Flag placement

Nearly 5,000 volunteers turned out to place flags at Calverton National Cemetery's 230,000 gravesites Saturday ahead of the Memorial Day holiday. Photos.

Scout troops, veterans groups and other volunteers from across Suffolk County decorated gravesites at Calverton National Cemetery Saturday with American flags in commemoration of Memorial Day. Photos.

The solemn annual flag placement ritual returned to a rainswept Calverton National Cemetery this morning, after a year off due to the COVID-19 pandemic last year.

The VA official in charge of memorial affairs has rejected County Executive Steve Bellone's plea to allow group flag placement at Suffolk's two national cemeteries for Memorial Day.

Some 6,000 Scouts and their family members placed flags on each of the 225,000 graves in the country’s largest — and busiest — national cemetery.

Scouts placed American flags on the nearly quarter-million graves at Calverton National Cemetery this morning.

Calverton National, America's busiest national cemetery, conducts about 6,000 burials each year. More than 3,000 veterans of WWI are interred at Calverton, which opened in 1978. Born in the 1800s, those vets probably don’t have a lot of relatives around to remember them and mark their graves. "Without you, it would not be done,” cemetery director Michael Picerno told the Scouts.