Punchbowl: The Cemetery Inside the Volcano

The Hawaiians called this place Puowaina, the hill of sacrifice. It is the eroded remnant of a volcanic tuff cone, a small crater that rises above central Honolulu, visible from most of the city below. The interior of the crater is flat and green, sheltered from the wind by the crater walls on three sides and open to the harbor on the south. In nineteen forty-nine, the United States military chose it as the site of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

More than fifty thousand American service members are buried here, veterans of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, along with their dependents. The graves are set flush with the ground, each marker the same size as every other, a visual insistence on equality in death that does not quite obscure the fact that those buried here died at very different rates depending on what unit they served in, what neighborhood they came from, and what year their war was. Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent whose columns from the Pacific and European theaters were read by millions of Americans during the Second World War, is buried here. He was killed in nineteen forty-five by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima.

The Courts of the Missing surround the cemetery's central memorial. On the marble walls of those courts are inscribed the names of about twenty-eight thousand eight hundred Americans who have no known grave, the missing of the Pacific campaigns and the Korean War. Some of those names have been cleared in recent decades as remains have been identified through advances in forensic technology. The names removed from the wall receive a rosette.

The view from the memorial looks south over Honolulu toward the harbor. Pearl Harbor is visible in the distance, on clear days.