Arlington National Cemetery

As a skinny teenage busboy, Juan Romero knelt beside a mortally wounded Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. On Saturday morning, more than 42 years later, he knelt again, this time beside RFK's grave on what would have been Kennedy's 85th birthday. Romero was wearing a suit for the first time in his life, saying it was the proper way to show his respect for a man whose memory he has tried to honor by living a life of tolerance and humility. Getting up the courage to visit Arlington National Cemetery was not easy for Romero, a construction worker from San Jose who has been haunted for decades by the events of June 5, 1968.

His last letter home to his father is written in tight script on paper that has yellowed. It's dated Feb. 20, 1944. "Just a line Dad to say goodbye and don't worry too much," wrote Marine 1st Lt. Laverne A. Lallathin, 22. "I'm going over to end this thing as soon as possible. Buy as many bonds as you can and pray that I will be all-right. " A month later, Lallathin vanished along with six crew members of the B-25 bomber he was piloting from Espiritu Santo, the largest island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.

On a sultry summer morning at Arlington National Cemetery, Erwin Henry Shupp was buried on a grassy knoll as a bugler played taps and soldiers fired a rifle volley at the sky. At 9 a.m., just after the bell tolled in a faraway cemetery clock tower, seven white horses pulled a gun carriage carrying a flag-covered casket with Shupp's cremated remains along a cemetery road, under the oak and magnolia trees, to his waiting grave.

The evening shadows have to fall just right. And the grave shouldn't be on a slope. In traditional Hmong culture, the burial site matters for eternity, to the living and the dead and the spirit world that connects them. So the old Hmong men ? once young soldiers in a CIA-backed "secret" war in the jungles of Laos ? light candles for Gen. Vang Pao, their leader in that war, and hope that he will be allowed to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. They fought a war on behalf of the Americans and lost everything: their land, their way of life, their country and the lives of tens of thousands of their people.

A funeral home that helps handle veterans awaiting burial at Arlington National Cemetery left corpses in an unrefrigerated garage, in hallways and on makeshift gurneys, according to a former embalmer who has given his photographs and notes to authorities, the Washington Post reported Sunday. "It was disturbing and disrespectful and unethical," said Steven Napper, a retired Maryland trooper who worked at the funeral home for nine months.

As a soft twilight fell over the nation's capital, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to his final rest Saturday in a ceremony on a sloping site in Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's burial brings America's most famous band of brothers together again. His grave sits 100 feet south of his brother Robert's, and 200 feet from the eternal flame that burns for John, the former president. The senator's funeral cortege followed the same route his brothers' hearses did, from the Capitol to the national shrine across the Potomac River in Virginia, after they were killed more than four decades ago. Eight members of a U.S. military honor guard carried Kennedy's casket from the black hearse and set it down at a freshly dug grave near manicured shrubs and broad maple trees.

For all these years, she pursued an utterly private life. But Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis chose to be laid to rest at one of America's most hallowed tourist attractions: the hauntingly serene Arlington National Cemetery. On Monday, in a private ceremony, the former First Lady will be buried alongside her first husband, President John F. Kennedy, among the 612 acres of green knolls that overlook the capital and serve as the final resting place for more than 225,000 U.S.

The body of Ignace Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist, composer and statesman, will be returned to his native land, a federal judge ruled Friday. A Paderewski fan named Mark J. Seidenberg had filed a lawsuit attempting to enjoin the American and Polish governments from removing the pianist's body from Arlington National Cemetery, where it has rested since his death in New York in 1941, and shipping it back to Poland. Although "there is no doubt the plaintiff's sentiments are heartfelt," said U.

Four years ago, John Haines, a retired Chevrolet dealer from Glenwood Springs, Colo., was thumbing through his hometown newspaper when an article about a local business caught his attention. Arlington National Cemetery's largest and most famous monument, the Tomb of the Unknowns, had developed extensive cracks after seven decades of exposure to harsh winters. At the government's request, Yule Marble Quarry in nearby Marble, Colo.

