'Rest easy, sleep well my brothers. Know the line has held, your job is done.'
Date: 12/3/2006; Publication: The Washington Post; Author: Marc Fisher

Every year for more than a decade, at the height of the season Morrill Worcester would pack up a truckload of his Christmas wreaths and head down from Maine to Arlington National Cemetery. Without fanfare, he and a dozen or so volunteers would lay red-bowed wreaths on a few thousand headstones of fallen Americans.

There was no publicity. No crowds gathered. The gesture was one man's private duty, born of a trip to Washington he won as a 12- year-old paperboy. Of all the monuments and memorials he saw, it was the visit to Arlington that stuck with the boy -- the majesty and mystery, the sadness and the pride, the sight of all those neat rows of government-issue, white headstones.

Years later, after he had started his Christmas products business, at the crunch point of one season Worcester asked some men who were building his new factory to locate some wreaths and buy them for him. They went a bit overboard: When Worcester heard that he was now the proud owner of 4,000 wreaths that couldn't possibly be sold by Christmas, he called a friend who owned a trucking company, he contacted his senator in Washington and, two weeks before Christmas 1992, Worcester was at Arlington , laying wreaths.

It seemed like the right thing to do. So each year he continued the ritual, honoring those who had died so that he and other Americans might live as they saw fit.

Then, a few months ago, the e-mails started. Maybe you got one: A heart-wrenching yet elegant image of Worcester 's wreaths, each adorned with a simple red ribbon, resting in front of seemingly endless rows of identical gravestones on a snowy day at Arlington . Beneath the photo, a few lines of poetry:

"Rest easy, sleep well my brothers. Know the line has held, your job is done. Rest easy, sleep well . . . "

And then just a paragraph about Worcester 's annual pilgrimage.

The e-mail became an Internet phenomenon, forwarded so many times that the professional skeptics who spend their time checking out urban legends at Snopes.com mounted an investigation. Sure enough, this was the real deal.

A week from today, Worcester will leave Columbia Falls , Maine , to lead the trailer full of wreaths down the coast. This time, it won't be just the trucker and Worcester and his wife, Karen. This time, there'll be an escort of a couple hundred Patriot Guard Riders, a national group of motorcyclists who take it upon themselves to display their respect for fallen service members. This time, Worcester and friends won't barrel down the interstate; they're taking the slow road, Route 1, so that more cyclists -- perhaps thousands more -- might join the caravan.

This time, the laying of the wreaths won't be a private affair. Instead of the 10 or 12 volunteers who had been rounded up in past years by Wayne Hanson, a retired federal law enforcement officer who lives in Springfield, there will be at least 500 people ready to help lay the wreaths Dec. 14 -- and maybe many more.

There will be a busload of school kids from Skowhegan , Maine , a Civil Air Patrol unit from up that way and all manner of Washington- area volunteers, too.

They're still calling, every day. "It's the e-mail that did this," says Hanson, 62, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. He got involved with the wreaths in 1993, when Worcester sought help from the Maine State Society, a Falls Church-based group of transplants. "I had a man call from Iraq , a civilian contractor who got his company to give him R&R so he could come back and lay a wreath."

Every year, the superintendent of the cemetery assigns the wreath brigade to a different part of the grounds. Last year, the volunteers completed their circuit of the cemetery, and this Christmas, they start all over again. Every year, Worcester makes certain to reserve a few wreaths for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the John and Robert Kennedy gravesites, the memorial to the USS Maine and the resting place of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine .

Even as his personal ritual morphs into something much larger, Worcester , 56, wants to ensure that its original purpose remains. "It's just my way to say thank you," he says. "I've got a lot to be thankful for." When he started Worcester Wreaths in 1971, he sold 500 wreaths. This year, that number will top 500,000, mostly to the Maine-based retailer L.L. Bean.

This time of year, Worcester Wreaths employs more than 600 people in Harrington, about 45 miles up the coast from Bar Harbor .

Worcester has always returned the checks that people send him. The wreath-laying is his personal statement: "This is the least we can do."

Everyone connected with the wreaths project takes pains to note that this has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with anyone's opinion about Iraq or terrorism. "It's just a way to pay respect," Hanson says. "When I came home from Vietnam , well, it wasn't the best time to be in the military, or to be coming home. But this -- it brings tears to my eyes to see 5,000 wreaths laid out across those white, government headstones. You can't think about anything but that ultimate sacrifice these people made to give us our freedom."

This year, the interest in Worcester 's project has exploded to the point that he had to find some way to extend the tribute, so he has launched wreathsacrossamerica.org, a Web site that coordinates similar rituals at more than 200 military cemeteries around the country.

"The veterans are going to get their due," says Worcester, who never served in the military. "It's going to be quite something."

