The Sentinel

There was no room for a parachute and nowhere to hide from the Devil. Cradling two machine guns, Staff Sgt. Robert Ferris Jr. was curled up inside the ball turret, a three-and-a-half-foot plexiglass sphere that hung like a snow globe from the belly of a B-17 bomber. It was four days before Christmas in 1942, and he was barreling toward the Normandy coast with eight other airmen and orders to attack a German factory in Romilly-sur-Seine.

Ferris was 20 years old and 3,500 miles from home when the flak and Luftwaffe found him. Trapped in the ball turret, all he could do was watch as smoke spiraled up from the engines and the plane spiraled down to the ground. The tail gunner parachuted out and was taken prisoner, but Ferris and the other seven crew members died when the B-17, named the Danellen for the pilot’s parents, crashed near the shore of the Seine. What bodies could be recovered could not be identified; they were buried in the graveyard of a nearby village, then moved after the war to the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. Above each of their graves, a marble cross read: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”

For eight decades, Staff Sgt. Ferris remained an unknown soldier on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. But a few years ago, the Defense Department and the American Battle Monuments Commission exhumed remains from the crew of the Danellen at the Normandy American Cemetery. An elite team of forensic anthropologists with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency studied those remains as they do hundreds of other such cases each year, identifying veterans of the wars in Vietnam and Korea and, occasionally, World War II. When they turned their attention to the ball turret gunner, his parents and siblings had long since died, so a niece so young she never met him provided the DNA to verify that it was her uncle who had lost his life all those decades ago. Eighty-two years after his plane was shot down, Ferris finally came home.

Earlier this year, that niece and her neighbors in New Bern, N.C., gave him a hero’s welcome: A parade of motorcycles escorted him from the airport, an avenue of flags lined the approach to the funeral home and the cemetery, and all along the route he was saluted by fellow veterans, men and women who knew that, no matter when or where or how they died, they, too, would be buried with such ceremony.

Ferris was laid to rest at New Bern National Cemetery a few days before Memorial Day, and when the community returned to celebrate that holiday, among the speakers honoring his service was Ronald E. Walters. Walters isn’t from North Carolina, and he isn’t a veteran, but he leads the National Cemetery Administration, which had arranged the burial with full military honors for Ferris and placed the headstone that already marked his grave, not to mention the 7,500 others that are perfectly aligned with it. The NCA maintains the pristine, precisely mowed grass between every row of graves in every section of the cemetery; provides the directory of gravesites so that anyone can find Ferris’s grave or any other; makes sure all the flags are flying, every marker and memorial is legible, every road is pothole-free, every trash can is empty, every flower bed is weeded, every mulch bed is mulched, every tree and shrub is trimmed, and every edge is freshly cut. Walters and his 2,300 colleagues bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year, and they tend to the perpetual memory of nearly 4 million other veterans, from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, interred in 155 national cemeteries around the United States. It doesn’t matter if you were a seaman recruit who died without any family or a four-star general who lived into your 80s: If you served this country, then the NCA serves you.

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.

Walters has a lot to do with these satisfaction scores, but he himself isn’t really satisfied with them. He believes the NCA owes those it serves a perfect score. “We only get one chance to get it right,” he says, and he has spent the past two decades obsessing over everything from the life span of a backhoe to how many days it takes to manufacture and engrave a headstone, working with scientists to determine what chemical best cleans marble, consulting with groundskeepers about the exact number of millimeters a grave settles every year, creating the 40 pages of standards and measures that regulate every national cemetery, and then refining those standards annually to make sure every day that the agency is improving the services it offers veterans at the time of burial and for all of eternity. He is probably busy refining one of those refinements right now.

This relentless pursuit of excellence could easily make Walters exhausting or annoying, like the high school sophomore who wears a tie to school every day. Instead, for so obsessive a man, he is surprisingly serene and easygoing. He has an even higher customer-satisfaction rating than the agency he runs: His subordinates adore him, his superiors have never received a complaint about him, and spending even just a few days with him will make you yearn to be excellent, too. This is perhaps the most striking thing about Ron Walters: His agency is one of the world’s leading experts on death, but he is an expert on how to live.

