The work Walters does would be admirable no matter how well he did it, but, as it turns out, he and his colleagues do their work better than any other organization in the country. Not just better than other cemeteries and funeral homes — better than any other organization, period. Seven consecutive times, the NCA has received the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Developed at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, the ACSI has been the gold standard for measuring consumer experiences for the past 30 years; its satisfaction scores range from zero to 100, with Costco pulling a whopping 85, Apple a respectable 83, McDonald’s a middling 71 and Facebook an underwhelming 69. The average ACSI score for federal agencies is 68, but the NCA most recently scored a 97 — the highest rating in the survey’s history, except for the last time the NCA participated, when it also scored 97.
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Color guards, taps, marble headstones, military escorts, flags draped over coffins: So many of the traditions we associate with burying fallen heroes were standardized in the aftermath of the Civil War, when more than a half-million Americans had been killed and their loved ones struggled to make sense of their grief. Few people remember today that the occasion for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was the consecration of the national cemetery at that battlefield, where some 3,000 men were respectfully laid to rest and the president declared: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
The national cemeteries were part of an effort to unite the living in the pursuit of a lasting peace, creating a space where the soldiers whose lives had been sacrificed for the preservation of the Union could be glorified — to honor their memory, and also to ensure that no American would forget the wages of war. It was the first time in history that a country had gathered its war dead this way for reburial, a practice the United States continued throughout its foreign conflicts. The largest repatriation effort came after World War II, when President Harry S. Truman promised next of kin that they would get to decide where their loved ones would be buried, no matter how difficult it was to identify them, no matter how far from home they died. Well more than half the men who perished fighting alongside Staff Sgt. Ferris — more than 170,000 veterans — were returned to the United States for interment after the armistice. The effort to bring the others home has never ended.