To stride behind the rope line, escorted at every footfall by the finest sentinels of the U.S. Army’s renowned Old Guard, is normally something of presidents and dignitaries. To place a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a privilege few will ever experience.

Earlier this fall, Vietnam veterans Charlie Walker, of Fort Dodge, and Russ Naden, of Webster City, did just that. The wreath they placed was adorned with a ribbon bearing the words, “Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight,” recognizing that Walker and Naden placed that wreath for all of the veterans they have served as long-time board members of the popular Honor Flight.

Both Walker and Naden have served the Honor Flight since its inception in 2009. They have gone on about two dozen flights and escorted more than 3,000 area veterans to see the military and war memorials of Washington, D.C., always highlighted by the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

“We found out a few years ago that groups could lay a wreath at the tomb, and we were originally planning to do it last May, but the time slots were all filled,” Walker said.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is located in Arlington National Cemetery.

The wreath presentations are limited to two people, so board members opted to choose among the four original board members remaining, including Ron Newsum and Mel Schroeder, with Naden and Walker selected for the final honor.

Arlington National Cemetery, which sprawls over more than 600 acres, is a place of quiet dignity. On any given day, perhaps 30 funerals will be ongoing, with those laid to rest joining the ranks of more than 400,000 buried there. Because of this, visitors are asked to be very quiet; those placing a wreath must abide by a simple dress code as a show of respect and the solemnity of the occasion.

“They told us, ‘No shorts, no jeans, no sneakers,'” Naden said. “We wore our Honor Flight shirts, black dress pants, and black walking shoes. It was fairly comfortable.”

Arriving for the ceremony in mid-afternoon, Walker noted that one of the tomb guards quickly greeted them and prepared them for the ceremony. Honor Flight buses are actually the only public vehicles allowed to drive all the way through the cemetery to the amphitheater at the Tomb of the Unknown.

“We reported to the guard headquarters. One of the guards marched up, real formal, greeted us, and after that he kind of relaxed and told us what we needed to do,” Walker said. “It was pretty simple. We marched down in step with him and he gave us the wreath. We were hanging on to it, but he did most of the work.”

-Messenger photo by Lori Berglund
Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight board members Russ Naden, left, and Charlie Walker, center, received the honor in September of placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. With the two men here is Mary Lou Walker, a volunteer who does much to assist veterans and families as they prepare for the flights.

The guards, also known as tomb sentinels, even welcomed the two local veterans to their headquarters at the lower level of the amphitheater shortly before the ceremony.

“It was kind of like a little museum and we were able to look around a bit,” Walker said. “When we first got there it was raining, and that gave us a place to get out of the rain. By the time came to lay the wreath, it had mostly quit.”

For Walker, even the brief time spent with the guards was impressive, knowing that their work is not just ceremonial, but a true call to guard this sacred site and pay tribute to the fallen.

“The guard escorted us around and he thanked us for our service,” Walker said. “He was somebody I wouldn’t mind just sitting and talking with for awhile… I was very honored to be a part of the ceremony and to remember the unknowns this way.”

Walker, a Fort Dodge attorney, is a U.S. Army veteran and served one year in Vietnam. A graduate of Iowa State University in Ames, he was selected for training with the National Security Agency as a cryptographic analyst, a code-breaker.

Naden, retired after leading Naden Industries in Webster City, is a U.S. Navy veteran. A graduate of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, he attended Officer’s Training School in Rhode Island. Assigned to the USS Tutuila near Saigon, the ship served as a home-base for gunboats that patrolled up and down the Mekong River.

Vietnam, of course, never looked much like the spit and polish of the revered sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknown. The Old Guard, which is the U.S. 3rd Infantry, has guarded the Tomb 24-hours a day, seven days a week, since 1948. The guard is changed in a precision-filled ceremony every half hour in the summer and every hour in the winter.

“I felt it was a great honor and really the experience of a lifetime,” Naden said.

Naden can well appreciate the fact that the unknown soldiers who rest at the Tomb of the Unknown serve to represent so many more who never made it home and whose remains were never identified.

“There are so many unknowns,” Naden said. “My dad (Bob Naden) lost a brother in World War II. His body was brought back, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like for families that still have missing loved ones.”

His uncle, Charles Naden, was a tail-gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber that was returning from a bombing mission to an oil factory in France in the summer of 1944 and lost two engines. It was getting ready to land back in England when it was waved off because of another incoming plane that had injured people aboard. Before getting clearance to land, Naden’s plane lost a third engine. The pilot ditched the plane in a grove of trees, avoiding a church or school where children were at play. While some crew members survived, Charles Naden lost his life in the crash, but the children were saved and the town later put up a plaque to honor the sacrifice made by the crew of the plane.

For Walker and Naden, the placing of the wreath is a highlight of years of service to veterans through the Honor Flight. Walker’s wife, Mary Lou, works alongside them and, while she has gone on only one flight, enjoys meeting the veterans as they depart on their long-awaited flights. In that time, they have seen the one-day flight change lives and bring peace to veterans who often struggle to put some hard memories behind them.

“Particularly with the Vietnam vets, they don’t feel like they want to go, and I’ve had a lot of them say that,” Naden said. “But if you finally get them to go, they have found out it helps. I had one just a few months ago. He said, ‘You got me on that Honor Flight, and when I got home it was the first peaceful night I spent in 45 years.'”

Facts on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

• Nov. 11, 1921, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is dedicated. Four unknowns were exhumed from four different American cemeteries in France. Caskets were shifted and rotated, with no trace remaining of which cemetery each had come from. A sergeant who had not been present for the moving of the caskets was led into a room and randomly placed white roses on one of the caskets to select one soldier for the World War I Tomb of the Unknown.

• May 30, 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower presides over the dedication as unknown soldiers from World War II and Korea come to rest alongside the World War I unknown.

Great care is taken again to find a truly unknown soldier from World War II, drawing the remains of 18 fallen soldiers from virtually every theater of battle. Similar techniques of swapping around caskets to disguise its source were used to select one soldier for burial at the Tomb of the Unknown.

To locate an unknown from Korea, four unidentified remains were exhumed from the National Memorial Cemetery (Punch Bowl) in Hawaii. Again, the caskets were moved around to make sure the final selection was completely unknown.

• May 28, 1984, seeking to finally give Vietnam veterans more of the respect they deserved, President Ronald Reagan spoke as an unknown soldier from Vietnam joined the ranks at Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Few could have then imagined the advances in DNA that would eventually see this soldier identified.

On May 11, 1988, Lt. Michael J. Blassie, the former unknown, was laid to rest at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, in Missouri., at the request of his family.

• Sept. 11, 2001, Arlington National Cemetery is basically across the street from the Pentagon. Tomb guards could almost feel the blast when terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. Despite the chaos that ensued, the Tomb was never unguarded. At 10:30 a.m., Arlington was closed to the public. Tomb guards changed out of their dress uniforms, put on BDUs (battle uniforms), and continued their watch, according to tombguard.org.

• While lesser known, Arlington National Cemetery has a second Tomb of the Unknown, this one dating to its very beginning during the Civil War. It is estimated that up to half of the soldiers killed in the Civil War were never identified. Dedicated in September 1886, buried beneath the Civil War Unknowns Monument are the remains of more than 2,000 soldiers who fought and died within about 25 miles of Washington, D.C., many at Bull Run.