Walters was born in the nation’s capital, and he has worked there his whole life. His mother was a federal secretary, first for the State Department and then for Health and Human Services. His father, after serving in the Coast Guard, became a machine specialist for Remington Rand, mostly repairing typewriters. Not long after Ron’s birth in 1962, the family moved into a tiny apartment in Falls Church, Va., where he and his older brother, James, shared a room at night and cane fishing poles on the weekends, the two boys as close then as they are today. Both attended Catholic schools, and Ron thought he might become a priest. His heroes growing up were Augustine, Ignatius and quarterback Billy Kilmer: the first two because they blended faith and intellect, the third because “he was not your prototypical football player.” Walters elaborates: “He had a beer belly and threw passes that wobbled like a duck, but he was team-oriented and not into self-aggrandizement.”

Walters has been a Washington Commanders fan for as long as he can remember. Cerebral as they come, he compares football to a chess game. “Everybody thinks it’s just people running around slapping each other, and that’s part of it, but there’s so much more.” He likes tennis, too, and for decades, he has admired Chris Evert, chiefly for her grit and determination. “She probably wasn’t the best player ever, except on clay,” he says, “but she was always up there. She was always in the quarterfinals and the finals, even if she didn’t win, until the very end of her career — she was always pushing herself.” Even as a kid, Walters was interested in how good players become great; what fascinated him was how people improve.

But he also liked people for whom greatness was a given: A connoisseur of superheroes, he liked them best when they came in teams, like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, combining forces to do more than any of them could accomplish on their own. Walters bought comic books by the dozen at the local drugstore, and then completed his collections by ordering any back issues he’d missed. Although he always paid for the comics, he knew his parents would frown on such extravagance, so he recruited his older brother to help conceal the evidence: “I felt like Ethel helping Lucy smuggle them into the house. We’d literally tuck the comics under our shirts,” James told me. Once the comics were inside, Ron shifted from concealing to cataloguing. “He would lay out the books according to the name in the series, like at a comic book convention. Everything was so orderly.”

James Walters also remembers his brother as an exasperatingly good student. He jokes that while he himself never brought a book home and preferred watching “Gilligan’s Island” to doing homework, his little brother was devoted to his studies. “Ron never did anything with half a brain,” he told me. “There were times where he’d have school assignments that weren’t due for weeks, but he’d be hard at work every night without any thought to the timeline.” Both boys idolized their parents, who were known for doing their best and nothing less, admired equally by colleagues and neighbors.

Partly because he was drawn to the priesthood, Walters chose to go to Georgetown University. He double-majored in government and English, was named a Baker Scholar, and found himself inducted into just about every honor society on campus. Although he befriended some of the Jesuits there, he soon realized the priesthood wasn’t for him. Public service was, though, and after graduation he enrolled in a master’s degree program in public administration at George Washington University, which had cooperative education agreements with various federal agencies. As part of his studies, Walters was assigned an internship at Veterans Affairs. “I thought it was just going to be a summer job,” he said.

That was 39 years ago, and, except for a brief stint in the Office of Personnel Management, Walters has been with VA ever since. He began as an analyst in the Central Budget Office overseeing the construction service, scrutinizing financial statements and operating budgets, space plans and staffing levels, workload projections and construction contracts. A line-item genius, he was promoted to senior analyst, then assistant director and then director; in less than a decade, the budgets he was responsible for had grown from $45 million to $1 billion. Another promotion followed, managing the finances not just for the construction office but 10 staff offices.

This is when Walters first got to know the National Cemetery Administration. Among the $2 billion-or-so worth of VA projects for which he was responsible, Walters oversaw budget formulation and execution for the NCA. The part of him that had wanted to be a priest was moved by its work with veterans and survivors during some of the most difficult periods in a family’s life. As soon as he could, Walters joined what he considers the best-kept secret in the federal government, then promptly made it better.

Almost every other nation, past or present, would have left Staff Sgt. Ferris where he lay in Normandy. But America’s commitment to leave no service member behind extends to the dead. The first national cemeteries were established during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln launched an extensive campaign to scour battlefields and beyond for hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers. Ever since, we have honored those who “gave the last full measure of devotion” by bringing them home to their next of kin or burying them with honor in a military cemetery.

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.