Copyright © 2006 The Washington Post

'Gardens of Stone' Author Proffitt Dies
Date: 11/27/2006; Publication: United Press International

Journalist Nicholas Proffitt, whose Vietnam-era novel Gardens of Stone was turned into a 1987 Francis Ford Coppola movie, died of kidney cancer in Florida; he was 63.

Gardens of Stone, published in 1983, was based on Proffitt's first-hand knowledge of the Army burial detail at Arlington National Cemetery where he was assigned as part of the Third Infantry Division's famed Old Guard at a time when the war in Southeast Asia was heating up.

Proffitt was born to an Army family in Sault Ste. Marie, MI, and grew up on military bases around the country, the Los Angeles Times said Monday. After his own Army service ended in 1964, he was hired by Newsweek and worked in a number of the magazines bureaus in the United States and abroad, including Saigon .

The pithy Proffitt once told an interviewer a news correspondent's life is a wonderful life for a younger man and not a very good life for an older man. He said it was not a profession in which you're allowed to grow old gracefully.

Homegrown Soldier Watches Over Unknowns: P.G. Graduate Passes Muster to Join Elite
Date: 10/31/2006 Publication: The Monterey County Herald (Monterey, Calif.)

 

He's an elite who watches over the unknowns.

Army Spec. Chase Neely, a 2004 Pacific Grove High School graduate, has joined a small group of soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

Neely will receive his Honor Guard Badge in a ceremony Nov. 9 from Col Robert Pricone, commander of the 3rd Infantry "Old Guard" Regiment, the unit that provides ceremonial guards for official functions in the nation's capital.

The 20-year-old will be the 533rd soldier to receive the badge since it was authorized in 1957. He is the first from Monterey County .

"It's a very rigorous selection process," said Neely in a telephone interview last week. "You have to have a certain look, a certain military bearing."

The Tomb of the Unknowns, near the center of Arlington's cemetery, is one of Arlington's most popular tourist sites. The tomb itself contains the remains of unknown American soldiers from both World Wars, the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War.

The tomb is guarded around the clock, every day of the year.

To qualify for the badge, soldiers must be a "three-time volunteer," Neely said. In other words, the soldier must volunteer as an enlistee, on assignment to the "Old Guard" and for sentinel duty at the tomb.

Not all the tomb guards get the badge, though all who earn it have had tours of duty as sentinels, he said.

Each candidate for the badge is tested four times, Neely said, on his appearance in uniform, on his performance at ceremonial drill, and his memorization of 16 pages of lore about Arlington National Cemetery, the tomb and other subjects. Each time he is tested, Neely said, the soldier is allowed fewer and fewer mistakes.

Aside from faultlessly polished brass and shoes, with insignia centered to the fraction of an inch and an utterly clean and pressed "blouse" or uniform coat -- each sentinel learns to clean and press his own dress blue uniforms -- the soldier seeking the badge must master the intricate manual of arms and precision pacing of "the mat" that marks the tomb guard's duty station.

The guards march 21 steps south, turn and march 21 steps north, and then repeat the process minute-by-minute for up to an hour at a time, day or night, in sun, rain and snow.

Each of them is a volunteer from the 3rd Infantry, eligible to apply for duty as a sentinel only after they have already been ceremonially qualified in The Old Guard. Each soldier must be physically fit, between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet 4 inches tall, with a proportionate weight and build.

Before any soldier is allowed "a walk," he must memorize seven pages of history on Arlington National Cemetery and then recite it verbatim. If a soldier finishes this phase and is granted "a walk," he enters a new phase of training known as "new soldier training."

In addition to extensive training in the manual of arms, the guard change ceremony and the intricacies of military ritual, the new soldier is required to memorize additional information on Arlington, including the grave locations of nearly 300 veterans.

Even after earning the right to test for the badge and passing it, the badge award is temporary, and becomes permanent only after the soldier has served at the Tomb of the Unknowns for nine months.

Neely joined the Army immediately after high school, took basic training at Fort Benning, GA., and then went on to the Airborne School at Benning, where he earned his paratrooper's wings.

From there, he said, he went to Fort Myer, VA, where he joined the Old Guard, and has been undergoing ceremonial training since last April.

Aside from his ceremonial duties, Neely said, he and another soldier have been assigned to take part in hurricane relief and recovery work at Biloxi, MS, next month.

The silver badge measures 2 inches by 1½ inches, with a representation of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and three figures representing Peace, Victory and Valor, enclosed by an inverted open laurel wreath and bearing the words "Honor Guard."

"He's just a stud," Tom Neely of Pacific Grove said of his son, adding that he plans to attend the badge-pinning ceremony next month.

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Copyright © 2006, The Monterey County Herald