Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. Anyone who's killed on active duty, as long as they were serving honourably when they were killed on active duty, is eligible.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes.

Veterans Affairs committee  I have a recollection of that, yes.

Veterans Affairs committee  Wow. There's actually a definition within law, which I cannot cite for you because it goes on and on. For our purposes, any veteran who served on active duty prior to 1980, as long as they served and received an other than dishonourable discharge, they're going to be eligible for burial or for burial benefits.

Veterans Affairs committee  No.

Veterans Affairs committee  For that spouse, yes.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's up to the age of 23 if they're going to school full-time. After the age of 23, the only time they're eligible is if they're totally disabled and dependent. You could have a 50-year-old child if that person is disabled and totally dependent on the parents. Other than that, if they're not going to school full-time, then it's up to the age of 18.

Veterans Affairs committee  We have wonderful statisticians and we have all that information. Yes, it's certainly a lot of information, but we do have it, and it's good information. Your numbers are exactly right; we lose approximately 1,000 a day. I don't know how many staff it takes to keep up with all that, but we have it, and it's available to us.

Veterans Affairs committee  Those would be the American Battle Monuments Commission sites, and that's an entirely different federal agency from the VA, so we do not maintain those cemeteries. They're maintained separately. I don't know what the relationship is with the various countries.

Veterans Affairs committee  Did we not provide a memorial or something up there?

Veterans Affairs committee  That's correct. We have nothing to do with the upkeep of private cemeteries, no.

Veterans Affairs committee  I can't speak to all the reasons there might be. Certainly as you've pointed out, in many instances the veteran may have a family plot somewhere and they want to be buried with their family. They may not be very close to a national cemetery. We have the 75-mile radius for the population parts, but 75 miles is pretty far to drive for a family member and there are parts of the country that simply do not have a dense enough population for us to even put a cemetery there, so it becomes even farther for those veterans to have to go to be buried in the cemetery.

Veterans Affairs committee  Our national cemeteries are managed by the federal government, by the Department of Veterans Affairs. There are three different types of national cemeteries. There are the VA national cemeteries, which are the 128 that we manage. There are national cemeteries that are managed by the United States park service and those are all historic sites, for example Gettysburg, Antietam, those kind of historic sites, and they're not open.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's my understanding that there are some benefits payable through the veterans benefits claims process to reimburse some of the funeral expenses. We don't administer that program, so I can't really speak to that, but it wouldn't be the entire cost. There may be some reimbursement, and we do provide that headstone free of charge.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, but they do not need to be in the same cemetery. The spouse and minor children gain eligibility based on the veteran's eligibility. As it sometimes happens, the spouse or the child may predecease the veteran. They may be buried in cemetery X, and the veteran may move across the country and die and be buried in a cemetery over there.