It is sometimes difficult to know what makes a nation distinctive, to recognize which among our traditions and habits are essential to our collective identity. But repatriating the war dead is the deepest expression of the commitment we make to those who serve this country, an act of loyalty and gratitude that endures beyond the grave. By reuniting fallen warriors with their families and communities, we also bind their memory to our national identity, following rituals that turn each individual loss into something like the legend on a map, showing us the true scale of something we might otherwise never see. “There is no place where the price of freedom is more visible than in a national cemetery,” Ron Walters told the crowd gathered at New Bern earlier this year.

Over his long career, Walters has visited many of the 155 national cemeteries, and he wishes every American would visit at least one. Perhaps the most striking thing upon doing so is how profoundly egalitarian they are, affording the same ceremonies and markers to every person buried there, regardless of rank or station. There is no towering obelisk for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, no lesser location or diminishment of care for the recruit who died without bars on his sleeve: Those who died in battle and those who died in peacetime are honored equally for their service. Nor is there any distinction between those who sacrificed their lives in what history has subsequently deemed a just or an unjust war; these are not memorials to the victories or failures of war, but monuments to the hope of peace. Beautiful and contemplative, these hallowed grounds are designed to stir our moral imagination. They both inspire courage and summon humility, reminding us headstone by headstone of the gravity of sending men and women into harm’s way, hopefully, although not always, on behalf of our highest ideals.

You can still reach Robert McDonald on the cellphone number that he gave out during his first news conference as secretary of veterans affairs. McDonald had just stepped down as CEO and chairman of Procter & Gamble after a 33-year career there when President Barack Obama tapped him to run VA in 2014. McDonald’s predecessor had resigned because of a health-care scandal in which whistleblowers revealed that veterans had died waiting for care at hospitals around the country while staff falsified records of their treatment. McDonald gave out his personal number because the department was in such free fall that he felt the need to make clear from the beginning that he would be directly answerable for its performance.

After McDonald took over, he began studying the organization he was expected to lead, trying to figure out what had created the crisis by investigating VA top to bottom. What he found mostly dismayed him, but then there was “this jewel,” with unbelievably high rates of staff performance and customer satisfaction: the NCA, which was handily outperforming the rest of VA. McDonald wondered why. “And then,” he told me, “I discovered Ron.”

At that time, Walters was principal deputy undersecretary for memorial affairs — an incomprehensible collection of nouns parading as adjectives, but Walters was all verb. He’d been overseeing the cemetery administration’s Organizational Improvement and Assessment for eight years, which, unlike OIA work elsewhere, actually worked. In management-speak, Walters loves the Baldrige criteria, named for President Ronald Reagan’s commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige Jr., which focus on seven categories of performance: leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and results. In total quality terms, Walters is big on the “PDCA cycle,” implementing Plan-Do-Check-Act at every scale of his operation, from the height of the grass to the annual budget. In everyday English, he established high standards, figured out how to meet them, then raised those standards and did it all over again. McDonald had implemented a similar program years before for Procter & Gamble, but Walters, he said, “was out there doing all this by himself.”

Naturally, though, Walters wants to talk only about everyone else who was involved: the managers at each of the national cemeteries and employees at every level of the organization. Every time we talked, Walters took the opportunity to praise the field workforce, “the most dedicated in the federal government,” he said, more than 65 percent of whom are themselves veterans. Walters told me a story about a technician at Mountain Home National Cemetery in Tennessee who raced to the side of a woman during a bone-soaking rain, taking off his boots so she could make her way through the muck to her grandfather’s grave. “He helped her find the grave, then stood in the mud in his socks while she visited,” he said, tearing up. “Those are the kind of employees we have.”

There is no entry in the employee handbook that covers giving up your boots, but Walters has helped cultivate a culture in which every interaction is an opportunity for excellence. It’s one thing to sloganeer vaguely about “being the best” or “reaching new heights,” but succeeding, at customer service or anything else, is mostly a matter of attending to a shocking number of minute details. The key to any kind of improvement is often the boringly specific work of breaking down every job into discrete, measurable tasks. Want to walk more? Get a step counter. Want to save more? Make a budget. Want to improve your mortuary and cemetery services? Have your fieldworkers figure out how long it takes to do every task they are expected to complete — digging and squaring graves with pneumatic equipment, applying fertilizer, mowing, setting the interment schedule, placing permanent markers — and use those figures to arrive at standardizations to ensure consistency and customer satisfaction across all your cemeteries.

