At 7:50 a.m. Tuesday, Dennis Nussear rolled his white Bobcat digger to Section V of Rock Island National Cemetery. It was a chill 42 degrees, a sharp wind sweeping from the Mississippi River and Sylvan Slough. There was promise that the sun might break through the dismally gray clouds, but it didn’t happen.

Nussear was about to dig the grave for Cpl. Jason Pautsch.

It took 38 minutes to dig the grave of a soldier who had lived 20 years of life on this earth.

THE GRAVE site was marked by two screwdrivers, one at each end. It would be a precise job, as it has been for the 3,000 or so graves that Nussear has dug for service men and women and their spouses.

“It always gets through to me,” said Nussear, a grounds employee at this vast plateau of the dead where 26,000 are buried. For every stark white marker, row upon row in the bright green grass, there is a service person.

He tugged tightly on his billed cap and was about to begin digging the grave for Pautsch, killed a dozen days ago by a suicide bomber in Mosul, Iraq.

The machine with its big scoop was ready to go to work. But first, Nussear paused to pray. He does that as he digs a grave for each service person

“IT’S AN INFORMAL thing, never quite the same. I feel it’s an honor to dig the grave for this young man who died for his country,” he said.

Nussear, a husky man who lives in Cambridge, Ill., said he first silently blessed Cpl. Pautsch.

“Then, I blessed the ground where he will be buried, and I said blessings for his family.”

A block or so away, between barren oak trees, was a pickup truck holding the marker to be placed on the young corporal’s grave.  It said “Jason G. Pautsch, Cpl., U.S. Army, Iraq.”  Below were the letters “BSM,” “PH” and “KIA.” That, I was told, is the new way of grave markers. The letters stand for “Bronze Star Medal,” “Purple Heart” and “Killed in Action.” The abbreviations seemed oddly cold, but then I suppose everyone should be able to decipher their texting-style brevity.

“How do you dig a grave for a hero?” I asked Nussear.

“Very carefully,” he answered.

The grave would be a precise 5 feet wide, 10 feet long and 5 feet deep.

Scoop after scoop of dirt dropped into a Freightliner truck. This was not a perfunctory chore. The grave digger was serious, squinting his eyes to gouge a perfect 5-5-10. Nussear climbed down from the digger  for a moment to measure the size of the grave with a long aluminum rod attached to a rope.

Nussear has a close attachment to the servicemen and women for whom he digs graves. He served two years during the Vietnam War era but never went overseas. He spoke up, “The young man they’ll be burying here … nothing comes out of fighting wars. Nothing is accomplished but the dead.”

He mounted his cab again after sizing up his work with that long aluminum measuring pole. It was perfectly symmetrical, smooth, as if sculpted by a hand trowel. He is an expert.

Cpl. Pautsch’s gravesite is but a few yards from that of Staff Sgt. Nathan Cox, 32, who lost his life in Afghanistan on Sept. 20. He, too, was killed when his vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device.

The last reported tally of military deaths in the Iraq-Afghanistan war was 4,274.

There is talk of peace, but as Jack Belden, the noted United Press World War II correspondent wrote in 1945 after fighting had stopped: “There will always be war; there is still time to die.”

Contact Bill Wundram at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.