By Jared Solis
Their day begins in the damp basement of the cemetery’s administrative building, a converted garage that has just enough space for two tables, a small, fortified gun room and a few lockers.
The morning starts off with bellows of laughter, the smell of doughnuts and coffee and a sense of excitement.
Men dressed in white, pressed shirts, dark pants, black berets and white gloves gather around outside near the beaten down van that has seen better days.
A tattered American flag still holds on for dear life on the radio antenna.
By midday the palms of their gloves will be dark gray from brandishing their rifles for the 10 funeral services they plan to attend that day.
The Memorial Services Detachment Friday squad are a motley crew of 10 today, and they are about to do what the United States government has abstained from doing since the late 1970s.
They are about to honor their several veterans, not retired and now deceased, with full military burial honors.
“If the individual who’s deceased is not retired from the active service, then he’s not entitled to full military burial honors; that is, three volleys of rifle fire and ‘Taps,’ and that’s why our organization exists, to provide that for military veterans who are no longer entitled to military honors,” the MSD Friday squad leader, Chief Master Sgt. Gene Kuwik, U.S. Air Force, retired, said.
President Jimmy Carter did a lot of military cutbacks in the 1970s, and the military bands and honor guards were the first to go, Kuwik said.
The 5th Army headquarters near the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery provided full military burial honors in all categories of active duty, Medal of Honor recipients and retirees and veterans until 1988.
Due to the dwindling of funds, the MSD was founded and patterned after the first memorial service detachment at Fort Snelling in Minnesota.
“Now there’s several throughout the nation, but we’re still one of very few,” Kuwik said. “Some are very small and operate very differently from us. As far as the way we operate, there are only two.”
It is a quarter to 9.
They pack their rifles and themselves into the van and embark toward the first grave site.
If there are any assumptions that the MSD squad at Fort Sam Houston’s National Cemetery are young Americans with access to a U.S’s war chest to honor veterans in death, that would be false.
The eldest member of the MSD fires his rifle at the age of 89.
They are all veterans who have served in wars, risked their lives and sacrificed a great deal.
But now to honor those who have