James Kelly is the sort of guy whose lips, legs, and arms are always moving, and they move at frenetic speed as Memorial Day nears, because that means something to Sergeant Major Kelly.
“There’s one up there, Toro,’’ Kelly shouts to a teenager trying to keep up with him as he hustles down a row of headstones at Evergreen Cemetery in Brighton, dozens of small American flags tucked under his right arm, hunting for the graves of the 264 veterans buried there.
“Do you see it, Toro?’’ he shouts again, pointing toward a weathered headstone up on a bluff. “Spanish-American War. I can see it from here. Give him a flag.’’
Toro is 17-year-old Miguel Toro of Roxbury, a senior at the Community Academy of Science and Health in Dorchester, who is part of a small army of JROTC cadets who have been hustling around the city this month, trailing veterans like Kelly in the run-up to Memorial Day.
Toro is a pro at this by now, having chased Kelly past countless headstones in his four years in the program. Read the veteran’s name. Give them a brief second of respect. Remove the old flag if it hasn’t already been taken by weather or weed-whacker, then plant a new one to the side of the headstone.
“To plant an American flag on a veteran’s grave is such an honor,’’ Toro said, after they paused a moment at the grave of Horatio Julius Homer, a 19th-century veteran whose headstone explained he was the first African-American officer appointed to the Boston Police Department. “We’re giving back just a little for what they’ve done for this country.’’
This high-speed ritual – there are a lot of graves to cover in the small window between the time Boston cemeteries cut their lawns and Memorial Day — is being performed by cadets from several high school JROTC programs. Each year, they help veterans organizations plant flags in graveyards and change the wreaths that mark the plaques at the city’s “hero squares’’ — intersections named for Bostonians who lost their lives in combat.
“This whole thing is about teaching the kids that America’s freedom is not free,’’ Kelly said as Toro ran back to the car for more flags. “A lot of people paid the ultimate sacrifice.’’
Kelly, who served 30 years in the Marine Corps and the Army and fought in Iraq, has run the JROTC program at the Community Academy of Science and Health for more than a decade, along with Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Mills, an Army National Guard veteran.
The JROTC program, an acronym for the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, is sponsored by the military and was initially created during World War I to train youth for military service. While many students still use it as a path to the military, the mission of the program shifted long ago. Instead of training students to be soldiers, the goal, as Kelly describes it, is “training them to be good citizens and people.’’
He has turned his cadets into a well-oiled platoon in the art of honoring veterans. He and his students are in charge of planting flags at the graves of more than 2,400 veterans, as well as the wreaths at 218 of the city’s 1,032 hero squares. They make the wreaths themselves in the classroom, using ribbon to wrap whatever Kelly can find a good deal on at the flower market.
The run-up to Memorial Day has Kelly, Mills, and their students out until nearly dark each day after school for weeks. On this day, when the dismissal bell sounded at school and Kelly headed off to the cemetery in Brighton, Mills hustled to his car and drove down Dorchester Avenue with Alex Perron, an 18-year-old senior at the school.
They parked in front of a convenience store, and Perron pulled a green ladder out of the back of Mills’s car and they made their way to a small pole with a placard at the corner of Sudan Street, named in honor of Boleslav Vaicunas, an Army soldier who was killed in Northern Italy just before the end of World War II.
Perron and the other student cadets had read about him in the classroom earlier in the day — he was a private first class in the 34th Infantry Division, and was buried at the Florence American Cemetery in Italy. Perroncarefully climbed the ladder, dressed in his JROTC uniform, and cut down the wreath placed there last year, tattered by weather and missing the two small American flags that once adorned it.
Working with Mills, he tied one of the new wreaths they’d made to the pole.
“Detail, ten-hut,’’ Mills said with gravitas, and the two men saluted.
Cars raced by on Dorchester Avenue. A passing older man stopped and took a photo.
Perron packed up the ladder, getting ready for the next hero square. He said that before he joined the program, he felt disconnected from the government and military.
It is something, Kelly said, that many students feel. At the beginning of the school year, students are asked what Veterans Day means to them. Many say “a day off school.’’ But by the end of the school year, when they are asked the same question about Memorial Day, the answers are profoundly different.
“The sergeant major and the chief have taught me to respect what goes into these jobs. They taught me that if you put in a lot, you get back a lot,’’ Perron said.
He has already chosen to enlist in the Army, with plans to become a combat medic after graduation.
“There are times out here changing these wreaths where it can be hot, or cold, or feel tedious,’’ he said. “But I always find it memorable. It feels huge.’’
Billy Baker can be reached at billybaker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @billy_baker.
