Carolina family connected with their ancestor. A spelling error sent Pvt. Haywood Treadwell of the Confederate Army to an unmarked grave in the cemetery.

More than 150 years later, Treadwell finally got a marker of his own, tenderly unveiled to a crowd of his kin by a 5-year-old boy with the same last name.

When no family can be found to honor the dead, the cemetery takes on that duty.

In 2010, 10 veterans whose bodies were unclaimed at the time when they died received a funeral service at the cemetery with full military honors. A line of veterans holding American flags saluted when the urns passed.

“The greatest tragedy for a veteran is being forgotten,” said Larry Truax, an event organizer, at the funeral. “This is a happy day because these guys get to go home.”

Sometimes, the person found isn’t family.

But the cemetery makes them feel like they are.

Beau Snowdon, of Nashville, was passing through Beaufort on business recently when he remembered that writer Pat Conroy’s father, Donald Conroy, was buried at the national cemetery.

With help from Google, he found directions to the Great Santini’s grave.

“As a child, dad would play that movie (“The Great Santini”) for us and we would watch that movie again and again,” Snowdon said of the Pat Conroy novel-turned-film about a pilot, inspired by Conroy’s father.

“I thought it was the greatest movie in the world, so as I grew up I thought the Great Santini was probably the greatest of all Marines. And so, for my family, this is an important marker for us,” Snowdon said.

THE SOUND OF TAPS

It is a place for quiet celebrations.

American flags are placed on each grave every Memorial Day. Christmas wreaths every December.

One Christmas morning several years ago, employees discovered a lit, decorated tree standing in a section filled with infants’ and children’s graves.

“It’s hard to put into words the history, the memories that are in this place,” said Craig Arsell, a Navy veteran and the cemetery’s new director who is still learning about its history.

On a recent afternoon, the solemn sound of taps floated through Arsell’s office window.

Down below in a patch of sun, members of the 82nd Airborne Army Rangers stood at attention around the grave of Maj. Gen. Reuben Henry Tucker III, paying tribute to the World War II hero who led troops in the parachute invasion of Sicily.

Just a few graves down was the grave of Tucker’s son, killed in Vietnam.

Arsell stood up, too, his arms alive with gooseflesh.

He knew he was on hallowed ground.

This story was originally published May 24, 2015 at 8:24 PM with the headline "On hallowed ground: Tales from Beaufort National Cemetery."