BARRE, Vt. — In a cavernous factory in central Vermont, it fell to Ben Smith to render the final honor for Michael Yury Tarlavsky.
The Army captain's father and grandfather had been soldiers in Russia, and Tarlavsky continued the tradition by enlisting straight out of college. He had risen to the rank of captain in the Special Forces, fought in Afghanistan and was on his second tour in Iraq last month when his unit came under fire in Najaf. Three hours before the attack, he had instant-messaged his sister to say he was in safe territory: "Tell Father, tell everybody, I am all right."
But all Smith knew as he sandblasted the inscription onto a 232-pound of white Vermont marble was that Tarlavsky was 30 years old when he died Aug. 12.
"That's awful young," said Smith, 29, a buzzer and finisher at Granite Industries of Vermont. "We see the names of guys who have fought in World War II, Korea, Vietnam. But guys like this, they're fighting right now and dying right now."
As part of a $3-million contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Granite Industries will produce about 20,000 upright marble headstones this year for government cemeteries. Most memorialize veterans of World War II, who are dying at a rate of about 1,100 a day.
Some are replacement stones honoring soldiers as far back as the Civil War, such as Leigh R. Terrell, a member of the 47th Alabama Infantry who died Oct. 21, 1864. Terrell's headstone was scheduled to be carved right after Tarlavsky's.
But with the U.S. casualty count in Iraq passing 1,000 last week, the weekly headstone orders at Granite Industries lately have included a half-dozen or so for men and women killed there. Workers on the "government line" never know how a soldier died. They just know that every U.S. veteran deserves the dignity of a proper headstone.
Wearing goggles, gloves and custom earplugs, Smith and his co-workers produce at least 400 veterans' markers each week. They inspect them for flaws, pack them into cardboard boxes and ship them off by flatbed truck to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and other government burial grounds.
Their days are noisy, dusty and busy, affording little occasion to reflect on the lives that pass before them. Yet Smith said the names of those killed in Iraq stand out: "They feel more real."
