The grass hasn't always been greener at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, but in the next couple of years, it will be.

The famous Veterans Affairs cemetery at Punchbowl is getting a grassy $9 million makeover that will level the ground and turn what's now a light green lawn into a deep green, cemetery officials said.

"It will look a whole lot different," said cemetery foreman Larry Thornton. "They just started laying sod within the last week, so I haven't got a lot of feedback yet. But when I'm up there and a visitor walks by, they say, 'Oh, this is beautiful.' "

The re-sodding over 40 acres of burial space is part of the cemetery's "Millenium Grounds" project. There are more than 49,000 burials at the cemetery, which opened in 1949.

A larger effort to spruce up some of the country's older national cemeteries has been under way for years, Thornton said. There are 141 national cemeteries in all. The VA, through its National Cemetery Administration, administers 125 of them.

"We're 60 years old, so the grass — you get a little sinkage. It's uneven out there, and we want to make it nice and smooth and pleasant," Thornton said.

Since World War II, a lot of people have made pilgrimages to veterans cemeteries overseas, including locations such as Normandy, France, he said.

"Those cemeteries are pretty much pristine," Thornton said. "I think Congress said, 'Hey, we need to put that much effort into our cemeteries here in the U.S.' "

Akahi Services, Pearl City, has an approximately $4.5 million contract to complete half of Punchbowl's grass, Thornton said. Sections of the cemetery to the right of the entrance drive will be worked on over the next year.

Thornton said sod replacement work on the left half of the cemetery will probably cost another $4.5 million or more and will start after the right half is done.

As part of the renovation, graves will be leveled and markers will be cleaned. The soil will be tilled to a depth of about eight inches and replanted with a new, darker green Bermuda grass variety called Celebration.

The grass that's there now is common Bermuda grass, Thornton said. That grass is being killed to make way for the new sod, which is grown locally.

Thornton has a cemetery layout map and buried identification markers for each grave to make sure the headstones go back in the right place. The contractor also is required to have a survey done before any work, "and they've done a pretty meticulous survey, and they know exactly where to put (the markers) back," Thornton said.