As James Horton mills through Punchbowl Cemetery, where he is director, he is constantly envisioning where the next building project could be. It’s important that he “not close the gates” for veteran interments.
Space is a premium at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, nestled in Punchbowl Crater. It’s why Horton, a retired Air Force fighter pilot and onetime inspector general for Pacific Air Forces, is carefully overseeing a $25.1 million construction and renovation project at the cemetery — and already thinking about future projects.
The current renovation includes building 6,800 new columbarium “niche” spaces for ashes in the spot that now houses the administrative building, a relic from 1949 when the cemetery was first built. The current project and those slated in coming years will likely guarantee at least another 14 years of first interments for veterans, said Horton, 54.
Horton, who became director in February 2014, has tried to foster a good relationship with cemetery neighbors, some of whom aren’t happy that what was once their community park is now a construction zone where the cemetery’s administration building will sit.
Horton, who earned a bachelor of science in financial management from the U.S. Air Force Academy and a masters in business administration from Golden Gate University, said there have been discussions about a future interpretive center at the cemetery, but nothing is set in stone.
The U.S. Air Force veteran retired as a colonel and his last full assignment was at Hickam Air Force Base, where he and his wife and two sons felt at home, he said. So after moving back to the mainland, it took little convincing for him to apply for the Punchbowl Cemetery position. The family now lives in Aiea where they can see Hickam and the coastline from their lanai.
Horton said becoming a cemetery director was never in his “crystal ball of things I wanted to do when I grew up.” But “what you’re allowed to do and how well you can spend your time taking care of the veterans, there is a whole lot of personal reward through this job.”
Question: What is a typical day like for you?
Answer: There really are very few days that are alike. Our priority every day is to take care of the veterans and their families. So a typical day here at the cemetery is six or seven interments and those can be a combination of either urns into the niche or caskets into the ground. So even though the cemetery has been closed for first interments literally for 23 years, because spouses pass away, we still wind up doing them.
So we have a full staff of 25 total here and while they do all that work, I’m still very much watching and part of those daily operations, partly to evaluate how my folks are doing but also to make sure the needs of the families are met as well. It’s very easy, though, to get distracted from that stuff. We’ve got a lot of construction projects as well. The Honolulu Memorial, the big white memorial at the end here, it’s actully not ours. It’s owned and operated by a whole different government agency … the American Battlefield Monument Commission. … We are an oddity in that regard.
Our cemetery is one of 132 that are all run by the Veterans Administration and we’re the only one that has someone else’s memorial, another national-type memorial at it. …
Visitors running around: Right before you got here I was with the lead team for a high-ranking Department of Defense official who is coming through (Thursday) … doing all the preparatory work for that.
A typical cemetery is a fairly quiet place. On a given day we’ll have 40 to 60 large tour buses come through here; a typical VA cemetery may have three or four ceremonies like at Veterans Day, Memorial Day. We’ll run anywhere from 24 to 30 ceremonies a year …
Q: You mentioned there are six or seven interments a day? There’s really no capacity, correct? How is that being done?
A: This is the kind of stuff that I had to get educated on, having no experience coming into this. There are three choices normally at any given ceremony. You can put a casket in the ground with remains; or you can choose to have the remains cremated and you can put the urn in the ground; or you can put the urn into a niche, essentially a spot in the wall. And then you have a memorial marker for each of those locations. We’ve been closed since 1992.
Really, two-thirds of the cemetery was full of ground space right after it opened in 1949 because it was an aggregation of the Northern Pacific war dead that were interred. So they sort of ran out of space very quickly. …
So the in-ground space is more or less all taken up. … Back up behind us here in section U, within that section it’s very unusual. We had almost 800 Korea unknowns, U.S. soldiers from the Korean War that are all interred here. Those are in individual gravesites, single sets of remains. Over the course about the last six years or so … on average, four sets of remains per quarter, we’ll disinter them, do a dignified transfer ceremony to the (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) and they will work on the identification.
Between World War II and Korean unknowns, last check I think they’ve had 80 positive identifications. Of those 80, for all but one of them, the families made the decision to reinter the remains closer to home on the mainland. We literally had one Marine reinterred. What that means then is we’ve had that many spots become available for local veterans. That’s how we’ve been able to maintain still trying to make casket sites available for the veterans.
For the columbarium, where the niches are, there have been three projects over the course of the years. …that last expansion is a little more than a year away of being full. We’re talking first interments.
That’s why we’re going through the thrash of building. Our new administration building will be away from here because we’re out of space. We’re out of square footage.
So this space right where the current administration building is now will be torn down and built up as a columbarium. There will be approximately 6,800 new niches. At our current rate of interments, it will give us between nine and 10 more years of first interments. It’ll give us about another 10 years of options for veterans to be interred here. There’s actually another set of columbarium that are already engineered, already drawn for another project, up by the overlook restrooms. That’s all on the books ready to go.