Steve L. Muro, a Vietnam veteran who rose from automotive mechanic at Los Angeles National Cemetery to undersecretary for memorial affairs during the Obama administration, remembers when Walters began the organizational assessment that revolutionized the NCA. For decades, the national cemeteries had been largely independent from one another. “Directors went from one cemetery to another,” he said, “and you did things your way, not really the VA way. You just sort of did what worked. But Walters’s group collected all this data, and we learned things right away about little things that gave cemeteries high scores, like having chairs with the name of the cemetery on them or blankets for mourners on a cold day or having a rifle squad — or low scores, like how long it took applications for burial benefits to get approved.”

Reviewing the 40 pages of standards and measures, you get a sense of how clearly the expectations are defined for all national cemeteries, and how fairly those expectations are evaluated, whether you work at South Florida National Cemetery, Fort Richardson in Alaska or the Punchbowl in Hawaii. Every cemetery, whether it has turf, sand or mineral-based ground cover, is expected to create “a sense of serenity, historic sacrifice and nobility of purpose.” To this end, the operational self-assessment asks, among other things, whether signage is convenient and helpful; whether maintenance and service records are current and accurate; how clean, functional, sanitary and appropriately supplied restrooms are; whether gravesite grades are level and, if there’s grass around the headstones, whether it is trimmed to the recommended height; and whether the headstones, markers or niche covers are all set within 60 days of interment. All this goes on for pages and pages, with each expectation ranked from medium to high to critical priority, sometimes with illustrations and color coding.

After developing the operating standards and measures, Walters’s team also helped develop a center for training cemetery directors and caretakers. On the VA campus, classes for new employees and for those taking on management roles create a culture of continuing education and advancement that is nurtured at every cemetery when these new and old staffers return. The NCA also offers training for employees of Arlington National Cemetery, which is run by the U.S. Army. In addition to the training center, the team helped open a national call center in St. Louis, which is staffed six days a week with hours for every time zone from Puerto Rico to Hawaii to field questions whenever veterans or their family members need answers. Now, if a veteran dies on a Friday night, her widow can make funeral arrangements right away; alternatively, and unlike in the past, a veteran at any age can apply for “pre-need” eligibility, making his arrangements in advance to ease the burden on his family.

These and other initiatives have been so successful that Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough has said that the NCA could teach the private sector a thing or two. “There is no mission more sacred than honoring these heroes and helping their families through such a hard time,” McDonough said in a statement, “and it’s a job that Ron and his team do with excellence and compassion every single day.”

Overall, veteran trust in VA — not only at the NCA but across the whole department — has risen to more than 80 percent, up from 47 percent just after McDonald was appointed. The NCA’s always high satisfaction has gotten higher even when Walters worried it might suffer, namely during the pandemic, when military burials, like all others, were restricted in ways that were devastating to the bereaved. But the NCA had always managed to impress people even though it generally encounters them during some of the worst moments in their lives, and Walters was accustomed to leading the organization during periods of unprecedented change. Over time, the veteran population has expanded, aged and diversified, with more than 100 World War II veterans dying every day, and requests coming in for green burials or columbarium niches in addition to traditional interment — and for an increasingly diverse set of emblems for their headstones, among them more than a dozen different crosses, Kohen hands, a Druze star, an atheist atom, a hammer of Thor, the Farohar and a Wiccan pentacle. And yet, today, only 1 percent of Americans serve in the armed forces, an all-volunteer military that is less and less visible to the public it protects.

Walters thinks a lot about these two contrasting demographic destinies since he leads an agency increasingly burdened by its workload in a country increasingly ignorant of the history of sacrifice that has secured its freedoms. But then Walters thinks a lot about a lot of things. Around the same time he was selected for the senior executive service, he finished a doctorate in political science at Johns Hopkins University. Alongside his VA work, in the evenings and summers for nearly a decade, he’d been taking courses and writing a dissertation on the restructuring of the veterans’ health-care system. He began teaching courses on public administration, policymaking and the federal budget, which he still does most semesters at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.

