Alabama Veterans Memorial Cemetery

[Niner]

If you are a veteran in the US you can be buried in a Veteran's cemetery. You can also include your spouse. Good thing about it is that there is no charge for the resting place of your finial remains once it gets there. No opening the ground fees. No vault fees. The government will even spring for a head stone. Since I had deposited my still living wife at her 95 year old mother's house for a long afternoon visit I decided to check out the relatively new Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Spanish Fort Alabama.

At the cemetery you can be buried in the ground in the conventional way. You can have your cremated remains in a locked drawer in a standing unit....or you can apparently have your ashes in the "Scatter Garden". You can also be buried some place else and have an engraved piece of marble about 10 or 11 inches square put on a "wall" it looks like. Not sure how that works.

The graves are laid out on what looks like on a next dead guy that comes along basis. Air Force guys may be next to Navy guys, next to Army...etc. Looks like a lot of Vietnam era vets, which makes sense when thinking about how it's a new cemetery and Vietnam vets are the right age for passing on in large numbers. Some show medals received. Most don't...either because they didn't get any worth the mention or the family didn't know one medal from another and left that stuff off.

You can have your wife buried there too. On the standing headstones there can be a front and a back entry. Husband on one side and wife on the other. Each grave is numbered on the back side. There is a kiosk to look up the location of anyone interred.

You can send in a short application, along with a copy of your DD 214 and be preregistered. I don't know if I would want to be planted there .....but wife doesn't like the big local cemetery and...if my remains end up there when I no longer inhabit them it would leave more potential money to leave to the kids and grandkids. In any case the place looked very well cared for. The grass looked like it could have been a golf course at a well to do country club.