Where the Brave Find Their Eternal Rest - Notes from the Sunshine State

              The patriot's blood is the seed of                                                               Freedom's tree.

        – Scottish poet Thomas Campbell

Each time I have returned to Florida for the past several years I always make a point of visiting the Florida National Cemetery, my father’s final place of rest near Bushnell, a small south Sumter County town.  Old soldiers do in fact die.  Dad 

passed away in October 2009 at the age of 85 and his memorial service at the cemetery took place the following April when his family and friends were able to gather in Florida.  I had never been to the Florida National Cemetery before that beautiful spring day, and I did not know what to expect.  The scrub back country of central Florida did not seem the appropriate place for a national cemetery.  I was amazed and impressed by what I found.  It is a majestic and solemn place as it should be for these brave souls who, regardless of who they were or where they came from, put their lives on the line to defend generations of Americans.  It is a quiet place interrupted only occasionally by the sharp report of an honor guard firing a final salute or the sad moan of Taps floating through the live oaks, dogwoods and palmettos and over the thousands upon thousands of marble headstones lined up in neat, seemingly endless rows.    

The Florida National Cemetery is located in the Withlacoochee State Forest, approximately 50 miles north of Tampa. The forest was acquired by the federal government from private landowners in the late 1930s, and the United States Forest Service managed the property until it was transferred to the Florida Board of Forestry in 1958.  It is the second-largest state forest in Florida.  In 1980, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced it would establish a fourth national cemetery in Florida (there are now nine) and the Withlacoochee site was supported by government officials.  The State of Florida sold the present tract of land to the VA in 1983 for the development of a Florida National Cemetery. The first internment took place in 1988.  Today it occupies 517 acres and contains the final resting place for over 131,000 veterans and their dependents.  Veterans from throughout the country and representing every major US conflict dating back to the Second Seminole War in Florida and the Civil War, are interred here.  With about 1,100 World War II veterans dying every day, and now with an ever-growing number of Korean War and Vietnam War veterans passing away, such final resting places are increasingly in demand, even though only about 15 percent of the nation's veterans choose to be buried in national cemeteries.  Florida National Cemetery is presently the second most active national cemetery in the country due in part to Florida, along with Arizona, being one of the country's top retirement destinations.  More than 7,000 internments take place annually – on average more than 20 funerals a day.  At this rate the Florida National Cemetery will reach full capacity of 180,000 interments by 2030.

All of these fact and figures fade into the background when I come to spend few minutes with my dad.  His ashes are entombed in one of the cemetery’s columbaria.  My uncle, a veteran of the Korean War, is in an adjacent columbarium.  Not too far away is the grave site of my dad’s best buddy during the war.  They were comrades in arms from Normandy, in the early autumn of 1944, until the Allied victory at the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945.  They would not see each other again for 50 years and today a once small-town lad from Michigan and one raised in Baltimore, find their eternal rest together.  Also nearby is the recent grave site of my wife’s maid of honor at our wedding, an early victim of the Covid-19 pandemic.  She was taken much too soon.  

These visits are always sad occasions.  How can they not be?  But they also afford an opportunity to be near family and friends who have gone before us. It somehow lessens the pain of grief.