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Rock of ages At one point, Richard Mendelson got so frustrated with Washington bureaucracy that he dumped a stack of letters on an official's desk and said, "Here! You'll have to answer to all these people why you're not doing the right thing."
will rest in isles
A headstone that marked
the graves of 17 men of a
submarine lost off Oahu 85
years ago is rescued for HawaiiBy Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinAll Mendelson was trying to do was save a piece of quarry stone.
This piece, however, was the headstone for 17 crew members of the submarine F-4, lost off Honolulu 85 years ago. Mendelson and the Washington, D.C., chapter of U.S. Submarine Veterans Inc. became interested in the saga of the F-4 a couple of years ago and tracked down the crew's mass grave in Arlington National Cemetery. They were appalled to discover a tiny stone, sized for an individual grave.
Last month, after agitation from the submarine vets, Arlington installed a properly sized joint headstone. The old headstone, which marked the resting place of the first U.S. Navy sailors lost in a submarine, was delivered yesterday to the USS Bowfin Museum at Pearl Harbor.
It is the only one ever transferred from a national cemetery. Federal rules mandate headstones must be crushed into rubble when they are recycled.
In a brief ceremony at the Bowfin's memorial to submarines lost in action, museum director Jerry Hofwolt noted that "this hallowed ground is an appropriate place to transfer the headstone from Arlington ... it's particularly appropriate, given the recent circumstances in the Bering Sea. To the families of the F-4 crew, their loss was just as heartbreaking."
Mendelson said the key to having a new headstone created was providing a list of the "unknown" crew to Arlington. "We found the information at the National Archives in about two minutes. We then started writing letters to people with the same names all over the country, and now we've tracked down about 40 descendants of the F-4 crew."
Since the museum is on Navy property, Arlington agreed to the transfer, and released the stone to Mendelson, who was designated the Bowfin's agent in the transfer.
The next trick was shipping the stone slab, which weighs several hundred pounds. "The government wouldn't ship it," said Mendelson. "So I posted a query on a Navy Internet group and within 24 hours got a Navy OK to ship it via FedEx."
Other submarine veterans donated dollars to fly him out here with the stone.
The shipping cost was $245. Mendelson was temporarily taken aback at the FedEx office in Washington when he was asked how much to insure it for. "How much are 17 lives worth?" he wondered.