Dr. Walters the professor is a lot like Ron Walters the boss. Boyish and buoyant at 62, he’s generally sporting nerdy glasses, trendy suits and sandy hair a little too tousled to meet military standards. No matter what he’s wearing, though, he’s patient, kind and exacting, somehow just what any given student or colleague needs him to be. Jacqueline Hillian-Craig, a former Army logistics officer, has worked for Walters for more than 10 years. “In the military,” she told me, “you mostly have authoritative leadership that’s very clear and direct, taking orders from your higher-ups. But Ron is a different kind of leader: He’s not just top-down; he leads in different ways — he’s more fluid.” He describes his own leadership style as “intuitive,” and, shadowing him one day at the central office as he moved between one-on-ones and meetings with two dozen members, tackling everything from unfulfillable sod contracts to artificial intelligence, it was obvious how well his intuition serves him. Although Walters is a stickler for punctuality — his meetings always begin on time — there’s a gentle give-and-take of ideas, feedback and follow-up no matter the rank or standing of the participants. He’s famous for his “blue sheets,” to-do lists he prints on blue paper to track outstanding tasks and topics so they don’t get lost in the white paper of daily agendas and correspondence. Everywhere at the NCA, a military culture of sirs and ma’ams is infused with Walters’s almost Midwestern politeness, hellos and thank-yous echoing through the halls like ringing phones.

Walters’s own phone can be heard but barely seen on his desk, although he had apparently cleaned it not too long ago. The wall cabinets above it had been mostly de-Post-it Note-ed, but there were still stacks of printer paper, scattered accordion files, pages torn from his daily briefing books, and programs from events honoring Jewish veterans and one of the “hello girls” who operated a military switchboard during the First World War. Books proliferate there and on a coffee table, too — military and cultural histories such as Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” alongside business and leadership guides such as Peter Schwartz’s “The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World” — since the actual bookshelves are taken over by old budget binders, budget hearing binders and budget submission books: a kind of trophy cabinet for a financial all-star like Walters. He’s nowhere near as neat as you expect him to be and yet nowhere near as messy as he could be, given the diverse duties he has managed for decades. He has a plant of some kind near his desk, but mostly he seems to be growing American flags: A tiny burial flag is framed on his desk, handheld parade flags wave from the bookshelves, and a floor-to-ceiling, eagle-topped number nearly blocks the view from the only window in his office.

There’s an empty office three times as big across the hall that he could be using, but he doesn’t want it. “Ron’s a servant leader,” Matthew Quinn told me. “He always thinks of the organization more than himself.” Quinn, a 36-year veteran of the Army and the Montana National Guard, just stepped down as undersecretary for memorial affairs. Walters took the job but not the office: A career civil servant rather than a political appointee, he stepped up to become acting undersecretary of memorial affairs, just as he did during vacancies under President Donald Trump and before that under Obama.

“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to bury a veteran,” Walters says, though partisanship and calls for privatization have come for VA as for so many other seemingly apolitical aspects of our national life. Yet he has served through seven administrations and earned admiration from both parties. Stephen Shih, who worked with Walters years ago at OPM and is now the director of the Office of Civil Rights at USAID, said Walters is admired and trusted by leaders on both sides of the aisle, because even though “he has his own personal philosophy, his thinking and decisions are not rooted in politics — they don’t align to a political view. For Ron, it’s about serving the American people.”

“Our government is designed to change,” Shih told me, “so there will necessarily be these periods of transition, and Ron has navigated that masterfully, finding a balance between providing continuity and moving the government forward.”

Complacency is one of the great dangers to a great organization, but Walters, despite still having an AOL account, is a born innovator. Alongside making sure the NCA does its core work better, he has also worked to expand its mission and update it for the digital age. He created the Veterans Legacy Memorial, a kind of combination database and memory book for those buried in national cemeteries — what one Vietnam War widow called “my radio to heaven” since it allowed her to share and gather stories about her husband’s service. The VLM hosts nearly 10 million records for veterans, with a webpage for each one, along with their location, whether he was interred in 1864 or she was cremated in 2024 — so that fellow service members, relatives, historians or the general public can submit photographs, memories, newspaper clippings or a note of thanks. Walters can summon a tribute from the page of a second lieutenant from the Second World War whose son wrote: “Dad, Even though we never met Mom made sure she kept your memory alive for me. I was born on July 26th and you were killed 2 weeks later on August 9th. I have the knowledge that you at least knew of my existence and that you had a son. … Please know that I have never forgotten you. Your memory will always be alive in my heart especially on Memorial Day. Love, your son, Bobby.”

