RIVERSIDE, Calif. — For eight days, a constant flow of volunteers has come to Riverside National Cemetery to stand at two lecterns and read the names of all 148,000 veterans buried here.
They have read at varied paces in high, low, steady and wavering voices in shifts 24 hours a day. It is the first such unbroken roll call at any national veterans cemetery in the country, said Michael Nacincik, a spokesman for the National Cemetery Administration in Washington, D.C.
The “roll call program” began as an idea by Riverside cemetery staff members, said Gill Gallo, the cemetery’s director. They started asking for volunteers in April.
“So many people responded,” Gallo said. “We were amazed. It’s theirs now. They made it come to life.”
Gallo stood in the bright sunlight Friday morning as volunteers came and went, signing their names on a list and waiting for their turns to read.
This is the “busiest” of the 128 Veterans Affairs cemeteries, said Nacincik, with 8,340 people last year interred in the ground or in a long white wall at the property’s perimeter.
Of those cemeteries, Riverside has buried the most soldiers from the current wars, Gallo said, with 71 who died in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“When you think of how many we’re losing every day, it brings it home,” said Rae Lee Escalera, 53, who came to place fresh flowers on the grave of her brother, George.
The roll call was not in alphabetical order, so there was no way to know when a name would be read, but Escalera arrived just in time to hear her brother’s.
“Amazing,” she said. “George Arthur Davis. I miss him.”
