Veterans cemetery honors those who gave their all

Toward the rear of the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City, where the graves are all new and the grass has yet to grow in, a slight young woman sat on the dirt Monday.

She was in the third to the last row, wearing black. She had pulled her skirt over her knees, which were bent up in front of her as she sat. She put her head between her knees and folded her arms around herself.

She rocked back and forth and seemed to be crying. It was past noon. She'd been there for two hours already, alone.

She picked at the petals of a half dozen orange roses she'd brought because she thought the color looked happy.

She wrote a note, which she would fold and put inside a red, white and blue wreath she had placed on her husband's gravestone.

It was Memorial Day, and all around Cherisse West, families were visiting. There were children and old people. There were politicians and speeches.

U.S. Sen. Dean Heller referenced the saying about how evil exists in the world not so much because there are lots of evil people, but because of people who watch it go on and do nothing about it.

"The men and women we honor today," Heller said, "would not look on and do nothing."

Michael Allen didn't do nothing. He joined the U.S. Navy in 2007, right after graduating from Basic High School in Henderson.

High school is where he and Cherisse West had met. She was a freshman, 15 years old. He was a sophomore. Cherisse was still in high school when they got married. She didn't tell her parents at first.

When Michael joined the Navy, he wanted to become a Navy Seal, one of the vaunted special operations types who would, four months after Michael died, kill Osama bin Laden.

But Michael broke his leg, Cherisse said, so the Seals were out. He began to train to handle underwater mines.

Losing out on the Seals had not dampened Michael's enthusiasm for the Navy. He still planned on spending his whole life as a sailor, she said.

He was stationed in San Diego. She was trying to go to school here on the Millennium Scholarship. She wanted to be a nurse. She and Michael traveled between Las Vegas and San Diego often, eventually sharing a small apartment in California.

Last year, Cherisse said, Michael's mom died. It did something to his personality. He began to do dangerous things, skydiving, cliff jumping, buying a fast motorcycle.

This past January, Michael died while riding his motorcycle in San Diego. He was 22 years old. He was buried at the veterans cemetery surrounded by men born in the 1920s and '30s, veterans of wars fought long ago.

Now, Cherisse is a 21-year-old widow. The couple had no children.

"Now I know the true meaning of Memorial Day. That's for sure," Cherisse said.

"Everybody's like, 'Oh, it's a day off work. Let's go on vacation.' But this," she gestured around the cemetery, "is what it's really about."

Several rows behind her, a boy and girl were visiting their grandfather's grave.

"It's this one," the little boy said.

"No, remember, Papa has two flags on his," the girl responded.

Two men in Air Force uniforms passed by. "You check this row," one said to the other, "and I'll get this one."

Cherisse ducked her head again.

"You think as you're living life it's a really long time," a middle-age woman said to her companion on a bench under a tree. "But when you look back, it's really short, isn't it?"

Cherisse had not visited her husband's grave before Monday. She could not bring herself to do it in the four months since his burial. She felt guilty about that, and so she had steeled herself for Monday's visit.

"I wasn't sure I could do it," she said.

An old man with a baseball cap that identified him as a World War II veteran walked slowly by. He sat on a bench under a tree. An oxygen tube snaked underneath his vest. You could hear the rhythmic hissing.

He had lived in Las Vegas for 45 years, he said, but now spends summers in Idaho.

His wife of 71 years was buried here last week, he said. His brother had been here for years already.

The man, Everett Rhoades, said he was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. He is 90 years old.

"Ain't none of us get out of this alive," he said.

Two rows over, a teenage boy posed behind a grave as his mom snapped a picture.

A row behind that, an elderly couple set up beach chairs and an umbrella, as if they were settling in for the day.

Cherisse, sitting on the ground in the third row from the end, fiddled with orange flower petals in the dirt.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.