Posted on 05/12/2003 10:23:08 AM PDT by gubamyster
From the May 19, 2003 issue: Meet the men and women of Mortuary Affairs.
by Matt Labash
05/19/2003, Volume 008, Issue 35
"And so we brought our dead man home. Flew his body back, faxed the obits to the local papers, called the priests, the sexton, the florists and stonecutter. We act out things we cannot put in words."
--Thomas Lynch, "The Undertaking"
Camp Wolf, Kuwait
The backstretch of the Kuwait International Airport, like much of the rest of the country, is ugly. It is barren and arid, and the frequent sandstorms that whip through make the entire place look like it's been breaded in a Shake 'N' Bake bag. Yet there is a special pocket in this otherwise nondescript military tent city. It is a place where cause becomes effect, where military service is considered sacrament, where all the editorial-page flapjaw about "sacrifice" becomes haltingly, disturbingly real. It is the Theater Mortuary Evacuation Point.
At a gate on the camp's outskirts, I roll up in an SUV with Army Col. Richard Dillon, who oversees the 377th Theater Support Command, under which fall the Mortuary Affairs personnel from the 54th Quartermaster Company and two reserve units. Though we are comfortably in the rear, where quartermasters like Dillon usually do the unglamorous work of getting infantry types their bullets and beans, Dillon has brought along a sidearm--as mandated by the Army ever since a civilian contractor was murdered by a terrorist not far from here in January. "We took custody of the body to enable us to process his remains with the same dignity and respect of each of our own soldiers," says Dillon. Since that day, the men and women of Mortuary Affairs have grown considerably busier.
Dillon is tall with a thin mustache. He speaks in the plodding, carefully measured cadences of a computer specialist, which is what this reservist is in his civilian life--a life he hasn't known since his deployment in December 2001. "It's been over a year since I've heard a dog bark," he laments (although he re-upped for another stint when his initial year-long assignment expired). His wife and children live back in New Orleans, but he speaks in the geographically indistinguishable accent shared by many military lifers who, moving every two or three years, never get the chance to settle into regionalisms.
At the gate, we come to a crossroads. One road goes to the military side of the airport. The other is traveled only by Mortuary Affairs personnel, who bring along the bodies of deceased soldiers in order to send them home. Dillon made sure his people had access to a separate entrance, he says, because nothing shakes an incoming soldier's morale like seeing one of his fallen comrades returning home in a refrigeration truck.
The soldiers live in the space where they work. Descending into this subculture, one expects a certain amount of M*A*S*H-like black humor, for coping purposes, if no other. In advance of this visit, I have read a Gannett reporter's account of his travels with a forward collection team (the Mortuary Affairs troops who travel to the forward areas, so that individual units can drop off their deceased). Their helmet graffiti read "Don't Be the One" and "Smell the Dead." Here at Camp Wolf, these young soldiers also have pressure releases. They laugh about overweight reservists and assign vicious nicknames--"Juggernaut" to the sergeant with the large head, "PW" (for "P-- Whipped") for the officer they heard chatting up his girlfriend on the phone. But there is one thing the company commander, Capt. Brooks Brenkus, says is never, ever done: "We don't joke at all about remains."
Brenkus speaks with a clipped, bolt-action intensity, and still looks like the multisport high school athlete he was back in Maryland, even though he's a grand old man at 27 years of age. That's a year older than the average age of the deceased coming through. (Of the 128 publicly identified American dead--there are 140 total as of May 5--a fifth weren't old enough to order a drink in a bar.) Brenkus knows about death--his father died when he was 15, forcing him to be "the rock of the family." And he has spent plenty of time in bars, where he has heard people talk about war.
Under the influence of beer and bravado, people say stupid things. He hears it all the time. He hears them talk about "acceptable risks," and about the relatively few casualties--"it could've been worse." He is just waiting, upon his return, to hear someone say, "Tough break--those who died signed up for the job," or, "It serves them right, they should've never been in Iraq." If he does, he says, "you can come visit me in jail, because I would lose it without thinking twice." For this conflict is not something he's just watched on TV. "I've seen the face of nearly every person that's died in this war," he says. "It's more than just another war to me."
The dead leave this military life just as they came in: in a blizzard of paperwork. They come out of the refrigeration trucks (called "reefers") usually in body bags--which the ever-euphemistic Army now calls "human remains pouches." They are brought in through a reception area, where there is a painting done by one of Brenkus's men, inspired by a picture Brenkus brought back from Normandy. It depicts a fallen soldier, sprawled next to his M-16, with an angel ministering to him. It is inscribed: "Think not only upon their passing, remember the glory of their spirit."
