Where the Modern Wars Hit Home

For most Americans, the longest war in the history of the United States, the ongoing series of conflicts that began with the Sept. 11 attacks, has taken place largely out of sight, the casualties piling up in Afghanistan and Iraq while normal life continued on the home front, with no war taxes, no draft notices, no gas rationing and none of the shared sacrifice of the country’s earlier conflicts.

The most notable exception has been in Section 60, a 14-acre corner of Arlington National Cemetery, where more than 900 men and women have come to rest in the past decade—the largest concentration of the nearly 7,000 Americans killed in the recent wars. With no monument yet established for them, Section 60 stands as their memorial, a point of contact for the community of the living and the community of the dead.

As the last combat troops leave Afghanistan and new fighting spreads over Syria and Iraq, Section 60 is nearing capacity—a testament to the human cost of America’s longest war, a conflict largely hidden from ordinary life in America. “This is one of the few places you’d know we’ve had a war going on,” retired Navy Commander Kirk S. Lippold, skipper of the U.S.S. Cole, said last year, standing near the center of Section 60. He had come to pay his respects to three shipmates—Technician Second Class Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter, Chief Petty Officer Richard Dean Costlow and Seaman Cherone Louis Gunn—now lying side by side beneath neat white tombstones.

The trio of sailors, among 17 killed when Al Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the Cole in Yemen in 2000, were among the earliest casualties in the long war that in fact began months before the phrase “9/11” entered Americans’ vocabulary. “Their deaths were prelude to everything that’s happened in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Lippold, who regularly visits this part of the national cemetery, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

In the years since the Cole bombing, Section 60 has been filling up row by row. It is the busiest part of the cemetery, with the crack of rifle salutes and the silvery notes of Taps announcing the arrival of new conscripts with depressing frequency. The whole history of our recent wars can be traced among the closely packed tombstones, which mark the graves of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who earned a berth in the national cemetery by volunteering, suiting up and paying the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan, Iraq and other battlegrounds of the war on terror.

AP Photo

Some of Arlington’s recent residents, like Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Malachowski and Army Spec. Christopher T. Neiberger, came home in pieces, killed by a signature weapon of modern combat, the improvised explosive device (IED), which cheated families out of the age-old ritual of seeing brothers, fathers, sons and daughters one last time. Other warriors, like Army Pfc. Ross A. McGinnis and Army Sgt. A. J. Baddick, arrived in Section 60 as the result of storybook bravery—McGinnis by throwing himself on a grenade and saving the lives of four comrades in Iraq, Baddick by diving into an Iraqi canal to rescue drowning soldiers. Still others died while walking point on foot patrol, leading the charge into enemy strongholds or crashing in airplane and chopper accidents. Some were knocked out of the sky by hostile fire, some were felled by snipers, some by friendly fire and far too many by the familiar “green on blue” killings of recent years—at the hands of supposed Afghan allies. A handful of the toughest and bravest survived frequent combat deployments, came home and tried to settle into civilian life, only to falter from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or other invisible injuries that consigned them to Arlington.

The first combatant from the Iraq War to be buried at Arlington was Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe, killed on April 3, 2003. He was seen into the earth by his father, retired Lt. Col. Joe Rippetoe, a fellow Ranger and a disabled veteran of the Vietnam War. Like many of those killed in the recent wars, Captain Rippetoe was taken out by a suicide bomber, an Iraqi woman who had begged him for food and water. When he approached her with the supplies, she triggered a car bomb that killed Rippetoe, along with Staff Sgt. Nino D. Livaudais and Spec. Ryan P. Long.

“My son’s big heart got him killed,” says Joe Rippetoe, who travels from Colorado several times every year to visit his son’s neatly tended grave site in Section 60. “We keep his memory alive.”

Robert M. Poole, former executive editor of National Geographic magazine, is author of Section 60: Where War Comes Home, just published by Bloomsbury, and On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery....