Urns carrying the ashes of 42 forgotten veterans, who fought in conflicts ranging from Spanish American War to Vietnam arrived to their final resting place at National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona, thanks to the Missing in America Project.  

By Cecilia Chan

Independent Newsmedia

Not much is known about Rolla Davenport Welch, other than he fought in the Spanish American War.

Paperwork states he was about 25 years old and a first sergeant during the nearly year-long war in 1898, waged largely in Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam between Spain and the United States.That war ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.

Mr. Welch left the military and ended up in Phoenix, where he died on Dec. 11, 1937 at the age of 64. His cremated remains sat unclaimed for 79 years until the Missing in America Project stepped in.

“The guy fought in the Spanish American War and he was put on a shelf in a tin can and paper, whatever they got to store him,” said Clyde Taylor, Northern Arizona state coordinator of the Missing in America Project.

The nonprofit organization came in and claimed the remains of Mr. Welch and 41 other forgotten, indigent and homeless veterans, who served in World I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, from Dignity Greenwood Memory Lawn Mortuary at 23rd Avenue and Van Buren Street.

“Every veteran when they enlist in the military or drafted, sign a blank check payable up to and including their life to the United States,” Mr. Taylor said.

In return, the U.S. government is obligated to give a veteran a dignified military burial, the Glendale resident said.

“For them to be sitting on a shelf, not getting that burial, that obligation is not getting fulfilled,” Mr. Taylor said. “What we are doing is fulfilling that obligation made to them by the government and got dropped.”

So, on a Sunday morning in March last year, a coach carrying the urns of Mr. Welch and the other veterans along with folded burial flags made the trip to the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona on Cave Creek Road.

There, the escorted coach after a 27-mile trek from Greenwood Memory Lawn, was greeted by a giant American flag fluttering between the ladders of two Phoenix fire trucks.Patriot Guard Riders stood a flag line while members of the ROTC from Arizona State University and JROTC cadets from Mesa High School provided the dignified transfer of the urns from the coach to a viewing stage.

The mournful tune of Amazing Grace by a bagpiper filled the air. After Taps was played and speeches given, the 42 veterans finally found their final resting place.

To date, Missing in America, which launched nationwide in January 2007, has interred 3,221 veterans, going back to the Civil War.

In Arizona, 233 forgotten veterans has been interred since 2014. On Oct. 28, 32 more veterans will be interred with full military honors at Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery at Marana. Remains of veterans found in funeral homes from Pinal, Pima, Cochise and Santa Cruz counties are interred in southern Arizona.

The veterans to be interred served in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, according to Nicole Baker, spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Veterans’ Services, which buries the veterans.

“We want to make sure all veterans whether homeless or unclaimed have the same type of ceremony and given the same respect and same military honors,” she said, adding she encouraged the public to come out to these ceremonies.

Mr. Taylor said the next veteran burial for northern Arizona will be sometime in April at Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery on Camp Navajo in Bellemont, which opened in 2016.

MIA members are currently working with a funeral home in Kingman, finding eight veterans so far, who were identified through the National Archives of military personnel records.

“We go in and actually pull each individual cremains out of the storage vaults,” Mr. Taylor said. “We run all the unclaims through a secured database in St. Louis to see which qualifies for burial.”

The work is long. It took the group over two years to get into the doors of Greenwood and to go through and identify the remains, Mr. Taylor said.

“Lot of funeral homes don’t want to cooperate,” he said. “They worry about liability. But we got the laws changes in Arizona to resolved them of all liability once a decedent has sat on a shelf for six months.”

He added MIA was instrumental in changing the law in 37 states to allow the nonprofit to step in and claim forgotten veterans.At Greenwood, volunteers pulled out all the cremated remains that were kept in burial vaults, went through paperwork attached to each one, put them back, sent the information to St. Louis and then returned for the remains of those identified as a veteran.

“We provided marble urns (for the ashes) from the cardboard box and plastic bags they were in,” Mr. Taylor said.

All of the funeral homes in Arizona has been contacted with a certified letter requesting to do an inventory of their remains and so far, MIA has inventoried 15 mortuaries, he added.

“There’s many, many more to go,” he said, noting it will be a minimum of 10 years before MIA’s work is done in Arizona.

MIA is an volunteer organization with its members paying for their own expenses, said Mr. Taylor, a Vietnam-era veteran who served in the U.S. Army from 1971-74. The retiree was a former Patriot Guard Rider before taking over as state coordinator in 2013.

MIA has its work cut out for it. It has visited 2,100 funeral homes and there are are 21,080 funeral homes in the United States, according to SBDCNet, a clearing house for small businesses.