National Cemetery Administration 50th Anniversary Event Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery (ALNC), Elwood, IL

Matt [Quinn], thanks for that kind introduction and for your exceptional leadership of our National Cemetery Administration. I’m honored to join you today for this important celebration of NCA’s 50^th Anniversary—five decades of excellence serving Veterans and their families.

Let me also acknowledge and thank our Cemetery Director, Quincy McCall, and all her dedicated staff here at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, for hosting today’s celebration.

Let me just say a few words about Quincy for those of you who don’t know her. She’s an Army Veteran who also served in the Army and Navy Reserves and as a Department of the Army civilian. She joined VA 26 years ago—first working in the Veterans Health Administration.

But in 1999, she was called to NCA—and in 2002 selected for the Cemetery Director Intern Program. She served her internship at Leavenworth National Cemetery, became the Assistant Director at Quantico National Cemetery, and then began her distinguished tenure as a Cemetery Director—first at Wood National Cemetery in Milwaukee, then at Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, and then at Alabama National Cemetery, which she helped open in 2008 … all that before assuming her duties here, at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery complex, where she’s responsible for nine facilities—three active cemeteries and 6 more which are no longer active.

Quincy—thanks for your service in uniform and during your many years at VA. There’s a reason NCA is known for excellence. It’s all about people—people like you.

Let me also thank:

• Members of the Illinois Army National Guard 144^th Army Band, Nathan Treece, and Laurica Petrella-Zitko for sharing your musical talents with us today;
• The John Whiteside Ceremonial Color Guard for posting the colors;
• Cooper Merinette, Boy Scout Troop 99, for leading us in the Pledge of Allegiance and Chaplain Mitzner for his inspiring invocation;
• Randy Duncan for reminding us, once again, of the legacy, eloquence, and genius of President Abraham Lincoln;
• All our First Responders with us today—thank you for what you do in your communities and across the nation;
• State, county, and local officials—thank you for attending;
• Most importantly, all our Veterans, your family members and your friends—other distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

. . .

Welcome, everyone. I’m honored to join all of you here today at the beautiful Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.

You know, I can’t think of a more appropriate place, a more appropriately named cemetery, at which to celebrate NCA’s 50^th Anniversary as our National Cemetery System. Because almost everything we do at VA—providing health care, benefits, and memorial affairs for our nation’s Veterans—all of it has its roots, in some form or fashion, in the devastating and cataclysmic events and results of our Civil War.

And it was Abraham Lincoln who shepherded the nation through those terrible years, 1861 to 1865, four years during which more than 615,000 Americans died, so much of our nation was devastated, and so many families left mourning. Lincoln is remembered for many important qualities, truly an iconic, visionary leader, but one of his most important skills was his ability to communicate so well—both in his writing and in his speeches.

In December of 1862, two and a half months after the costly Union victory at Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the war up to that time, Lincoln composed a letter to Congress, the second such annual letter he had written. It’s a long letter—detailing the status of US trade and international agreements, the nation’s financial status, and many other aspects of a government and a nation at war. But the main focus of the letter is to make a strong argument to convince members of Congress to support Lincoln’s impending Emancipation Proclamation, a Presidential executive order that would free more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the Confederate states and allow Black Americans to enlist in the Union military, crucial, Lincoln believed, to help end the war.

Lincoln’s close friend, David Davis, said at the time that “Mr. Lincoln’s whole soul is absorbed in his plan of remunerative emancipation.” After a lengthy and logical argument on why emancipation of the slaves was required and just, Lincoln closed the letter with some of the most inspired and eloquent prose of his entire presidency. He wrote,

We can succeed only by concert. It is not “Can any of us imagine better?” but “Can we all do better?” … The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country . . . In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.

Wow. It’s worth the time to think about those words, and to use them as a yardstick as we examine our own actions in this time, a time also “piled high with difficulty” and challenges we must and can overcome.   

“Can we all do better?” 

“We must think anew and act anew.”

Today is an opportunity to reflect on how NCA has met those challenges set forth in President Lincoln’s letter.  

Looking back 50 years we see an organization that had responsibility for 21 “burial grounds”—but in 1973 was able to quickly incorporate 82 Army cemeteries for a total of 103 national cemeteries across the country, and has since grown that number to 155 national cemeteries, where almost five million Veterans lay in eternal rest.

