victory for families of military veterans

[sfc_darrel]

A widow's victory for families of military veterans

By LISA HOFFMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
July 08, 2002

- Vivian Mansfield resolved not to rest - or die - until the government changed an old, obscure law that kept her from putting an official marker on her husband's grave honoring his Navy service at Pearl Harbor.

Now, the feisty former farm wife, who turned 83 on July 5, can relax.

After more than two years of pounding out hundreds of letters to national lawmakers and others with arthritic fingers on an ancient Royal manual typewriter - not to mention making more long-distance phone calls than she could afford - Mansfield won her battle.

And the kin of as many as 20,000 veterans a year may benefit as well.

"I was fighting for all those veterans as well as for my husband," said Mansfield, of Cullom, Ill.

The problem: The Department of Veterans Affairs was applying a narrow interpretation to an 1860s law that said, in effect, if a family member puts his or her own marker on a veteran's grave, the family forfeits the right to an inscribed white headstone or bronze marker the government offers to all who have served in the military.

Once relatives make that innocent mistake - as Mansfield and an estimated 20,000 other veterans' families a year do - the plot technically becomes a "marked" grave and thus ineligible for the VA's official memorial marker, which, the Civil War-era law specifies, must only be affixed to a pristine, otherwise "unmarked" grave.

That's what happened to Mansfield. She received an 18-inch-wide bronze plaque from the VA, which describes her husband of 55 years as a "Pearl Harbor survivor," but the cemetery where he is buried refused to allow it to be attached for fear of falling afoul of VA regulations.

Much the same "Catch-22" befell the Connecticut family of the late Army veteran Agostino Guzzo, an immigrant from Italy who served in the South Pacific in World War II. His wife and son lobbied Connecticut legislators, who tried, but failed, in 1999 to get Congress to change the VA law.

A Scripps Howard News Service story in 2001 brought Mansfield unexpected support. A man in Memphis, Tenn., who prefers anonymity, not only sent her scores of postage stamps but also the gray granite slab on which the VA marker now is attached. Others, particularly veteran organizations in Illinois and elsewhere, donated money and helped spread the word.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., tried again last year. Helped by Mansfield's dogged letter-writing and the publicity it spawned, they finally persuaded Congress to slip a paragraph into a veterans' benefits measure that allows a VA marker to be placed on any veteran's grave after Dec. 27, 2001, - regardless if it already bears a plaque.
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story...7-08-02&cat=AN