How We Bury the War Dead

[Valin]

WSJ:

Bringing fallen troops home is a fairly modern idea. Today, the military sees it as a sacred duty
YOCHI J. DREAZEN, GARY FIELDS
5/29/10

The U.S. military didn't always bring home its dead. In the Seminole Indian Wars in the early 1800s, most of the troops were buried near where they fell. The remains of some dead officers were collected and sent back to their families, but only if the men's relatives paid all of the costs. Families had to buy and ship a leaded coffin to a designated military quartermaster, and after the body had been disinterred, they had to cover the costs of bringing the coffin home.

Today, air crews have flown the remains of more than 5,000 dead troops back to the U.S. since the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan began.

For those charged with bringing out the dead, it is one of the military's most emotionally taxing missions. The men and women of the Air Force's Air Mobility Command function as the nation's pallbearers, ferrying flag-draped remains to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware from battlefields half a world away.

The missions take a heavy toll on the air crews, but many of the pilots and loadmasters say their work is part of a sacred military obligation to fallen troops and their families. Air Force Capt. Tenaya Humphrey was a young girl when her father, Maj. Zenon Goc, died in a military plane crash in Texas in 1992. She remembers his body being flown to Dover before his burial in Colorado.

Capt. Humphrey and her husband, Matthew, are now C-17 pilots who regularly fly dead troops back to the U.S. and then on to their home states for final burial. "It's emotional for everyone who's involved," she says. "But it's important for the family to know that at every step along the way their loved one is watched over and cared for."

Bringing fallen troops home is a relatively modern idea. Until the late 19th century, military authorities did little to differentiate and identify dead troops. Roughly 14,000 soldiers died from combat and disease during the Mexican-American War of 1846, but only 750 sets of remains were recovered and brought back, by covered wagon, to the U.S. for burial. None of the fallen soldiers were ever personally identified.

The modern system for cataloguing and burying military dead effectively began during the Civil War, when the enormity of the carnage triggered a wholesale revolution in how the U.S. treated fallen troops. Congress decided that the defenders of the Union were worthy of special burial sites for their sacrifices, and set up a program of national cemeteries.
During the war, more than 300,000 dead Union soldiers were buried in small cemeteries scattered across broad swaths of the U.S. When the fighting stopped, military authorities launched an ambitious effort to collect the remains and rebury them in the handful of national cemeteries.

The move "established the precedent that would be followed in future wars, even when American casualties lay in foreign soil," Michael Sledge writes in "Soldier Dead," a history of how the U.S. has handled its battlefield fatalities.
The first time the U.S. made a serious effort to repatriate the remains of soldiers killed overseas came during the Spanish American War of 1898, when the military brought back the remains of thousands of troops who were killed in places like the Philippines and Cuba.
The relatives of fallen troops in both world wars were given the choice of having their loved ones permanently interred in large overseas cemeteries or brought back to the U.S. for reburial.

(Snip)

The military reshaped its procedures for handling war dead during the Korean War, when territory changed hands so many times that temporary U.S. battlefield cemeteries were at constant risk of falling into enemy hands. In the winter of 1950, the U.S. launched a policy of "concurrent return," which called for flying the bodies of fallen troops back to the U.S. as quickly as possible.

The military now goes to tremendous lengths to recover the remains of fallen troops. In March 2002, a Navy Seal named Neil Roberts fell out of the back of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan and was cornered and killed by militants on the ground. The U.S. sent in a second helicopter to attempt a rescue, but six members of its crew were killed in the ensuing firefight.
Then-Brig. Gen. John Rosa, the deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, told reporters that U.S. commanders ordered the high-risk recovery mission to ensure that Petty Officer Roberts' body didn't fall into enemy hands.
"There was an American, for whatever reason, [who] was left behind," Gen. Rosa said at the time. "And we don't leave Americans behind."

The military's system of concurrent return is basically still in use today, with modern technology cutting the lag time between when troops die in the field and when they are returned to their families down to as little as one day.

On May 16, Navy Petty Officer Zarian Wood, a 29-year-old medic who had deployed overseas less than a month earlier, died from wounds suffered in a bomb blast in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. Marine Cpl. Nicolas Parada-Rodriguez, the son of immigrants who moved to the U.S. two decades ago, was killed in Helmand that same day.
The following evening, the remains of both men were slowly lowered from the cargo deck of a civilian 747 that the military had chartered to fly their bodies back to Dover. Cpl. Parada-Rodriguez's relatives could be heard weeping as the transfer case carrying his body was taken off the plane.

The plane that brought the two men back to their families was operated by Evergreen International Airlines Inc., a military contractor. The Pentagon employs four other companies, including UPS and Federal Express, to help bring bodies back to Dover. Officials at the base say that 70% of the dead are flown back on the civilian planes, with the remainder coming home aboard military aircraft.
The military doesn't have air crews who are assigned specifically to the mission of bringing out the nation's war dead. Instead, the work is assigned to crews depending on their locations and the speed with which they can stop at bases in Afghanistan and Iraq to pick up fallen troops and their military escorts.

Air crews are tight-knit groups of men and women who typically pass the long hours in the air and on the ground telling jokes and needling each other. But veterans of the repatriation missions say the mood among the flight crew changes immediately after they get orders to pick up fallen troops.
"You can sense it in the crew," says Maj. Brian O'Connell, a C-17 pilot who has flown the remains of a half-dozen soldiers and Marines. "As soon as everybody knows about it, the attitude changes, a lot."

The long flights from the war zones mean that the air crews spend hours with the flag-covered remains. Air Force Tech Sgt. Donny Maheux, a C-17 loadmaster, says he often finds himself staring at the metallic transfer cases holding the bodies of the dead soldiers and wondering what kind of people they were. "I'm looking at [the remains] the whole flight," he says. "Sometimes I wonder, 'What if it was my family on the receiving end?'"

(Snip)

Remembering Adam
Lance Cpl. Kevin Adam Lucas had volunteered to relieve a fellow Marine, who had a pregnant wife, from taking the lead during a foot patrol. The 20-year-old was killed a half hour later

[nickydog]

Very timely, Valin. Thank you.