Tombstone Medic: Sergeant William Irwin’s story

Irwin, Campbell County High Class of 1990, served as a medic in the military for 23 years

VERY TOP PHOTO: This is the restored tombstone of George Heatherly, Vietnam Veteran. Heatherly was a graduate of La Follette High School.

By Charlotte Underwood

LAFOLLETTE, TN (WLAF)- Once a military medic, always a military medic. This is the story of Campbell County’s own Army Veteran Sgt. William Irwin, who served 23 years in the military as a medic. His last combat deployment was for a year in Afghanistan in 2008 through 2009. He also would travel to different military bases around the United States when those bases needed a medic up until his retirement.

“I’ve been to just about every military base in the United States as a medic, but my last duty station was at Fort Riley, Kansas,” Irwin said. He officially retired from the military October of 2013. Around five years ago, he and his wife Tia started Tombstone Medic.

As a military medic, Irwin took care of soldiers on a daily basis, now that he is retired, he is taking care of their gravestones. For him, it is “one veteran’s way of giving back to other vets who have passed.”

Irwin had the idea to start Tombstone Medic about five years ago, when he was sitting in Baker’s Forge Cemetery at his “Mamaw and Papaws’ graves” and he noticed how dirty it was.

“So, I decided right then and there to look it up how to clean headstones; I got on Arlington Cemetery’s National website and contacted them, and they told me how they clean their veteran’s headstones. While at Baker’s Forge, I also noticed how dirty some of the veteran’s headstones were and me, being a veteran, I decided I wanted to do something about it, I was a medic in the military for 23 years in the Army and I felt this was a way I could continue to give back, by cleaning and restoring the veteran’s headstones,” Irwin said.

His next step was telling his wife Tia that he wanted to start doing this service. She was on board immediately.

“She helps me with it, she is out there every weekend with me in the summer cleaning headstones,” Irwin said.

They started cleaning veteran’s headstones and taking before and after pictures and putting them on the Tombstone Medic Facebook Page. This led to people contacting him to clean the tombstones of their veteran’s graves and to clean their family tombstones as well.

This gave him the idea of how to keep it going.

Irwin worked out a price list for people wanting him to clean the tombstones of family members for civilians. However, he does not charge to clean and restore veteran’s graves, this is done free of service as a give-back. He does take sponsorships from those that want to support or sponsor the restoration of veteran’s headstones as it costs $45 to $50 just in supplies alone. The funds made by cleaning and restoring non-veteran civilian tombstones allow him to cover the costs of cleaning supplies to clean and restore the graves of veterans and keep the whole operation going.

The special cleaning supplies needed for tombstones are not cheap, and he buys them by the 5-gallon jug. He uses “trusted and proven products that are used at Arlington National Cemetery” and warns that the use of other chemicals not approved can actually deteriorate the headstones.

When tombstones in Red Ash Cemetery were vandalized, Irwin, his wife and his stepson removed graffiti and the paint, restoring dignity and peace to one of “Campbell County’s forgotten cemeteries,” Irwin said, “the dead are supposed to be at rest.” It angered and hurt him to see the cemetery vandalized.

“When we were young, we would go to graveyards and have picnics with our families; it was different, there was more respect for the dead and people don’t understand that and live that way anymore,” Irwin said.

He also repaints the lettering on stones as part of the restoration process, something else he learned how to do after contacting Arlington National Cemetery and watching videos to train himself in how to do it. After the past five years, he has perfected his technique.

“For five years now, we have been in the graveyards cleaning headstones. When I do veteran’s headstones, I also put a flag holder in the ground, along with a U.S. Flag,” Irwin said.

Headstones can only be cleaned in the spring and summer when the temperature is above 50 degrees, or it can damage the headstones.
It can take up to an hour and a half to clean a tombstone that is in rough shape.

There are over 300 cemeteries in Campbell County, “some of them are mountain ones and hard to get to, and hardly any of them are on level ground.”

He also cleans headstones outside of Campbell County.

“I have been to Georgia to clean headstones, to Ohio to clean headstones, Sevier County. People have found me through the local funeral homes, everything we make goes back in to buy supplies so I can keep cleaning veteran’s graves at no cost,” Irwin said.

The oldest tombstone he cleaned and restored was a Revolutionary War Veteran’s stone. That of Shadrach Reedy. Another stone he restored back in June of 2023 was that of PFC Lawrence McCarty’s who was a World War II Prisoner of War (POW) at the Bataan Death March.