They are brought through swinging doors to the back of the processing tent, which by necessity is constantly Cloroxed and extremely well air-conditioned, since the smell would be unbearable in the 120-degree heat. The Mortuary Affairs specialists here are not morticians--the actual embalming and cosmetic work gets done at Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware. Personal effects come back with the deceased, attached in a pouch to their wrists--assuming they still have wrists. All of this must be catalogued, and scrupulously accounted for. There is paperwork for everything. There is the DD-2064, the overseas death certificate, and the DD-894, the fingerprint record, which includes a space where "amputations, abnormalities, missing fingers and/or dermis" can be noted. They catalog it all, from the dead soldier's X-rays to his tattoos.
In another tent is a personal effects depot, where I watch a team go through belongings that a soldier left behind at camp--in this case, it was pocket change. They separate high-dollar items from low-dollar items, military possessions from civilian ones. Back in the processing tent is where they sort through whatever came in with the deceased. Every dollar will be registered by serial number, to make sure it all gets back to the family. All possessions are sent to a stateside depot to be cleaned. Nothing with blood on it will be forwarded to the family. Neither will anything that has the remotest possibility of upsetting a survivor--say, a photo of a woman other than the deceased's wife. To sequester these sensitive belongings, the Mortuary Affairs specialists, nicknamed "92 Mikes" after their Army job classification number, must fill out more paperwork. "There's a certificate of destruction that has to be filled out," says Col. Dillon. All of these records will be kept forever, since they still get family queries going back to Vietnam, Korea, and even the Civil War.
From there, the deceased are put in metal transfer cases and placed in refrigeration trailers until they can be flown out. Before they leave, they have ice poured on their torsos, to keep them between 34 and 38 degrees. Actually freezing the remains, says Dillon, would "make the mortician's job almost impossible." The bodies are strapped into the cases, and molded plastic headrests are placed beneath the heads to prepare them for the trip to Germany or Dover. Before they leave, they go through Evacuation Section Quality Control. Everything is triple-checked. And all of this, the 92 Mikes will tell you with solemn pride, is done around the clock--sleep is often not an option--so that they can get their fallen comrades on a plane within 10 hours.
If you ask them why the rush--the dead will remain that way--they recoil. They live by a credo you'll read as the sign-off on all of Col. Dillon's e-mails: "There is no greater honor than to serve those who have made the ultimate sacrifice." In the grim arithmetic of a 92 Mike, a speedy return = honoring the dead.
In a group interview in the reception area, I learn more about these unique soldiers. Some want to be morticians or forensic scientists, others just want to pay off their college. Some of them got into this lightly, but nobody stays in that way. It is the one military occupational specialty that the Army permits you to beg out of with no recriminations if you feel you can't hack it. A litmus test, of sorts, comes during training back in Richmond, Va., where prospective 92 Mikes spend time in the mortuary and see all manner of death. Not that it can really prepare them for the field experience. In training, "they'll bring out a decomposed body, so you can see the severities of death," says Specialist Kyna Bullock, who at 24 is already a two-war veteran, having done the same job in Afghanistan. "But it's just a guy off the street. It changes everything when you see somebody come through here that has on a uniform like you, that lost their life fighting for a cause. I've been to morgues several times. But the first time I processed the remains of an American soldier, I can still remember his name. . . . You can get a remain in and it may not look like that person. But when you look at their ID card, you look at their dog tags, you go through their wallet and see pictures of their family. . . . It changes things a lot."
The Mortuary Affairs team is a close-knit lot, not only because of the nature of their jobs, but because many regular soldiers think it is bad juju to associate with them during times of war--a bit like asking the Grim Reaper to ride shotgun. "They don't even want to understand what you do," says Brenkus. "That's not a thought a soldier wants to have. I respect that feeling. I would feel the same way." Temperamentally, there are plenty of self-described outsiders. "I was the weirdest kid on the block," says Staff Sergeant Gregory Jones. "I dragged roadkill home--my mother would literally hit me with a broom to get it off the porch." But most don't seem to have an obsession with death. "We're a very eclectic bunch," says Bullock. "We're all pretty weird, but we're weird in our own way." Oddly, the importance of the job seems to spoil anyone for other military occupational specialties. The 92 Mikes have a high reenlistment rate. But there are still plenty for whom it becomes overwhelming.
Brenkus says it sometimes becomes too big a load to shoulder. His people see "bodies burnt, mutilated, beaten to death, filled with maggots, shot to pieces . . . but they go on working knowing that they will be the last people to ever see the body again. . . . You can [only] deflect that emotion for so long." While they have teams of mental health professionals at their disposal, whom they are encouraged to chat with regularly, Brenkus says that realistically, he will lose 25 percent of his people after this deployment. Back home, he worked with psychiatrists from the Army's medical headquarters at Walter Reed Hospital to develop pre- and post-deployment treatment plans, after tallying over 20 soldiers who needed treatment for depression or for making "suicide gestures." "The truth is," he says, "we all have issues. You can't see what we have and not hurt." Even though he can't imagine doing another job, he says, "I will not miss coming from chow to the stench of death or aura of sadness and grief that surrounds that processing tent."