Joan Waxman happened to be in the nation's capital on an elementary school trip that week in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was buried. She was in town for a wedding when former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. This weekend, as the body of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, Waxman, 53, and her husband, Howard, were moving their son in for his junior year at George Washington University. Before heading back to New Jersey, they decided to pay their respects to the last of the fabled Kennedy brothers after watching his funeral cortege on Saturday.

As a skinny teenage busboy, Juan Romero knelt beside a mortally wounded Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. On Saturday morning, more than 42 years later, he knelt again, this time beside RFK's grave on what would have been Kennedy's 85th birthday. Romero was wearing a suit for the first time in his life, saying it was the proper way to show his respect for a man whose memory he has tried to honor by living a life of tolerance and humility. Getting up the courage to visit Arlington National Cemetery was not easy for Romero, a construction worker from San Jose who has been haunted for decades by the events of June 5, 1968.

On a day when Americans acknowledge the service of veterans past, President Obama today told members of the military currently serving around the world that he will honor their work with a commitment to the "hard work of peace." Speaking to veterans and their families at a memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery, outside Washington, Obama said modern service members belong in history alongside veterans of "wars whose names have come to define eras." "We don't mark this day each year as a celebration of victory," Obama said.

Joan Waxman happened to be in the nation's capital on an elementary school trip that week in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was buried. She was in town for a wedding when former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. This weekend, as the body of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, Waxman, 53, and her husband, Howard, were moving their son in for his junior year at George Washington University. Before heading back to New Jersey, they decided to pay their respects to the last of the fabled Kennedy brothers after watching his funeral cortege on Saturday.

As a soft twilight fell over the nation's capital, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to his final rest Saturday in a ceremony on a sloping site in Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's burial brings America's most famous band of brothers together again. His grave sits 100 feet south of his brother Robert's, and 200 feet from the eternal flame that burns for John, the former president. The senator's funeral cortege followed the same route his brothers' hearses did, from the Capitol to the national shrine across the Potomac River in Virginia, after they were killed more than four decades ago. Eight members of a U.S. military honor guard carried Kennedy's casket from the black hearse and set it down at a freshly dug grave near manicured shrubs and broad maple trees.

It's a gesture that couldn't have been made while U.S. forces were breaking down the doors of Iraqi homes and detaining residents by the thousands. Or when civilians were being killed by frightened American soldiers in sometimes careless shootings that have claimed an untold number of Iraqi lives. But U.S.

A funeral home that helps handle veterans awaiting burial at Arlington National Cemetery left corpses in an unrefrigerated garage, in hallways and on makeshift gurneys, according to a former embalmer who has given his photographs and notes to authorities, the Washington Post reported Sunday. "It was disturbing and disrespectful and unethical," said Steven Napper, a retired Maryland trooper who worked at the funeral home for nine months.

The new World War II Memorial may be the star attraction this summer in the nation's capital, but there are many other conflicts memorialized in the Washington area that pay tribute and open a window on how our country remembers itself.

His last letter home to his father is written in tight script on paper that has yellowed. It's dated Feb. 20, 1944. "Just a line Dad to say goodbye and don't worry too much," wrote Marine 1st Lt. Laverne A. Lallathin, 22. "I'm going over to end this thing as soon as possible. Buy as many bonds as you can and pray that I will be all-right. " A month later, Lallathin vanished along with six crew members of the B-25 bomber he was piloting from Espiritu Santo, the largest island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.

In "Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery," the stepfather of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan remembers the moments just before his wife got the dreadful notification. She had heard on the news that 16 troops had been killed and, her husband says, she knew "that meant there will be 16 mothers who will be crying tonight. She didn't know she would be one of them." There is a lot of crying in "Section 60," an intimate and achingly personal look at that section of the famed cemetery where U.

Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner, had one final wish: that his remains be interred at Arlington National Cemetery. But officials at Arlington denied that wish this week in a case that pits the edicts of faith against military policy. Strict guidelines determine whose remains may be buried in the ground and whose ashes may be inurned in the columbarium at Arlington. Klausner qualified to have his ashes placed in the columbarium; he did not qualify for ground burial.