As burials go, the one for Albert Lee Renfro and Everado Alvarez-Lara on a misty Wednesday was sad in ways other funerals are not.
There was no sobbing and weeping. No relatives came to Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery to bid the men farewell.
Both died homeless, but 40 or so people, many of them veterans, parents of fallen troops, active-duty soldiers and airmen, made sure that Renfro, 62, and Alvarez-Lara, 64, were given a GI's salute.
“I was never privileged to know these men. Perhaps you were not, either,” Pastor Vernon Welshans told those at Shelter No. 3. “But God knew them.”
The service came courtesy of the Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program, which is in 36 cities nationwide including San Antonio, Waco, Dallas, Houston and El Paso.
There is no program in Abilene, where Marine 1st Sgt. Dale Frerich said one homeless veteran smelled like the rotting corpses he'd encountered in Iraq. Another smelled like formaldehyde.
“I don't know how it happened,” said Frerich, a veteran of Mogadishu and Iraq who coordinates burials in Abilene. “If that's the best that can be done, fine, but I refuse to believe that is the best that can be done.”