“After completing the 65-mile Bataan Death March, PFC McCarty succumbed to death on July 4th, 1942, as a POW in Camp O’Donnell in the hands of the Japanese. It was a honor to clean this Hero’s Headstone,” Irwin said.

 He has cleaned veteran’s stones at multiple cemeteries across the county, including that of many of his ancestors such as his Grandfather James Charles Guy Sr. who was a World War II Sgt. who served in Germany. Other graves of his ancestors he has cleaned are his Uncle Leo L. Irwin who served in the Army in Vietnam and his great uncle Robert Taylor Irwin who served in World War II.

“We have so many veterans buried here in Campbell County, and I just want to pay them the respect that is their due,” Irwin said.

Baker’s Forge is his favorite cemetery to clean tombstones at because even in the summer when it’s hot, “there’s always a breeze blowing across Baker’s Forge.”

Irwin was born in LaFollette and “grew up in Jellico and LaFollette.” He graduated from CCHS in 1990 and joined the Army and “traveled the world.”

He served in combat in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009. Irwin was part of an Embedded Training Team (ETT).

“We lived with the Afghanistan and trained their Special Forces,” Irwin said. As a medic, Irwin would often end up “taking care of the Afghanistan people” and helping where he could.

In one circumstance, he intervened and helped negotiate the release of an Afghanistan man who was in jail and going to be killed, due to accidentally killing his neighbor in self-defense over a dispute.

“I remember taking care of a child that was injured and needed stitches, so I stitched them up. That child’s father had accidentally killed another man over a dispute; the police did not want to release him. The family of the man that was killed took the other man’s farm and his livelihood and all of his animals as compensation for the death. I negotiated to free the man as long as he and his family left that province, I know that sounds horrible, but he had a wife and kids and everything else and they had already taken his property, all his livestock and the family considered that a wash. The killing was not a murder, it was self-defense and just an unfortunate thing, they had got in a fight over a dispute. They were going to kill him to make it right, but see, they are different than we are, they don’t have a jury of their peers, or they didn’t at that time, so that man would have been unjustly killed, leaving his wife and children destitute and they had already had everything taken, all his livestock, goats and land,” Irwin said.

While in Afghanistan, he and his team would go on night patrols where they often got shot at. He was a Truck Commander, meaning he rode in the right front seat of the truck.

“We hardly ever stopped and engaged, we would just roll through,” Irwin said.

Stationed in the mountains, he recalled it was cold in the winter over there and a harsh environment overall.

In total, he spent 11 and a half months in Afghanistan; a mere 15 days after he left the country, the truck he had been assigned to was hit with an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and everyone in the truck was killed, including two of his best friends.

“I remember Sgt. Brock Chavers and Spc. Isaac Johnson of the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team and 1st Lt. Derwin Williams and Sgt. Chester Hosford of the Illinois National Guard’s 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team who were killed in action in Kunduz, Afghanistan July 6, 2009. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of them and remember my fallen friends. They paid for America’s freedom with their lives,” Irwin said.

This close call made Iwin feel like God had a plan for him.

“Before that, I did not live for the Lord at that time, I could probably sin with the best of them is what I have always said.”

God did in fact have a plan for Sgt. Irwin and that involved getting him home to Campbell County.

Irwin came back to the area where his family and his roots are after meeting his wife Tia on Facebook.

According to Irwin, it was Tia “that brought him home.”

“We started talking on Facebook. I lived in Georgia at that time, we were getting serious, and I would drive up from Georgia to see her on her lunch break and drive back down to Georgia, so me being from here and having family here, it just made sense that when her son was starting high school at CCHS, my son was graduating high school at Cartersville in Georgia and going on to college, so it was easier for me to move up here than for her to move to Georgia,” Irwin explained.

They have now been married for eight years; “Mr. and Mrs. Tombstone Medic, as he likes to say” on his Facebook page when he does videos of tombstones he has cleaned.

“She helps me with Tombstone Medic; she is my best employee and is the backbone of Tombstone Medic,” Irwin said.

To contact Tombstone Medic and sponsor or help support the cleaning of a veteran’s headstone or to hire him to clean a civilian headstone, call Irwin at 706.233.3401 or message him via his email. You can also check Tombstone Medic out on Facebook. (WLAF NEWS PUBLISHED-11/11/2025-6AM-PHOTOS SUBMITTED)