Stolen Valor: Air Force Officials Grossly Mishandled War Dead, Report Claims
An 18-month investigation has revealed three senior officials at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware engaged in “gross mismanagement” over the base’s mortuary, which handles America’s returning war dead. The investigation revealed the officials lost body parts for two soldiers who died serving in Afghanistan, shoddy inventory controls and lax supervision, the New York Times reports.
The Air Force investigation reported the mortuary “misplaced a dead soldier’s ankle and another set of remains that had been stored in a plastic bag.” As if that weren’t bad enough, “employees also sawed off the damaged arm bone of a Marine so he could fit in his uniform and coffin.”
Military officials claim these incidents occurred because Dover officials suffered from handling thousands of dead bodies, many with gruesome injuries making bodies difficult to prepare for burial.
The three senior officials were disciplined but not fired. Col. Robert H. Edmondson, the former commander of the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, who left his position as part of a regular rotation last year, received a letter of reprimand, effectively ending any further promotions. Trevor Dean, Colonel Edmondson’s former deputy, and Quinton R. Keel, the former mortuary director, both civilians, were demoted within the last two months and moved to lesser jobs at Dover, although not in the mortuary.
The chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, called the lapses “systemic issues.” He said that they had since been corrected but that he could not say for sure that other mistakes had not been made. He acknowledged one notable statement in the Air Force investigation from an unnamed mortuary employee — that the mortuary lost body parts “every two years” — and said the Pentagon had named a panel to further review procedures at Dover.
There’s something completely unacceptable about this. If the government is sending young Americans overseas to fight and die for wars that might not even be legit, the very least they can do is respect those same soldiers upon their return. It’s not much to ask the government to treat the war dead with care to provide closure for families and provide them with proper burials. In the same vein, we should also expect the living soldiers to have employment opportunities and mental health counseling.
Dover Air Force Base is treated with reverence. It’s where the flag-draped coffins arrive and where presidents greet the returning war dead on the tarmac. In some respects it is sacred ground. It’s particularly troubling that Dover Air Force Base is treated publicly as a place of respect, then behind the scenes officials acted with such disregard to the soldiers.
According to the Washington Post:
Troubles first surfaced in April 2009 when technicians noticed something amiss while conducting an inventory of body parts stored in a walk-in refrigerator.
A sealed plastic bag that was supposed to contain a shattered ankle from a soldier killed in Afghanistan was empty, according to the investigations. The ankle had been stored in the refrigerator seven months earlier, but the plastic bag was slit at the bottom and a frantic search turned up no sign of the remains.
About the same time, supervisors learned that a similar problem had occurred three months earlier, when two plastic bags containing body parts were also found slit and emptied. In that incident, technicians found what they believed were the missing remains in trays on storage racks underneath the bags.
Another empty plastic bag was found in July 2009. Missing was a four-inch-long piece of flesh recovered from an F-15 fighter jet crash in Afghanistan; two airmen had died and medical examiners weren’t certain to whom the missing body part belonged. It was never located.
The report demonstrates a consistent pattern of disregard for many soldiers killed in action. Stolen valor refers to something else entirely, but there’s no other appropriate phrase that works.
(Flag-draped coffin photo via Bigstock)
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