Mindful of the many children today who do not have a family member in the military, Walters also launched the Veterans Legacy Program, which tries to connect younger generations with the sacrifices of earlier ones. The VLP provides lesson plans for children and teenagers to bring more school groups and scouting troops into the cemeteries for field trips and service days, and runs a multimillion-dollar grant program for schools and universities that funds student research into the forgotten stories of the armed services. This year, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater won a grant for a study of Hmong American veterans, while Troy University in Alabama received funding to write an account of the United States Colored Troops buried in Mobile.

Walters is most proud of an apprenticeship program he started 12 years ago to employ homeless veterans. Men and women chosen to be apprentices are guaranteed a caretaking job if they complete the year-long training in national cemetery duties, learning about grounds, equipment and building maintenance. Their duties include not just landscaping, but also digging graves, placing caskets and aligning headstones. Some graduates have relapsed or stumbled, some have taken their training to private cemeteries closer to their families or support systems, but many continue to work at the national cemeteries where they were first placed.

Francisco Zappas, a caretaker at Fort Bliss National Cemetery, served in the Army for 15 years but struggled with the return to civilian life. After a drinking problem ruined his marriage and left his finances in shambles, he was desperate to escape his addiction: “I was down and out. I came to El Paso with everything — a wife and family, a house — but I lost it all.” The apprentice program was the second chance he needed, and he found meaning in tending to the graves of veterans like himself. He was in the first graduating class of apprentices, and even though he’s 71 now, he still goes to work with the same gratitude and purpose as the very first day he stepped onto the 82-acre cemetery: “Every day, I feel happy to come to work. I’ve probably pruned and cut every bush in this cemetery three or four times now — it looks like a big, beautiful park. We make it look like a shrine, just like the White House.”

The White House, of course, gets a lot more press, positive or otherwise, than the NCA or any of the other executive agencies. Rosemary Freitas Williams, a former assistant secretary of public affairs at VA, told me that joining the civil service is basically like being in the Witness Protection Program: “No one ever knows about the good you do.”

She came to the federal government after 22 years in broadcast journalism, and she couldn’t believe how little attention people such as Walters get for all their innovative work. “This guy wanted to put QR codes on headstones, so anybody could walk into a national cemetery and learn some veteran’s story of service and heroism with their smartphone,” she told me. “I felt like it could change everything: the way we grieve, the way we learn history. I was just stunned. NCA still uses fax machines for forms, not all the workforce has an email address, but Ron got the Veterans Legacy Memorial going.”

“True leaders are people like Ron,” McDonald told me. “They are quiet, confident people of character who always go back to their purpose, and his purpose is to serve others. Ron cares about integrity, commitment and advocacy — never ‘what does this do for me?’ Look at his paycheck. Look at the alternative jobs he could’ve had or how much he could have made in the private sector. Look at how he teaches at night after work. This guy is all about service to others.”

Of course, Walters doesn’t see it that way. He would never do a TED Talk on management; he claims he can’t write a book on mourning; he refuses to believe there’s anything like a Ron Fan Club, no matter how many members I find. When pressed about some of his best ideas, he tells me that he hopes in a few years no one even knows they were his: “The best thing in the world is when no one can remember whose idea it was. Then you know you’ve succeeded because the greatest thing that can happen is no one can remember who did it or how it was done; everybody has taken a piece of the idea, and it’s been institutionalized.”

“I used to joke that good ideas in government get put into the inertia machine,” Williams said. “But Ron knows how to get things done, and he doesn’t get impatient. The magic of Ron is he always figures out the shortest distance between where we are and where we need to be.”

