The Sentinel: Ronald Walters and the Sacred Work of Honoring America's War Dead
This is part 4 of my series on Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis.
Casey Cep opens this chapter with a story that stops you cold.
Staff Sergeant Robert Ferris Jr. was 20 years old, curled inside a ball turret hanging from the belly of a B-17 bomber. It was December 1942, four days before Christmas, and his plane was shot down over Normandy. He had no parachute. No way out. He and seven other crew members died when the plane hit the ground.
For 82 years, Ferris was buried as an unknown soldier at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. His headstone said: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”
Then a few years ago, forensic anthropologists identified his remains. His niece, a woman who never even met him, gave her DNA to confirm who he was. And in 2024, Ferris finally came home to New Bern, North Carolina. Motorcycles escorted him from the airport. Veterans lined the streets and saluted. He got the burial his family never got to give him.
That’s the America this chapter is about.
Meet the Man Who Makes It Happen
Ronald E. Walters leads the National Cemetery Administration. He is not a veteran. He grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, thought about becoming a priest, went to Georgetown, and ended up at the VA for a summer internship in his 20s.
That was 39 years ago. He never left.
Here’s the thing about Walters: he runs 155 national cemeteries across the United States. His team buries more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year. They tend to the graves of nearly 4 million veterans, from the Revolutionary War through Iraq and Afghanistan. And they do all of this better than almost any organization in the country.
Not better than other cemeteries. Better than anyone.
Seven consecutive times, the NCA has received the highest satisfaction rating of any organization, public or private, in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The ACSI is the gold standard for measuring how people feel about the services they use. Costco scores 85. Apple scores 83. Facebook scores 69. The average federal agency scores 68.
The NCA scores 97. The highest in the survey’s history. Every single time they’ve participated.
Why That Number Matters
The NCA deals with people on some of the worst days of their lives. You’re not going to a national cemetery because things are going well. You’re there because someone you loved is gone. And somehow, in the middle of all that grief, Walters’s team manages to give people an experience that scores 97 out of 100.
But here’s the problem, from Walters’s point of view: 97 is not 100. And he thinks they owe people a perfect score.
“We only get one chance to get it right,” he says.
So he obsesses. He tracks how many days it takes to manufacture and engrave a headstone. He works with scientists to figure out the exact chemical that best cleans marble. He consults with groundskeepers about the precise number of millimeters a grave settles each year. He wrote 40 pages of standards and measures for every national cemetery in the country, and he updates them every year.
The standards cover everything. Is signage helpful? Are restrooms clean and stocked? Is the grass trimmed to the right height around each headstone? Are headstones set within 60 days of interment? Every expectation is rated from medium to high to critical priority, sometimes with color coding and diagrams.
This is not the image most people have of the federal government.
What Equal Looks Like
One thing that really gets me about this chapter is the egalitarianism of it.
National cemeteries do not give better plots to generals. There is no towering obelisk for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is no smaller or lesser section for the recruit who died without any commendations. Everyone buried there gets the same marble headstone, the same ceremony, the same perpetual care.
If you served this country, the NCA serves you. Full stop.
And the headstone emblems tell that story too. The NCA now offers more than a dozen different crosses, but also Kohen hands, a Druze star, an atheist atom, a hammer of Thor, a Wiccan pentacle. Because the people who served came from everywhere and believed all kinds of things, and that matters.
Walters has visited many of the 155 cemeteries and says he wishes every American would visit at least one. “There is no place where the price of freedom is more visible than in a national cemetery,” he told the crowd at New Bern. He means it. These places are not monuments to winning wars. They are monuments to the cost of sending people into them.
The Details That Actually Change Things
Cep doesn’t let this stay abstract. She walks through the specific things Walters built.
He created a national call center in St. Louis, open six days a week across every time zone, so that if a veteran dies on a Friday night her family can make burial arrangements right away. Before this, you were stuck waiting until Monday. Small thing. Massive difference when you’re in crisis.
He launched the Veterans Legacy Memorial, a digital archive with a page for every veteran buried in a national cemetery, nearly 10 million records. Family members, historians, fellow veterans can add photos, memories, newspaper clippings. One son wrote to his father, a WWII lieutenant killed two weeks after the son was born: “Dad, even though we never met, Mom made sure she kept your memory alive for me.” That’s what this database holds.
He started an apprenticeship program for homeless veterans 12 years ago. Complete the year-long training and you get a permanent caretaking job. Francisco Zappas, a veteran who lost his marriage and his home to addiction, graduated in the first class. He’s 71 now and still shows up every morning grateful. “Every day, I feel happy to come to work,” he says.
A Different Kind of Leader
Robert McDonald, who came from Procter & Gamble to run the VA after a health-care scandal almost took the department down, describes what he found: mostly a mess, but then “this jewel.” He looked at the NCA’s numbers and asked what was different. Then he discovered Walters.
What he found was someone who had been quietly building excellent systems for years without any fanfare. Walters had implemented rigorous quality frameworks, raised standards, measured outcomes, then raised the standards again. And he’d done it without making it about himself.
His colleagues describe a leader who doesn’t take the bigger office across the hall (there is one, three times the size of his, and he refuses it). A man who cries telling a story about an employee who took off his boots so a widow could walk through mud to reach her grandfather’s grave. Someone who keeps a spreadsheet for fairly distributing his Washington Commanders season tickets.
“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to bury a veteran,” Walters says. He has served through seven administrations, earned trust from both parties, and never confused his job with politics.
The best line in the chapter might be this one: when someone offered him the rare honor of being buried in a national cemetery, even though he’s not a veteran, Walters said no. He was not a veteran. He did not belong there. “It was more than honor enough to get to spend his life there.”
And That’s Why It Matters
There’s a moment near the end where Cep reflects on what it feels like to spend time with Walters. She writes that after every conversation she left “wanting to be the Ron Walters of my writing, the Ron Walters of my exercise regimen, the Ron Walters of my marriage.”
That landed for me. Because this chapter is not really about bureaucracy or government efficiency. It’s about what happens when someone genuinely cares about their work and treats every detail as though it matters. Because in this job, every detail does matter. The person on the other side of each interaction just lost someone they loved.
Most of us will never have a job like Walters’s, where the stakes are that clear and the purpose is that obvious. But the question he implicitly asks is a good one for anyone: Why settle for okay when you could be excellent? Why coast when you could keep improving?
Perpetual care, as Cep puts it in her final line, is not just for cemeteries.
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Book: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis | ISBN: 9798217047802