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Dec 8, 2011

Interred




The Navy Times notes that Pearl Harbor survivors are returning to their dead shipmates, decades later:

On Tuesday, seven decades after dozens of fellow sailors were killed when the Utah sank on Dec. 7, 1941, Navy divers took a small urn containing [Graham Soucy's] ashes and put it in a porthole of the ship. The ceremony is one of five memorials being held this week for service members who lived through the assault and want their remains placed in Pearl Harbor, out of pride and affinity for those they left behind.

I don't know of another battle site where people are returning to be buried, though it's not something I've researched. "Pearl Harbor interment and ash scattering ceremonies began in the late 1980s and started growing in number as more survivors heard about them." Now, the article says, 265 survivors are interred there. In Soucy's case, his ashes were split, with some going to Pearl and some being buried in a plot at home to be shared with his wife. Both family, if of a different sort.



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