John Glenn is buried in Arlington Cemetery
Published 1:30 am Thursday, April 6, 2017
By Michael E. Ruane / The Washington Post
Legendary astronaut, U.S. senator and Marine Corps fighter pilot John Glenn was buried Thursday morning in Arlington National Cemetery in a drenching rain that pattered on his coffin and soaked the green hillside where he was laid to rest.
The body of Glenn, who was 95 when he died Dec. 8 in Columbus, Ohio, was carried through the downpour on a black, horse-drawn caisson decorated with silver stars and golden wheel hubs.
It was followed by six Marine Corps pallbearers whose white gloves had been soaked to gray and a black riderless horse with reversed boots in the stirrups.
There was little sound except for that of the rain, the clip-clop of the horses’ hoofs and the quiet beat of drums.
At 10:32 a.m., musicians from the Marine Band played the Marines’ Hymn at a slow tempo as the pallbearers carried the gray coffin, covered in a U.S. flag protected by an opaque plastic sheet, to the grave.
A minister recited from the Bible’s 23rd Psalm, and a trumpeter sounded taps.
Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War.
He was not the first American in space – two of his fellow astronauts preceded him – but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the Earth captured the nation’s imagination. He was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.
He was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 1974 and served 24 years.
When he was 77 and completing his fourth term in 1998, he returned to space as a crew member aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
He had climbed the ranks of the Marine Corps by accepting the most dangerous assignments. He flew 149 combat missions in two wars and was a test pilot in the 1950s.
Officials at busy Arlington Cemetery say that it is not uncommon for such a burial to take place several months after a death.
