6 unclaimed Vietnam veterans who died alone honored at Georgia National Cemetery Retired U.S. Army Sgt. Maj. Daniel McNeal looks out over the Georgia National Cemetery in Canton, Georgia, May 20, 2019. (Daniel McNeal/U.S. Army)
Six Vietnam veterans who died alone with no one to claim them were finally honored at an interment ceremony at the Georgia National Cemetery in Canton Tuesday.
Thomas Stenzel, a Vietnam veteran and resident of Kennesaw, was among those who attended the funeral to pay his respects to the former servicemen.
There is a sense of brotherhood, Stenzel said, that veterans feel for other veterans, even those they haven’t met, especially when they die without a family to honor them.
“Today was an opportunity to honor some veterans who died alone or had been forgotten,” he said.
The veterans honored Tuesday were Sgt. Samuel T. Sharpe, Spc. Vernon R. Grob, Spc. Russell Cooper, Pvt. Joseph Donald Adair, Airman Bruce T. Birkland and Cpl. Noah Myrick. The veterans all died between the years 2005 and 2020 and did not have immediate family to tend to their service or burial.
The veterans’ remains were first displayed at the Georgia Memorial Park Funeral Home in Marietta where Tommy Burnes, a resident of Marietta and bagpiper-for-hire, played while the remains were transferred into hearses before police escorted the funeral procession to the Canton cemetery.
Once everyone had arrived at the cemetery, Kaite Hedden, a student at Pike County High School in Zebulon, sang the National Anthem to begin the ceremony.
Guest speaker Col. Richard White, who served in the U.S. Army Airborne and is now the director of the Board of Georgia Military Veterans Hall of Fame, addressed the crowd and spoke highly of the forgotten veterans, commending them for their service and expressing disdain for how they died alone.
Throughout the rest of the ceremony, there were eulogies; a reading of the veterans’ names; flag presentations by the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps Honor Guards; three rounds of fire by the Marine Corps League Ceremonial Rifle Team; the playing of “Taps” by William Hall, a bugler with Bugles Across America; and a poem entitled “We Will Find You” by Charlie Tritto, read by John Newport, the Missing in America Project’s Georgia Coordinator.
The ceremony was made possible by the efforts of the Georgia chapter of the Missing in America Project, a national organization founded in 2007 that works to recognize forgotten veterans by locating, identifying and interring them with the military honors they earned through their service.
Newport, a retired Master Sgt. in the Marine Corps and resident of Woodstock, said the organization’s mission means a lot to him because of his military experience.
“These six veterans we have here today died alone, basically,” he said. “When you’re a military person, it becomes very personal when our veterans have no one to take care of them when they die, no one to hold their hand. So, we brought them home today.”
According to Newport, his organization finds the unclaimed remains of veterans by contacting coroners’ offices, funeral homes, police departments, city morgues, etc.
The organization’s assistant coordinator for Georgia, Dallas Johnson, discovered the veterans who were honored Tuesday.
Johnson has no military experience, but she has a “patriotic spirit” and was inspired to get involved after she discovered the organization in 2019, she said.
So far, the Missing in America Project has found 27,107 unclaimed cremated remains from all around the country. Nearly 6,000 of these veterans have been identified and a little over 5,000 have been honored with an interment ceremony.
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