Ben Gabriel Jr. brought native flowers to his parents’ grave site at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl on Veterans Day. It was a short drive from his home in Pearl City to the cemetery, where his father, an Air Force veteran who fought in Korea, was laid to rest a little more than a year ago alongside his mother.

“It is a prime spot,” Gabriel said Friday, surveying the manicured grass and lush, leafy trees. His uncle’s ashes are there, too.

He used to try to come every week, but now Gabriel and his sister split the weekly task of refreshing the flowers on their parents’ headstone.

When his father died, Gabriel was given the choice of burying him at the Hawaii State Veterans Cemetery in Kaneohe or in Section U at Punchbowl. Most of the headstones in that section are marked “US unknown Korea,” but that is slowly changing.

Other graves note more recent deaths, including a World War II Army veteran who died Sept. 3, and a 32-year-old Marine Corps captain who served in Afghanistan and was interred just last week.

“We got lucky,” Gabriel said. “A spot opened up.”

For years now the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific has been exhuming the remains of unidentified service members for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency to identify. When the agency succeeds, the service member’s family can elect to bury them closer to home, sometimes on the mainland, leaving a grave site open for a local veteran.

Just this week, remains at eight grave sites were disinterred and sent to the agency’s forensics laboratory.

“DPAA has given us back 75 to 100 (grave sites) a year, depending on their identification speed,” said Jim Horton, director of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and a retired Air Force colonel.

Sometimes a year or more will go by between a disinterment and a new burial, Horton said. The graves are filled as needed.

“It keeps Punchbowl as a local option for veterans and their families,” he said.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s glass-and-steel headquarters is at Joint Base Pearl Harbor- Hickam. Since 1973 it has identified service members from the Vietnam War, including 236 from Vietnam and 121 from Laos; 252 from the Korean War; and 401 from World War II, according to agency data.

Of the World War II remains, 181 came from Hawaii, 93 from Germany, 86 from the Pacific atoll Tarawa and 55 from a village in Papua New Guinea.

In the year since Nov. 1, 2021, the agency successfully identified 114 service members, according to its website. Twenty-four were recovered from Romania and another 24 from North and South Korea. Eighteen came from Germany, 13 from France and 10 from Nueva Ecija in the Philippines.

On an upper floor of the facility, behind floor-to- ceiling glass walls, the bones of unidentified Korean War veterans lie in varying degrees of completeness. Researchers use DNA samples to match remains with living family members.

The agency is involved in recovery operations for unidentified remains in Panama and has a boat between Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands surveying for unexploded ordnance before diving for potential remains there, according to Army Maj. Leah Ganoni, a public affairs officer for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Other recovery trips recently returned from Laos and Papua New Guinea, she said.

FRIDAY MORNING at Punchbowl, under a tent below the statue of Lady Columbia, sat U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, U.S. Rep. Ed Case, U.S. Rep.-elect Jill Tokuda, Gov. David Ige, Lt. Gov.-elect Sylvia Luke and Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi alongside about 500 service members, their family members and onlookers as they commemorated Veterans Day at the annual ceremony sponsored by the Oahu Veterans Council.

Ige thanked the estimated 117,000 veterans in the Hawaiian Islands.

“Because of your service, we all enjoy the freedoms of democracy and a safer and better way of life for all,” he said.

In his remarks, Adm. John Aquilino, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, urged those in attendance to ask veterans to share their stories and noted the sacrifices made by those who served in the military.

“They didn’t choose a well-paying job. They didn’t choose working standard hours, 9 to 5 every day. And they didn’t choose to stay home,” he said. “What they did choose was a life filled with uncertainty and difficulty to protect our way of life.”

The commemoration included music and hula, a wreath presentation and a 21-gun salute by a row of seven Marines firing their rifles into the air three times. A bugler played taps, and four F-22 jets from the Hawaii Air National Guard and U.S. Air Force zoomed westward overhead in a “missing man” flyover, scattering the birds below into frightened chaos over the finely manicured lawn.

Gabriel hadn’t come for the ceremony, only to visit his parents’ grave site on the opposite side of the cemetery.

“We like the way they keep this place,” he said, watching the ceremony get underway as he walked back to sit by his parents’ resting place.