Family of Fallen Marine Finds Community at Arlington

May 27, 2007 — -- All day long, Beth Belle had a bad feeling.

"It was Mother's Day and I kept thinking this is so wrong, that I just want this day to be over," she said.

When a military chaplain arrived at her door at 8:57 p.m., she guessed immediately why he was there.

"I came around the corner and I could see the silhoutte of the Navy chaplain's hat and so I knew and I just screamed," she said.

He had come to tell her that her 21-year-old Marine son, Nicholas Belle, had lost his life to an insurgent battle in the hills of Afghanistan.

Nicholas Belle joined the Marine Corps in his senior year of high school. Just a month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he told his parents that he felt that he had a mission.

"He felt like it was his duty as a citizen, an American citizen," Beth Belle said. "He felt like it was the least he could do."

He was aware of the dangers he would face and asked his parents to bury him at Arlington National Cemetery if he didn't make it home.

Four years later, they honored his request. Nicholas is buried in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery with other servicemen who lost their lives to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, amid the fresh graves, Beth and Nicholas' father, Michael Belle, have found a mission of their own.

"Every week, we see new graves and new families grieving," Michael Belle said. "We make it a point to let them know how much we appreciate their sacrifice and [that] if there's anything that we can do to help them, we owe it to them."

As the line of headstones advances each week, the Belles feel it is their duty to reach out to the new families. They have become the unofficial "caretakers" of Section 60, founding a support group that meets once a month. The section has become a community, shaped by shared pain and grief. But it has also served as a source of comfort, a place where everybody can talk openly and freely about their lost loved ones.

"We all share the same feelings, and when we say to each other, 'I know,' we really do know," Beth Belle said. "We feel like we might be able to reach out to people who are just starting this journey and be able to give them some sort of help -- to say to them, 'This is what we did, and we found this to be helpful,' or to be perfectly honest sometimes and say, 'I don't know what to tell you but I can be here and I understand.'"