Arlington National Cemetery sprawls over 250 hectares across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. Its headstones march in otherworldly symmetry across perfectly kept lawns. It is mostly a place of solemnity and silence.

But in and around Section 60, where the dead of America's new wars are buried, there is real grief rather than remembrance. Most Sundays you will find a handful of the bereaved sitting quietly or talking among themselves.

On Tuesday, Veterans Day in the United States, hundreds came and went throughout the afternoon.

Christine Honeycutt sat at the grave of her son, Terry, who was just nine years old when the Twin Towers fell and he decided to join the Marines. He was killed by an IED in Helmand province in Afghanistan not quite a decade later.

"He was a machine gunner, always in the thick of it," Mrs Honeycutt, 44, says. "He always wanted to join the army. He and his sister used to play with army men."

At high school Terry did summer leadership courses with the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and he joined up the moment he could.

"As a parent you try and dissuade your children from doing dangerous things but we supported him," she says.

Asked how she feels about the news of new deployments to Iraq to combat Islamic State militants she says simply: "I think of the parents. I cringe."

Many of the graves in Section 60 are adorned with trinkets. Some have sports medals or team T-shirts stretched over them, others have photographs propped against them. Some have Halloween candy or pumpkins left on them.

A tiny plastic figurine of soldier kneeling to fire a bazooka sits on the headstone of Staff Sergeant Joseph Phanuf who was killed in Afghanistan in 2006, leaving behind a wife and three children.

On the grave of Sergeant Andrew Baddick, a recipient of the Bronze Star who was born in 1977 and killed in Iraq in 2003 lies what looks to be a self-published book titled My Son, My Hero.

These personal tokens of love and grief have caused some tension between the families of Section 60 and the cemetery administration. No other national monument has been built to the ongoing wars, and some families have come to view Section 60 as a living memorial rather than simply a cemetery.

Officials have sometimes found it hard to balance the requirement to maintain the section with the need of the families to leave tributes. Most offerings are left in place for a time and then quietly removed.

A few rows away from Mrs Honeycutt, Lisa and Manuel Ruiz sit in camp chairs at the grave of their son, Manuel, a medic who was born in 1985 and killed in Fallujah in 2007 when his helicopter was shot down.

Manuel had survived his first tour and signed on for his second when his friends decided to return. Mrs Ruiz makes the three-hour drive to the grave every couple of months and she has come to know many of the families.

"It is a group nobody wants to be part of. It is an important group," she says.

As we talk a group of young men with military haircuts and civilian clothes moves from one grave to another, apparently visiting friends. They pass a bottle of bourbon back and forth between them and the breeze carries touches of their cigar smoke, laughter and tears.

Beyond them a young woman sits silent and still on one grave, and just one row back a young man with a thick beard and dramatic sleeve tattoos lies on his side on another. At a glance he could be asleep, in fact he is scrolling through photos on his phone.

Section 60 filled up quickly over recent years says one regular visitor, especially in 2003 and 2004.

In the late afternoon the shadows of the last row are cast over fresh earth where groundskeepers have removed sod in preparation for new graves.