No Longer Unknown

About the Book

Visit any of the approximately 150 national military cemeteries in the United States, and collectively you will find nearly 1,000,000 headstones marking the final resting place of U.S. Military personnel killed in battles beginning with the Civil War to the present. Spend an extra few minutes reading the names on the headstones, and you will find representatives of every ethnic, religious, geographic, and societal group existing in America today. Their names, dates of birth and death, their military rank and last unit, and their home state are clearly carved in stone. That's only half the story. Lift your eyes, look around, and you will see other identical headstones—identical in shape and size but different in that these stones bear no name except “Unknown.”

About the Author

William Rowland served twenty years in the US Army. The first five were in Graves Registration and are the basis for this book. He maintained his writing skills with a weekly humor column for the unit newspaper. The remaining fifteen years were served with the Armed Forces Radio and TV Service writing, producing, and voicing news and entertainment programs in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Hollywood, California, where he became an advisor for the Combat TV series. Following his retirement, he was employed by a Washington, DC, lobby as director of information. His final civilian employment was manager of product publicity for Chiquita Banana, a branch of United Fruit Company in Boston, Massachusetts. He now resides in Keysville, Virginia. Marna Neal was raised in New York State and holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Mississippi. Along with teaching, she has been employed by several medical offices and served as program coordinator/office manager for the Southside Area Health Education Center in Farmville, Virginia. Her most recent employment was at the University of Virginia HOPE Cancer Center. She has traveled extensively in the United States and overseas, with special ties to Jyvaskyla, Finland. She is coauthor of the book Common Bottles for the Average Collector. She currently resides in Dover, Pennsylvania.