On the last Monday of January, Ralph McHenry Boudreaux was buried in grave 499 at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Cemetery in Slidell, capping a service steeped in military precision and pomp.
Boudreaux, a sailor aboard the USS Oklahoma, was killed when the battleship was torpedoed during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Eight decades later, his remains were finally returned home and he became the 4,400th burial at the 10-year-old cemetery.
Since then, nearly 70 others — military veterans and, in some cases, their spouses — have been interred there, a testament to the graveyard’s popularity as a final resting place.
Now, the state’s busiest veterans cemetery is now undergoing a $6 million expansion that will add 4,000 additional burial sites.
“We’re the fastest-growing (veterans) cemetery in the state of Louisiana,” said Daniele Palen, an Air Force veteran and director of the cemetery. “This is almost doubling the space we have now.”
Long a quest of St. Tammany Parish officials and military veterans, the cemetery opened in 2014 on 75 acres donated by the National Guard’s Camp Villere, which is next door. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs covered the initial cost of $8.3 million.
The first burial was Marine Sgt. Michael Guillory, a Pearl River High School graduate killed in combat in Afghanistan. Since then, the cemetery has averaged 40 to 50 funerals per month.
Flanked by Interstate 12, the cemetery is buffered from the road noise by banks of trees and woodlands. Hundreds of headstones jutting from the ground make a dominant focal point, the straight lines resembling geometric patterns.
Another section holds structures containing rows of columbarium niches, above-ground wall structures where cremated remains are interred.
“It’s been an amazing cemetery,” said Lane Carson, former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs who lobbied for the cemetery.
“I-10, I-59 and I-12 are all right there,” he said. “That location is so convenient to so many people.”
The Slidell site is one of five veterans cemeteries the state operates. The buildout will come over several decades and be driven by need, Palen said.
“We have a total of eight phases, but they’re only going to grow as needed,” she said.
Construction of the latest phase, scheduled to be completed by November, includes 2,800 in-ground crypts, 650 gravesites for cremated remains and 600 columbaria niches. It will be paid for by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Palen said.
There are eligibility requirements and not all military veterans can be buried at the site. The guidelines can be found at www.veterans.la.gov/southeast-louisiana-veterans-cemetery.
Palen said veterans cemeteries, and the Slidell site in particular, generate a lot of interest.
“I get calls all the time — people wanting to reserve a spot,” she said. “We don’t do that. You cannot guarantee a spot in a veterans cemetery.”
But, she added, “I tell people ‘Don’t get nervous.’
“We have another 60 years before we run out of space.”
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