State Department of Veterans Affairs Cemetery Bureau Chief Gavin Sandvig says they don’t see many funerals now for World War Two veterans at the Iowa Veterans Cemetery near Van Meter.
He says there are indications at other facilities that the number of living World War Two veterans continues to drop. “The Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown, our last World War Two veteran just passed away recently. He was 102. So we no longer have any World War Two veterans currently residing at the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown,” he says.
Sandvig says there are more still more living veterans here than he expected. “According to the VA regional office in Des Moines, we still have over 120 World War Two veterans still residing in Iowa,” he says. Sandvig says the number of burials for veterans of the Korean war has also been dropping. “The Korean War veterans, you know, they’re starting to dwindle as far as services out at our cemetery. Just the plethora of them are really the Vietnam era veterans,” he says.
Sandvig says veterans who qualify do get burial benefits at the cemetery. “The preparation, the closing of the plot, the operations piece of it, that there’s no cost to the veteran for that. Every veteran, if they’re in the ground at the Iowa Veterans Cemetery receives a headstone,” Sandvig says. He says they are granite headstones that are also provided by the VA, and if the spouse is buried with the veteran, their inscription goes on that headstone as well.