Looking back 50 years we see an era when there were no—that’s zero—VA-grant funded state, territory, or tribal Veteran cemeteries. Now, there are 122 VA-grant funded state cemeteries located in 49 states, territories, and tribal lands.

Forty-five years ago, the Veterans Cemetery Grants Program was established, and in 1980 the first grant went to the Eastern Shore Veterans Cemetery in Maryland. This year, VA and NCA topped one billion dollars in total grants to state, territory, and tribal cemeteries since that first grant was delivered.

Fifty years ago, the National Cemetery System, forerunner of NCA, had just a few hundred employees; today, NCA is a diverse organization with more than 2,200 employees, covering all 50 states and Puerto Rico, almost 70% of whom are Veterans, the highest percentage in the federal government; more than 55% of whom are disabled Veterans; and more than 9% of whom are women Veterans. All these dedicated men and women know and appreciate what it takes to serve our country because so many of them have done so themselves, in uniform, and they also fully know the steep cost of freedom because they see it every day at their places of work.

Over the last five decades, NCA has steadily improved access for Veterans. Currently, 94% of American Veterans have access to a National, State, or Tribal Veterans Cemetery withing 75 miles of their homes—closing in on NCA’s goal of 95%.

Just 25 years ago, in 1998, the National Cemetery System became the National Cemetery Administration—NCA. Shortly afterwards, in 2001, Robin Higgins  became the first woman Undersecretary of VA. A Marine Veteran of 20 years, Robin was also the wife of fellow Marine Colonel Richard Higgins, who was tragically kidnapped and murdered while serving in Lebanon on a UN peacekeeping mission.  

Thinking and acting anew to do better for the Veterans we serve includes finding and utilizing the talents and abilities of all people—of every gender, race, orientation, and identity.

In 2019, NCA launched the Veterans Legacy Memorial, an innovative and interactive website, the nation’s first digital program dedicated to the memory of Vets. VLM allows family members, friends, and the public to offer tributes to Veterans using words, documents, photos, timelines, and other information so people can view and better understand what Veterans have done for our country. And in May of this year, NCA expanded VLM to include 27 DoD-managed cemeteries, including Arlington National Cemetery. That expansion added more than 300 thousand individual interactive pages of information to the 4.5 million pages already included in VLM. 

And over the past 21 years, we can see the results of NCA’s commitment to excellence—their desire to think anew, act anew, and do better for Veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors. We need to look no further than the results of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), announced every three years. For over two decades NCA has been the highest rated organization—public or private—in the United States! Using the ACSI scale from 1 to 100, only one organization has ever achieved a score of 97 from ACSI. And that organization is NCA. They achieved that score in 2019—and, again, in the most recent ACSI results announced last year—and we should remember that the NCA team earned that 2022 score while simultaneously overcoming the unprecedented challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

None of these significant accomplishments were easy.

None of them happened without hard work and dedicated people.

None of it happened without thinking anew and acting anew to do better for our nation’s Veterans.

And that’s true for all of VA, not just NCA. Doing better, doing what you know in your heart is the right things for Vets, can be divisive, confrontational, and, sometimes, harder than it needs to be. But that cannot and will not prevent us from taking the right actions on behalf of Vets—even if it is sometimes contentious.

Earlier this year VA faced a decision. I faced a decision. Many of you may have heard about our change to VA’s mission statement from the original statement selected in 1959. After years of discussion, talk, surveys, debates, and suggested new mission statements we decided on this: “To fulfill President Lincoln’s promise to care for those who have served in our nation’s military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors.”

I think today, in this place, it’s important to talk about the change. As many of you know, the original mission statement was a quotation from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address of 1865—his short speech inscribed in stone on the right hand, inner wall of the Lincoln Memorial as you enter. The portion from which we took our 1959 mission statement reads, “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.”

So, why the change? To me, it’s neither complicated nor confrontational. The decision was simply based on thinking anew—and acting anew—to acknowledge changes in what our military, our Veterans, and our nation look like, changes that have occurred over the last 158 years since the Civil War ended. The change was neither a critique of President Lincoln’s exceptional sentiments, nor an attempt to move away from them. It was, in fact, our considered best effort to embrace his sentiments—and his challenge to do better for the Veterans we serve.

All the Veterans we serve.

