WBAY-TV Green Bay-Fox Cities-Northeast Wisconsin News: Fate Brings Family, Soldier Together in Arlington National Cemetery
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Among the hundreds of thousands of heroes in Arlington National Cemetery is Luxemburg Marine Sergeant Luke James Zimmerman.
Tuesday, his grave was at the center of a string of improbable coincidences.
It all starts with a man from Northeast Wisconsin -- 93-year-old World War II veteran Al Denissen. He was a cook who served in the South Pacific during the war.
"It was all bread all the time," he says.
His service brought him to Washington, DC, on an Honor Flight with fellow veterans from the Great War. But it's another soldier's service that brought him to Arlington to pay his respects.
"You can't imagine, there's so many here. I don't think I could do this every day. It gets too emotional after a while."
There are roughly 320,000 headstones in Arlington National Cemetery. One of those headstones belongs to Al's grandson who was killed in Iraq three years earlier -- to the day.
With the cemetery set to close in 20 minutes, Al, his son Kurt, and a few other vets started the journey to find his grandson, Sergeant Luke Zimmerman.
After a cold mile-and-a-half walk, they saw it for the first time.
"They find it?" Al asks.
"There's our man. There's our boy," says Kurt, who is Luke's uncle.
"God bless you," says Al.
By sheer chance, Al and Kurt bumped into another man who also came to pay his respects to Luke on this anniversary.
It turns out he's a close friend who was patrolling next to Zimmerman the day he was killed in Iraq.
"We stopped and I turned and saw two guys down the road, picked up my rifle, and looked through the ACOG. Then Luke turned and it happened," the soldier recalled.
The soldier wished not to be shown, but he told Al and Kurt he's been waiting three years to decide if he was going to contact Zimmerman's family.
It appears fate answered that question.
Exchanging stories, the soldier said Sergeant Zimmerman saved his life that day.
"Happens to the best of them, don't it?" Al asked.
"He was the best," Kurt answered.
They all came to pay their respects and ended up finding some closure for a soldier who died too soon.
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