For Walters, of course, distance itself is a problem: something to be assessed, measured and improved. Among his many other projects, he led an analysis of veteran population data and service gaps, striving to make sure every veteran can be buried close to home. This led to opening additional cemeteries in Colorado, Florida, Nebraska and New York based on their burgeoning veteran populations; creating columbarium-only cemeteries in densely populated cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Indianapolis; and meeting the needs of rural veterans by establishing military cemeteries in eight states that previously lacked them, including Maine, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

In addition to establishing new cemeteries, including by offering grants to states and tribes, Walters figured out a way to expand existing ones. Until recently, the NCA could not always purchase the land it needed for cemetery expansion because it depended on the sluggish federal budget process, and prospective sellers were often unwilling to put a sale on hold for the multiple years it could take to get the needed appropriation. Rather than try to get them to wait, Walters persuaded Congress to change the way funding worked, creating a line item in the VA budget for national cemetery land acquisition so the NCA could move quickly to buy properties for expansion whenever acreage became available. Thanks to Walters’s efforts, 94 percent of American veterans live no farther than 75 miles from a veterans’ cemetery.

“Not having to drive long distances to visit a loved one’s gravesite has made a world of difference to our families and survivors,” Walters told me. As a Coast Guard veteran, Ron’s father was eligible for burial in a national cemetery, but he chose his family’s plot at a private cemetery in Pennsylvania, where he and two brothers have bronze military markers memorializing their service; buried beside him is his wife of 61 years, Ron’s mother, who was tended to by both her sons before she passed away.

Like Ron’s father, 4 out of 5 veterans are not buried in veterans’ cemeteries, in some cases by choice but in others because they or their family members do not realize it is an option. Yet any member of the armed forces who dies on active duty is eligible, as are veterans who were not dishonorably discharged, along with spouses and dependent children, and some National Guard members and reservists. Many veterans also do not know that, regardless of where they choose to be buried, the NCA can contribute to the costs of interment, as well as provide a headstone or marker, a burial flag for the casket, and a Presidential Memorial Certificate for the deceased.

Very rarely, under special circumstances, civilians outside of immediate military families are buried in national cemeteries as well. Earlier this year, before stepping down as undersecretary for memorial affairs, Matthew Quinn tried to extend this honor to someone he believed deserved it. “I went to Ron and I said, ‘You know, I have the power to bury civilians in a military cemetery. I can grant that waiver, and I’d like to do that for you.’” Walters refused. He himself was not a veteran, Walters insisted, and as such, he did not belong in a national cemetery; it was more than honor enough to get to spend his life there.

Like many civil servants, who plainly aren’t in it for the money or the glory, Walters is married to his work — in his case, happily and exclusively. He is generally the first to arrive and the last to leave the office; outside of sharing season tickets to the Commanders (for which he maintains a spreadsheet to ensure equitable distribution) and getting away to Rehoboth Beach when he can, he mostly spends his free time, such as it is, teaching and mentoring colleagues. But Walters assures me that there are no blue sheets on his nightstand, and that he has never created Baldrige criteria for his off-hours. Still, he has always loved Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises” and finds it meaningful to think through a personal inventory of things done and undone. “He would’ve made a great priest,” Rosemary Williams, a lifelong Catholic, told me. “There are people like Ron who work in the federal government, and you can tell they’ve answered a call. Ron always makes me want to be a better person.”

Just about everyone I talked to about Walters told me something similar. They could remember specific encounters where he gently illuminated a professional blind spot, recommended Ron-isms that improved some aspect of their work and recounted conversations where his emotional intelligence helped them understand something about their own life. “I think people leave every interaction with Ron feeling better about themselves,” Steve Shih said. “People who come into contact with him are inspired, and, to me, that’s the mark of a great leader.” I experienced it, too, leaving every interview with him wanting to be the Ron Walters of my writing, the Ron Walters of my exercise regimen, the Ron Walters of my marriage.

Who among us doesn’t want to be better at everything? Not just our work, however momentous or mundane it might be, but every aspect of our life: relationships, friendships, health, hobbies, community, stewardship of the earth, everything. Most of us, thankfully, aren’t terrible at what we do. We’re okay or pretty good. But Walters reminds us: Why not be better? Why not be the best? It isn’t impossible; it simply demands our constant devotion. Perpetual care, it turns out, is not just for cemeteries.