Guam Veterans Cemetery

The Guam Veterans Cemetery is at 150 Spruance Drive in Piti, and the National Cemetery Administration lists it as a VA grant-funded cemetery. It is run by the Guam Office of Veterans Affairs. The cost rule is 10 GCA § 67105, one sentence added in 1985: "Any veteran of the United States Armed Forces shall be buried without charge to the family of the deceased veteran in the Veteran's Cemetery of Guam." The eligibility rule is § 67103.1, and it is a Second World War document as much as a burial statute. The cemetery shall be used for the burial of persons who served honorably in the armed forces of the United States, the Insular Guard, the Guam Militia, the Guam Scouts, the Guam Combat Patrol, "or who were employed in a civil capacity on Wake Island on December 7, 1941, United States Merchant Marine vessels and other duties in direct support of the United States government at war," and their spouses and dependents. Those categories exist because of what happened to Guam. The Insular Guard, the Militia, the Scouts and the Combat Patrol were local formations; the Wake Island civilians were Guamanian workers caught by the Japanese advance. Federal burial eligibility would not reach most of them. Guam's own statute does, and a family whose relative served in one of those units should not assume a federal answer settles the question. The money runs through two funds. The Veterans Cemetery Trust Fund at § 67105.1 holds any money the federal government pays Guam in connection with use of the cemetery and is spent on maintenance at the direction of the Veterans Affairs Officer, with quarterly accounting to the Guam Veterans Commission, the Governor and the Legislature and posting on the office's website. The Veterans Affairs Fund at § 67109 takes gifts, bequests and donations solicited under § 67106, which may be used for maintenance of the cemetery, maintenance of the office, sponsorship of Memorial Day and Veterans' Day events, and donor-directed purposes consistent with the office's goals. Federal burial benefits sit on top and are not replaced: a government headstone or marker, a burial flag, a Presidential Memorial Certificate, military funeral honours on request, and VA burial allowances whose amounts and eligibility differ sharply between a service-connected and a non-service-connected death. Guam is one of only two Pacific territories with a grant-funded veterans cemetery; the Northern Mariana Islands has one at Marpi on Saipan, and American Samoa has none.