Lt. Col. Ross Hertlein, commander of the Army Field Support Battalion-Africa at Camp Darby, is followed by his wife, Jayme Hertlein, as they walk around the Old English Cemetery in Livorno, Italy, on May 6, 2026, seeking the gravestones of U.S. service members who died in the early 19th century and were buried there. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)
LIVORNO, Italy — They came to honor the dead, men they did not know but who were among the first American troops to die on overseas duty.
The dozen U.S. service members from nearby Camp Darby who visited Livorno’s Old English Cemetery on Wednesday cleaned up at least five Americans’ graves, an act of service that gave them a unique link to history.
After tidying up the burial plots, the troops formed up and Army Field Support Battalion Africa commander Lt. Col. Ross Hertlein presented a Meritorious Service Medal to Capt. Jorge Guevara, who had asked to receive his end-of-tour award at the site.
“For the rest of my career and as long as I live, when I look back on my (medal) rack, it’s going to be, ‘Hey, I earned this award in this cemetery,’ ” the departing Guevara said. “Their memories and their service will not be forgotten until I die.”
The service members buried there died in the first few decades after the Revolutionary War, including four sailors and a Marine who served on warships patrolling the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1800s.
For the visitors, paying respects to fellow countrymen was deeply connected to their own family histories of service.
Capt. Sydney Morriss, one of 11 soldiers and an airman who visited the burial site, hoped others in the future would show the same respect to honor fallen service members of more recent memory, such as her grandfather, an Air Force veteran.
A modern city has grown up around the high walls and locked gates of the Protestant cemetery, which dates to the early 1600s and was in use for about 200 years.
Clustered together among cypresses and elms, the jumble of some 500 carved gravestones is all but forgotten in the shadows of parking garages and apartment buildings.
Maj. Jeremy Evans, executive officer of the Army Field Support Battalion-Africa at Camp Darby, Italy, searches the Old English Cemetery in Livorno on May 6, 2026. He was looking for graves of American service members who had died in the area in the early 19th century and were buried at the cemetery, which dates from the 1600s. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)
Italian researcher Gabriel Pavolettoni, and U.S. Army Capt. Jorge Guevara read from a headstone at the Old English Cemetery in Livorno, Italy, May 6, 2026. Guevara was one of 12 service members from nearby Camp Darby who searched the graveyard for the tombs of American military personnel who died in the region in the early 1800s. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)
Amid rain showers, the visitors cleared away weeds and overgrowth, then planted U.S. flags and laid bouquets at the handful of tombstones of their countrymen.
At one point, Hertlein, removed a large piece of ornamental stone that appeared to have been used to smash an American’s headstone.
Later, he noticed that a large block of marble that had been toppled belonged to one of the Americans’ graves, so he gathered a handful of soldiers to heave it back to an upright position.
Senior Airman James George prepares to place a U.S. flag and a bouquet at the grave of Capt. James McKnight on May 6, 2026. McKnight, a Marine officer who was killed in a duel in 1802, is one of several American service members buried at the Old English Cemetery in Livorno, Italy, a long-closed graveyard near the U.S. military’s Camp Darby. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)
A Marine buried in a neighboring plot, Capt. James McKnight, was the brother-in-law of Stephen Decatur, the Navy commodore who led the service’s Mediterranean Squadron, which was formed to protect merchant ships from pirates.
In late 1815, Decatur signed the final peace treaty with the Barbary States, a region in north Africa that used piracy to try to control the sea and extract tribute from British, French and American merchant vessels.
The U.S. fought its first overseas war against the Barbary pirates from 1801 to 1805, as memorialized by the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” in the first line of the Marines’ Hymn, referring to the capital of present-day Libya. A second American war the Barbary States was fought in 1815.
McKnight, the Marine officer on the sloop-of-war USS Constellation, was killed not by pirates in combat, but by a fellow officer with whom he had quarreled, Lt. R.H.L Lawson, who shot him in the heart during a duel in Livorno on Oct. 13, 1802.
“He had but time to say he was shot and expired,” Capt. Daniel Carmick, a fellow Marine officer, wrote in a letter at the time to William Ward Burrows, the service’s second commandant, according to an article in the April 2015 edition of Leatherneck magazine.
Carmick wrote that McKnight was then taken to the burial ground “where I was to witness a scene I shall ever remember, that of being obliged to see a brother officer’s heart cut out, that I might certify that the ball had passed through the center of it.”
Hertlein learned that McKnight and at least four Navy officers were buried at the site from Steve Zglinicki, an Army retiree and former commander of a Camp Darby unit.
Zglinicki found out about them through a series of chance encounters while looking for the grave of a World War II Medal of Honor recipient.
Along the way, someone gave him a small wooden model of a ship, but it was broken, and the man he sought to fix it gave him a book by a local Italian author recounting the story of the duel and the burial ground.
Zglinicki found the duel site, then scaled the walls of the cemetery to locate McKnight’s grave, he told the soldiers at the cemetery during their visit.
Lt. Col. Ross Hertlein pauses on May 6, 2026, to read a headstone for two Navy midshipmen who died at sea in 1817 and were buried in the Old English Cemetery in Livorno, Italy. Hertlein commands the Army Field Support Battalion-Africa at nearby Camp Darby. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)
Army retiree Steve Zglinicki speaks to a group of service members and civilians on May 6, 2026, at the Old English Cemetery in Livorno, Italy. Zglinicki had learned that the locked cemetery, which closed in the 1830s, contained the graves of American service members who died overseas during the early 19th century. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)
Near McKnight is buried Capt. Thomas Gamble, who died in Pisa in 1818 while commanding the USS Erie. He was the son of a Revolutionary War major and brother of War of 1812 hero Lt. Col. John M. Gamble, the first Marine to command a Navy ship.
Hertlein chose a more official path to arrange the visit for his soldiers, though it took him four months to hunt down the people with keys to the gates and arrange the date, he said.
The soldiers and a few civilians accompanying them, including Hertlein’s wife, fanned out through the cemetery. They were looking for at least the five service members’ graves and those of any other Americans who may have been forgotten.
They found the graves of Capt. Henry De Butts, who died in 1801 in Sarzana, and two Navy midshipmen, John M. Cotter and Green Lynch. Both died at sea in 1817 while serving with the Mediterranean Squadron.
The experience brought up emotions for Hertlein that sprang from his family connection to the city, where his grandfather in-processed into Italy with the 88th Infantry Division in 1945 after the city’s liberation during World War II.
His grandfather, who died in 2019, had been the one to encourage Hertlein to pursue a military career.
Hertlein has visited cemeteries in Europe and north Africa where America’s war dead are buried, he said, but those are mainly the final resting places for those who fought in World War II.
“This is once in a lifetime,” he said. “This cemetery goes back to the 1600s. The servicemen who died here, 1800s. You never see that.”
“The fact that it’s a closed cemetery that you can’t even get into, I really hope that that’s a special moment for them to remember.”
