Remembering Riverside's Military Heritage on Memorial Day

On Monday, thousands of people will visit Riverside National Cemetery to lay flowers at gravesides and honor military veterans living and dead. The cemetery is among the places depicted in "Wild Blue Yonder," a photo and oral history project from Riverside novelist Susan Straight and photographer Douglas McCulloh that celebrates Inland Southern California's deep and colorful ties to the military.

The solemn and frequent crack of rifle fire reminds you just where you are.

"That's the gun salutes," says Susan Straight, pausing mid-sentence as another three-gun salute echoes in the distance where another body is being lowered into the earth at Riverside National Cemetery.

"To me this is an amazing place," says Straight. "It can be someone who is 92, or you might find somebody who was killed last week in Fallujah and that is that section over there," says Straight, pointing to a nearby area of the sprawling 920-acre cemetery.

Riverside National Cemetery sits on an axis between two major U.S. military installations; the nearby March Air Reserve Base and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton near San Diego.

Straight also places the cemetery at the heart of "Wild Blue Yonder," a visual and oral history project produced with photographer Douglas McCulloh, and now on view at the Riverside Art Museum.

"This was such an amazing convergence of 100 years of military history in Southern California and it's just a distinctive landscape," Straight says. "Here is the cemetery, there (is) March Field and all the KC-135's and the C-17 cargo planes they run active refueling missions every day. Thousands of the Marines from Camp Pendleton who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, they all leave from March Air Reserve Base."

Straight and McColluh spent months hunting not only the cemetery, but military bases, churches and homes mining for the stories. Many begin in a family's traumatic uprooting from one military town to the next, or in the flash of a firefight. The stories and characters were all around them.

"Like the day we came here to Riverside National Cemetery, the Friday before Memorial Day exactly a year ago," Straight says.

"And here was Roger Zay planting some of his 700 flags."

Zay is a burly retired U.S. Marine and a veteran of the Vietnam War. His wife is buried at the cemetery. He used to leave graveside flags just for her. Now he plants hundreds a few days before Memorial Day.

"I do all this section here and what I have left over I just keep on going," Zay explains, sweeping his arm across the green expanse not far from where his wife is buried.

"To date I got 2,106 flags which is just a drop in the bucket because of the grave sites here. I believe there are over 25,000 gravesites and growing every day."

The number of graves grows by "40 a day, every day," writes Susan Straight in "Wild Blue Yonder."

"Ordinary weekdays, cloudy Saturdays which remain unremarkable to anyone else. The busiest national cemetery in the nation, where tens of thousands of war veterans lay in above or below their wives in concrete vaults, above or below and bones separate as if in floating beds stacked in ironic opposition to twin beds aside each other, and where thousands and still counting also lay; single sad vaults of young men and women dying right now in Afghanistan and Iraq, too young to have spouses who have died, or to have had spouses at all."

Not far from Riverside National Cemetery is another kind of resting place also depicted in Wild Blue Yonder.

"In our main area we have office supplies, we have glassware, lots of beautiful china, crystal," explains Rita Sayre one of the volunteer proprietors of an antique collective meets thrift shop called The Treasure Chest.

It's operated from a string of houses at Air Force Village West, a neatly manicured gated community for retired military personnel and their spouses at the edge of Riverside National Cemetery.

Sayre, a vivacious, silver-haired Air Force widow and Village resident helped open the Treasure Chest about a year and half ago. Most of its wares are donated by the families of residents who've passed on.

"Many of the children of the people who live at the village come back after a death," Sayre explains.
"And they come from places other than Riverside and they have the homes here that are full of collectibles and lovely things and the family cannot take them."

So Sayre and her colleagues step in to collect what cannot be taken. All of the money earned, about $100,000 in its first 18 months of operation, goes towards the upkeep of the Village and its residents.

"I have shed many a tear when I have gone into a house and have seen pictures and things on the wall that have been very meaningful. No, there is a lot of heartbreak involved but then again we have people that donate and realize the money is going to a good cause," says Sayre.

Across town at First United Methodist Church in Riverside http://fumcor.com/ Bill McInroe pores over a wall map of North and South Korea.

"We were working all through this area, this is a very important point this 38th Parallel here," says McInroe, pointing to the belly of the map where he saw a lot of action as a U.S. Marine tank commander.

McInroe fills yet another chapter of "Wild Blue Yonder."

In January 1951, during the Korean War, McInroe was part of a battalion that provide cover for refugees flying from the north to the south. But only recently did McInroe discover that the parents of his pastor at First United, John Yoon, were part of that exodus.
"And so we like to think that as they were retreating they somehow ran across Bill," says Yoon.

"We might have passed each other in the night and not known it you know ya never know," says McInroe.

Pastor Yoon says the many funerals he's presided over for veterans of the Korean and 2nd World Wars are a way for him to return the grace military veterans gave his family so many years ago.

"Comforting them at a time of loss and also gives me a chance to say thank you for all you've done," Yoon says, turning to McInroe.

"I appreciate that," says McInroe.

One of the largest organized displays of appreciation in California this Memorial Day will be at Riverside National Cemetery. A day, Susan Straight writes, when not a shovel full of soil is turned.

"On Memorial Day, no one is buried. Tiny plastic flags whip thousands of live people walk and salute and listen to speeches; motorcycles from West Coast Thunder roar past seven thousand strong, and concerts and color guards fill the amphitheater."

"Wild Blue Yonder" from novelist Susan Straight and photographer Douglas McCulloh is on display at the Riverside Art Museum through July. It then moves on to the museum at March Air Reserve Base.