Q: When will that be ready for bid?
A: Three or four years out before the need is when they try to get the bids going and get construction going. … Normally, by four years out, four years away from depletion, they want to start building more.
The challenge, you can imagine, is once we get past that next set, which will give us probably between three and four years of opportunity or availability for the veterans. Somewhere around 14 years or so from next year with this current set being built and the next set, we’ll have to start looking harder at finding space. …
Q: Could we get an update on the current projects?
A: Let’s start inside the cemetery. The one part that we just literally are starting this week is the cap replacement for the original columbarium that was built back in the ’80s. That’s looking like we should be done some time in Februrary. It’s mostly cosmetic … it’s lots of heavy precast concrete caps … (once done) we’ll be doing work with hardscape, landscaping and greenscaping to make it look nicer.
The second piece is the memorial wall. … One of the things the VA does is every veteran is entitled to a marker. Even if you’re interred at a private cemetery, or as you know there are a lot of people around here who prefer to spread ashes at sea. The marker looks like a regular marker on the ground on a gravesite, but it says “in memory of” to designate that there is physically no ashes or not a casket there.
… Timing-wise, they think they’re going to have that done somewhere early spring, probably February or early March.
… The impetus for this whole thing is building this columbarium. The whole push behind this whole project was to continue to make space available. They’ll start this project in January. Probably level this (office) building the end of January, first of February.
I’m hedging. I would say that likely it will be end of August, first of September when they’ll finish this new columbarium. That’s the reason why we’re moving out early because I want them to have time to comfortably finish before we run out of space in the current columbarium.
I do not want to have to close the gates. If we’re doing anything we’ve got to make sure we’re available. …
The (administration) building is probably the biggest in terms of time and scope. … The building, ready for occupancy, isn’t going to happen likely until April 2017.
Q: Where exactly is that going?
A: … Therein lies I guess the sacrifice that we’re making. That building is now physically outside the gates of the cemetery. It’s much easier for us, from a customer service standpoint, much easier for me from a supervisory standpoint, to be boots on the ground and in the cemetery. It’s going to take a little getting used to for us to be outside of the cemetery. Nice building, but bad location. …
When I first got here that 5-acre lot was essentially a local park. Papakolea not only treated it like it, but the reality is it was. They helped take care of it. It was very much a peaceful, beautiful hangout place for them … (we’re) working with the community to kind of go, OK, there’s not going to be a fence, as part of being part of the community, we’re going to make sure that we allow access, especially towards the evening when people want to sit and watch the sunset.
We haven’t gotten anything firmed up but there is enough area especially at the southern end of it where there’s still going to be trees and green space there. So we’re trying not to just knock it down and put up concrete. We’re very aware of that. Plus, for our own sake we want to fit in and be part of the community.
… So as part of giving back or being part of the neighborhood and part of the community, we’re going to rip up part of the road (Puowaina) and put up off-street parking, about a dozen or 14 parallel parking spots along there. So even when the folks who live there park on the street, we’ve still got two open lanes. For safety’s sake, it’ll make it a lot better for everybody. It should help. There has been, as much as we can, there’s been a lot of thought put into trying to not just come in and plant the flag and go, this is ours, too bad.
Q: We touched on disinterments. How far along are you with the USS Oklahoma project?
A: Literally this weekend we will do the preparatory work and Monday morning we will do the dignified transfer of the last four caskets. There are 388 sets of remains from the Oklahoma unknowns. Those are all in 61 caskets which are in 45 gravesites. So I’m a retired fighter pilot so I can’t do math in public, but what that means is about a third of them have two caskets in each gravesite. Each of those caskets can contain anywhere from four to eight sets of remains each.
There is a lot of co-mingling. It is literally a large jigsaw puzzle for (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency). We took this on as part of our mission.
… They’ve made preliminary identifications on a few of these unknowns already.
Q: Are there any other future projects being considered?
A: ABMC — the guys that own the Honolulu Memorial — on many of their overseas cemeteries that they are the caretakers for, they have built an interpretive center to go with those cemeteries. So it’s essentially telling the back story of the individuals interred there, the battles. …
They are very keen on building an interpretive center here. It’s all still in the developmental stages. There’s no monies towards it. There’s not anything yet, but we have been very hand-in-hand with them in the development of the concept to build this thing. … It would literally be a 4,000 square foot or so building. By cutting back into the rim of the crater a little bit, they could put a building in there of that size and it opens up the opportunity in the future to be able to have the cemetery function somewhat the way the Pearl Harbor … site does, much more of an educational environoment as well as still remaining true to our primary reason for being here, which is a cemetery.