While you might expect them to build up a doctor's desensitization to pain and death, just from the frequency with which they encounter it, I don't sense this. They never see the one thing a doctor does: a patient who can leave of his own accord. They witness the worst that mankind has to offer, seeing what combat looks like when it all goes wrong, as it inevitably does. Over the last two months, each has made memories he'll never be able to shake. For one soldier, it was reading the helmet graffiti of a fallen Marine, which said: "I fight, so you don't have to." For Staff Sergeant Jones, it was the day NBC's David Bloom, embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, came through. "He risked his life out there, on the front lines with the 3rd ID," Jones marvels. "This guy came into our living rooms every weekend [on the Saturday Today Show] with Soledad O'Brien. Maybe you want to meet him. Maybe you don't. But it's strange to meet him in here. That was difficult."
Jones once worked in a civilian mortuary but says the difference is striking. "To see the agony some of these soldiers went through, you won't ever forget this. Never, ever, ever. I don't care if you have Alzheimer's." In the civilian world, he says, "You don't have mortar rounds out there on the streets, hand grenades, land mines. You get angry because of the conditions they come in. You wonder if they were captured first, and then this was done to them. That's where it gets personal. Because we're soldiers. You put this on," he says, patting his uniform. "You become a family, see what I mean? A nation is judged on how we take care of our dead, and we do the best job throughout the world in handling our dead."
And to their credit, not just our dead. Already, Col. Dillon is working on a plan to catalog the remains and personal effects of the Iraqi dead, as well--then to bury them at their place of death in accordance with their Islamic customs. This is partly, he says, to prove to them "we're not infidels." And it is partly, as Bullock, who handled enemy dead in Afghanistan, says, that "it's still a remain. It's still somebody's family. You have to treat that remain with utmost respect, because that's our job, no matter who it is. It could be Saddam himself. If it's a remain, we process it and do it with respect."
A WEEK LATER and half a world away, I shoot up the Coastal Highway of Delaware from Rehoboth Beach, where yuppie parents stuff their children with Thai food and Grotto's Pizza. It's a relief to be back in the land of plenty, spying crab-houses and Four Gospel churches, Harley shops and spring produce stands promising strawberries, sweet corn, and "candylopes."
I make my way up to Dover AFB, which houses the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs. For the fallen soldier, it is the last stop before going home to their families. It is here that active duty and reservists from all four branches, along with medical examiners and morticians, finish the work that their counterparts in Kuwait began. It is the only Department of Defense port mortuary in the continental United States, and DoD policy prohibits me from going to the morgue when deceased are present. Though Baghdad fell two weeks earlier, it makes no difference to the dead, who are still arriving at a semi-regular, albeit slower, clip.
I'm taken to another office building to do a group interview with an array of mortuary staffers, but before we start, I excuse myself to the men's room. Where the urinal puck would usually be is a sticker of Osama bin Laden with the inscription, "In your face." It's small wonder that personnel here like to piss on him. They have had to clean up his handiwork again and again: from the U.S.S. Cole and embassy bombings, to Khobar Towers, to the 9/11 Pentagon attack.
Dover is famous for its C-5 planes, which are big enough to transport half a dozen Greyhound buses or 48 Cadillacs. They help provide one-third of the nation's strategic airlift capability, but the ice-filled metal transfer cases are what we gather to discuss. The planes carrying the dead come at all hours. To weary morgue staffers, it seems like it's always in the middle of the night. Though there are no onlookers, the arrivals are met by an honor guard for what is called a "dignified transfer." Before anyone touches the transfer cases, however, a senior officer, a chaplain, and Dover's acting mortuary director Bill Zwicharowski, a former Marine whom everyone calls Ziggy, enter the plane, making sure the cases are flag-draped, draping them if they aren't.
From the time the chaplain says a prayer and the honor guard boards the plane to transfer the cases to hearses which then take them a half-mile away to the mortuary, there are but two goals: to positively identify the remains and to return them home to their families as quickly as possible. "A minute, an hour, a day, to a husband or wife is like an eternity," says Ziggy. "We've actually driven a hearse from here to Vermont because we could get it there quicker than flying. It may not seem like much, but when the family says, 'Can you get them here before dark today?' and the only way to do it is drive them by hearse, guess what? You drive them by hearse."
