VA plans to expand cemeteries

WASHINGTON – As a grateful nation remembers its military dead today, the Department of Veterans Affairs is turning some of its attention to the veterans who have yet to fall.

With veterans deaths expected to peak at 687,600 this year and to remain high for years, the VA’s National Cemetery Administration is in the midst of a major expansion of VA-run burial grounds. Historically, about 12 percent of veterans have chosen VA national and state cemeteries as their final resting place, according to VA figures.

“We’re in the greatest expansion we’ve been in since the Civil War,” VA Secretary Jim Nicholson said in an interview last week. “Every day now, we have 1,800 veterans pass away. Eleven hundred of them are World War II veterans, and more and more of them are choosing to be buried in VA cemeteries. So we need to be there for them.”

About 3.1 million veterans and their spouses are interred at 123 VA national cemeteries in 39 states and Puerto Rico, officials said.

The department plans to nearly double the capacity of 3.2 million grave sites, making an additional 2.7 million grave sites available by 2009. That is the year the steadily increasing annual number of VA burials of veterans and their spouses is expected to peak, VA officials said.