Because every time a Veteran, or a Vet’s family member, caregiver, or survivor walks by a VA facility, or enters a VA facility, we want them to be able to see themselves, the true face of America, when they see and read our mission statement. Because we know that service in uniform, sacrifice, and valor have nothing to do with gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or identity.

That’s the reason we changed our mission statement—to more accurately reflect the America we live in today and the Americans who served her in uniform. We want to think anew and act anew in the best interest of all Veterans. Because we are strongest when we acknowledge, appreciate, and draw on the talents of all our people.

So, that’s what we are doing, and that’s what we’ll continue to do moving forward.

…

So many things change over time. And excellent organizations adjust to those changes. They evolve to better care for the people they serve. But some things do not change. Some things remain constant. The honorable, selfless service of Veterans who sacrificed for our country is something that has not changed over time.

Veterans like Technical Sergeant Sator “Sandy” Sanchez, US Army Air Force, who served as an aerial gunner on B-17 aircraft during World War II. He began his combat service in 1943, flew the 25 missions required of Army Air Force members at that time, and then volunteered to serve another tour.

In the summer of 1944, after 44 missions, Sanchez was sent home for rest and reassignment. But he volunteered for a third combat tour—returning to Europe and flying more missions out of Italy. And, on March 15, 1945, he volunteered for a mission to bomb an oil plant at Ruhland, Germany, while manning the top gun turret position. This would be his 66^th, and last, mission. During the bomb run, his B-17 was hit and severely damaged. The entire crew, except Sanchez, was able to bail out—their aircraft crashed and exploded. Sanchez’ body was never recovered. He was awarded the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. In recognition of his service and dedication, a B-17 was nicknamed “Smilin’ Sandy Sanchez” in his honor—the only B-17 aircraft ever named for an enlisted man. Just six weeks after his death, the war in Europe came to an end.

A headstone memorializing his life and service stands here, in Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery—Section M1, Row O, Site 36. At the bottom of that marker, carved in stone, are the words, “Duty Above All.”

And we remember the valor and perseverance of Veterans like First Sergeant George Hyatt, a Union Soldier during the Civil War, who served with the 127^th Illinois Infantry from 1862 to 1865. On May 22^nd, 1863, General Ulysses Grant, then commanding Union troops during the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, ordered the storming of the Confederate positions on the heights above the Mississippi River. The assault would require Union Soldiers, in advance of the main force, to build a bridge across a moat and then plant scaling ladders against the enemy embankment to assist the Soldiers of the main attack that would follow.

The mission was extremely risky, and everyone knew it at the time. Only unmarried Soldiers were asked to volunteer for the mission. And George Hyatt volunteered. At dawn, after a Naval bombardment of the Confederate positions, the Soldiers launched the mission and immediately came under heavy fire from the Confederates above them. The force was bogged down, trapped in the ditch they had to cross, unable to advance or retreat. They remained there, under fire, for the entire day. When night fell, those remaining alive, including Hyatt, were able to get out. More than half of those who volunteered were dead. Many more were wounded.

For his valor, George Hyatt received the Medal of Honor. And he, too, is memorialized here, in this cemetery—Section 1, Row O, Site 1613.

While we gather today to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of NCA, at the heart of this event is a celebration of Vets. Because at this cemetery, at all VA National Cemeteries, at every State Veterans Cemetery, we can see with a single sweep of the eye the high cost of freedom. We see the granite reminders that Americans of every generation have put their lives on the line to ensure our freedoms.  

From the American Revolution, concluded more than 240 years ago, to the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Uzbekistan and Pakistan, young Americans have served, sacrificed, and endured untold hardships across our nation and around the world. We can never underestimate, or over appreciate, the costs they bore for us. We can freely gather here today because of them. It is those Veterans that the NCA workforce honors so well. Veterans like Technical Sergeant Sandy Sanchez and First Sergeant George Hyatt.

And today we appreciate the continued service of Veterans who come to work for other Veterans at VA. Veterans like Quincy McCall, our NCA Cemetery Director here at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, and Robin Higgins, who served as the first woman Undersecretary of NCA. 

Today, we honor Veterans—the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, and the service they rendered to us and to the Nation. And we celebrate the excellence with which NCA has served those Veterans and their families for the past 50 years.  

Thank you for joining us in this celebration.  May God bless you, all our service members and Veterans, and the United States of America.

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