Guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — Every Hour, Every Day

At 2 a.m. during a blizzard, with no visitors in sight, a sentinel still walks the mat. That, according to the soldiers who serve there, is when the duty feels most personal.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery has been guarded continuously since 1937 — every minute of every day, without exception. The sentinels who stand watch are members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, and the post they hold is widely regarded as one of the highest honors available to a soldier in the U.S. Army.

The tomb itself was established in 1921 with the unidentified remains of a World War One soldier. The large sarcophagus holds that unknown, while unidentified servicemembers from World War Two and the Korean War lie in front of it. The middle grave remains empty — a deliberate marker representing the thousands of service members still missing from Vietnam.

Arlington is the largest veterans cemetery in the country, and for many families, it is the final chapter of a soldier's story. As one senior enlisted advisor stationed there put it, the burial ceremony is the last opportunity the military has to honor a fallen comrade — and that weight is felt by everyone who serves on the grounds.

The changing of the guard — conducted every hour from October through March, and every half hour from April through September — takes months of practice to execute with the precision the ceremony demands. But for the sentinels themselves, the formality of the ritual is secondary to what it represents.

"You're guarding the unknowns for those people who never got that satisfaction of burying their loved ones," one sentinel said. The badge that designates a qualified tomb guard, he added, is beside the point. The soldiers say they would perform the duty just as rigorously if it never existed.

Millions of visitors from around the world have come to the tomb — on Memorial Day and Veterans Day in particular — to pay their respects, observe the wreath-laying ceremony, or simply stand in the presence of a place that holds the country's unresolved grief. For the sentinels, those crowded days are meaningful. But the quiet ones, the cold ones, the ones when no one is watching, carry their own kind of weight.

"Regardless of what's going on around us," one guard said of his fellow sentinels, "I honestly have the utmost respect for them."