Walking among the headstones recently, Silvia - who was among the first female West Point graduates in 1980 - points out Revolutionary War-era dead and stoops down to tidy the marker for a recently deceased colonel she admired.
Though a military cemetery since 1817, not all the graves are uniform. A few older ones are extravagant. The headstone of celebrated Army football coach Earl "Red" Blaik is shaped like a football ready to be kicked off. Egbert Viele, a Civil War veteran, rests in a two-story pyramid guarded by two stone sphinxes. It is said that his fear of being entombed alive was so great that his mausoleum was rigged with a buzzer.
There is no record of it being used.
The grounds on a tree-sheltered promontory near New York's Hudson River are reserved for West Point graduates and cadets, soldiers who die while assigned to the academy, and immediate family members. While graves of famous alumni like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur are elsewhere, some 140 to 200 people are laid to rest here each year.
Some are old soldiers whose feelings for West Point never faded away. Vietnam veteran and retired Lt. Col. Freed Lowrey, a 1967 graduate, says he will be buried here among the historic figures and his classmates who were killed in that war.
"I want to be among soldiers. I want to be among people of my own kind who have served and done so much for the nation and have sacrificed so much," Lowrey says. "I could be in Arlington, I could be in any national cemetery, but this is - and I'm not a religious person - I mean, West Point's almost my soul."
Mourners at Schwarzkopf's service in February were told how crucial the academy was to his life and values. On a recent chilly Friday, the cremated remains of Air Force Maj. Gen. William Strong and his wife, Virginia, were buried here amid rifle volleys and a plaintive playing of taps. Strong, Class of 1940, had a distinguished career in the Air Force. Still, he and his wife decided to be buried near his father and brothers at West Point.
Lowrey, who returned to live in nearby Fishkill, now works for the West Point Association of Graduates, which has raised more than $1.5 million for a double-sided wall with niches for cremated remains. While a space beneath the cemetery's Old Cadet Chapel has enough room to handle additional cremated remains for about a decade, plots for outdoor interments of cremated remains are expected to be depleted in about two years.
Silvia expects the first sections of the wall, which will follow a circular walkway in the center of the cemetery, will be in place by that time.
Farther down the road is a plan to expand the burial ground to a patch of adjacent land, since that option could be depleted within five years. Silvia figures that would allow another decade of burials.
Silvia says the situation boils down to basic math. Academy graduating classes can now number around 1,000, much larger than generations ago. About two-dozen of the more than 90 graduates who have died in the decade-plus of conflict since the Sept. 11 attacks are interred here.
Silvia expects construction on the cremation niche wall to begin this spring. She also is enthused about plans for a smartphone app that will allow people to punch in the name of a person buried here and locate their grave.
"These are lifelong friends of ours, and it's a very special honor for me to provide the final salute," she says.
- AP
