How Are Veterans Treated? Soldiers Buried In Wrong Graves In Rhode Island Veterans Cemetery

Seven people were mistakenly buried in the wrong graves at a veteran’s cemetery in Rhode Island, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The mistake occurred when grounds workers at the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery accidently allotted two spaces for the burial of a deceased father of a veteran in November 2010 instead of one. This caused plots in the row to be off by one space.

The director of Veterans Affairs in New Hampshire, Kasim Yarn, apologized Monday for the “unacceptable” blunder. He said the family members of the deceased were still being contacted by cemetery officials.

"We recognize our cemetery is hallowed ground, and we did not meet our obligation to our veterans, their loved ones who are buried here or the families and the veterans who continue to come to our cemetery to pay their respects," Yarn told local reporters.

Yarn said the issue was brought to his attention Thursday after members of the grounds crew noticed some of the names on the grave markers did not match the bodies of the deceased buried under them while they were preparing the gravesite for a veteran’s wife in the miscalculated row.

All of the misplaced dead bodies were realigned with the correct grave markers over the weekend. Yarn said the mistake was an isolated incident that was done without malice and that none of the employees of the cemetery would be disciplined.​

Roughly 1,200 people get buried in the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery every year. The cemetery currently holds 34,000 dead bodies.

There were roughly 21.8 million veterans in the U.S., according to a U.S. News report on Nov. 10, 2014. The states with the most veteran residents were California with 2 million, Texas with 1.6 million and Florida with 1. 6 million.

Veterans tend to struggle with high suicide and unemployment rates.