The remains go first to the medical examiner. While the families have been notified by this point that it is believed their loved one has perished, the military takes no chances, making sure to positively identify the deceased either through fingerprinting, dental records, or, if all else fails, DNA. The bodies are also screened for explosive ordnance, which is sometimes still embedded in the corpse. Medical examiners like Navy Cmdr. Craig Mallak don't just do identifications. ("We're going to do our level best to account for everybody. If we can, nobody will ever go into the Tomb of the Unknown again.") They also assemble the pieces that tell the story. "Sometimes we get portions of bodies," Mallak says. "Sometimes aircraft pieces. Everything is tracked all the way through the whole process." It is paramount, they say, to get every piece that belongs to every individual identified--not only for burial, but to fill in the gaps. Occasionally, after enough time goes by, a family member wants to know what really happened, and it is the medical examiner who will be able to piece together the story: for instance, whether a driver was shot before his vehicle crashed.
Around here, everyone has his taboos and superstitions, his rituals and preferences. Some stay glued to the television to see who'll be coming through next. Some won't turn it on. Some talk to the dead, some won't go near them. For some, especially the medical science and mortician types, dealing with the bodies isn't nearly as difficult as rifling through the personal effects. "I personally," says Ziggy, "would rather--and doc would too--work with anatomy as opposed to reading half-written letters, or seeing baby pictures, or a little boy's shoe. [Personal Effects] is a tough place to work." Others want, even need, to make a connection to the deceased. Staff Sergeant Curtis Tilghman, who assists with embalming, takes regular trips to Personal Effects. "I'll walk back through there, just to look at a picture or something," he says. "I don't know--sometimes the names just stick with me. I'll hear that name again. It just makes me work harder. Because I used to be infantry, so when I see a lot of those guys come through here, I take it, you know, personal. I always say to myself, 'That could've been me.' I'm blessed."
From the medical examiner, it is off to Ziggy's side of the operation. There, the body is embalmed and fitted with a new, individually tailored uniform that contains every rank and decoration for which the deceased is eligible. Just as important, Ziggy goes to work doing the cosmetology and restorative art that can make the difference between an open and closed casket. "We go to extremes to try to offer the family some viewability--extremes that probably the civilian sector would not," the former mortuary owner says. The military has different classifications of viewability. One of them is called "head wrap and dress"--in which, when damage has been done to the head or face that cannot be compensated for with a mortician's gifts, the head is wrapped in clean gauze, so that the family can just see the body.
At first, it sounds like a morbid extreme to go to in the elusive attempt to gain "closure"--a word that one mortuary staffer after another uses incessantly, both here and in Kuwait. But Ziggy tells a story, from when he was a mortician in the civilian world, that illustrates its importance. Years ago, a good friend of his was killed, and his body wasn't fit for viewing. During the funeral service, his friend's young daughter approached him and wanted to see her dad. He balked, but she insisted. "What if I let you hold his hand?" he asked. She agreed. He opened his friend's casket, just a little, "and she held her dad's hand and talked to him for 20 minutes," he says. "It could've been all day for all I cared. She felt and touched and made contact with her father. So when someone asks me why would you do it, it's because you're seeing your son, you're touching his hands, you're seeing his uniform on him, as opposed to a metal casket."
Sometimes, it's not just the family members who need closure. At Camp Wolf in Kuwait, I met Staff Sergeant Carlos Roman, a former infantryman who now works the last leg on the Kuwaiti end of the Mortuary Affairs line. He double- and triple-checks that everything has been properly prepared. Then he puts his fallen comrades on a plane and prays over their transfer cases. Roman speaks with a thick Puerto Rican accent, and has a lineman's build, a bristly high-and-tight, and a pair of hard brown eyes that could intimidate an enemy into surrender.
Often, the easiest way to do his job is to make those eyes stop seeing. "When we get ready to work," he says, "It's like I'm standing here, and it's a different person who steps out. I'm seeing, but I'm not seeing what I'm seeing. I'm just there to do my job. And once I finish doing it, and I'm done with it all, they're in the transfer case, they're sealed, they're in the plane, they're gone--that's when I take my moment alone. Have I cried and shed tears out here? Yes I have. Many nights. But I've already said that regardless of what I see, I'm not going to stop working. Because I'm still here. My family has the privilege of still having me. The other family members of these service members that I'm seeing don't have that. It's not going to be possible, you understand? Some of them are just not going to be able to be seen. And I'm the one that has the final image of them--me. Somebody that doesn't even know them. I feel bad. Who am I to be able to see them in this last condition they're in? On the other hand, I wouldn't want my family to see me like that. So in a sense, I take that last look. And when I get my moment, I do my thing. I speak to God in my own way. I say the things I need to say. And I pray for all of them. I pray for their families."
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.