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Last detail: Mortuary unit cares for fallen |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Thursday, 27 May 2004 |
Marines who quietly recover, prepare bodies of troops, wage their own emotional battle
TAQADDUM, Iraq -- Jim Patterson had seen painful things.
But nothing quite prepared him for the day he arrived at a battle scene and an officer handed him a worn slip of paper found deep in the clothing of a Marine who had been killed. Patterson unfolded it to find the printout of an ultrasound, the hazy outline of an unborn child who never will meet his father.
"I'm not an old man, but I'm an old Marine," Patterson, a plain-spoken 36-year-old, said later. "And I've aged a lot in a short period of time."
At this U.S. base near Fallujah, Patterson heads a small, obscure military unit with a uniquely sensitive mission: "mortuary affairs" in Iraq's bloodiest region, recovering the remains and personal effects of U.S. troops, as well as some Iraqis caught in crossfire or killed by American forces.
Patterson and his team of 19 other Marines perform a solemn science. They are, at once, evidence collectors, therapists and morticians who can find themselves sifting bone fragments from a suicide-bombing site one morning and inventorying an Iraqi's personal effects that night. It is an assignment few in the military are ready to accept.
They are busier than the Pentagon ever expected. During last year's invasion there were 300 Marine mortuary affairs specialists in Iraq; today there are 40. Yet with more Americans dying last month than in any month since the invasion, Patterson's crew has processed on average a body a day since the first one arrived March 25.
He never imagined he would be doing this. Patterson, a chief warrant officer, specializes in defending against chemical, biological and nuclear warfare. Like the White House, he once thought that would be a useful specialty in Iraq. It wasn't. So as U.S. casualties mounted late last year, the Marines turned to him with a more pressing task--mortuary affairs.
Team formed
He formed and trained a team, and the Marines set off for Iraq with the 1st Force Service Support Group, which provides food, ammunition and other support for U.S. troops stationed west of Baghdad.
Here in the broad, flat plains 50 miles west of the capital, the mortuary affairs group settled in a bare concrete airplane hangar, scoured it clean and set up eight surgical stretchers. They built plywood worktables and spread sawdust on the floor. Patterson got a heavy steel safe to protect the paper files in case of an attack on the base.
The first body they saw was a 20-year-old Marine. The scene was grisly. One of the young men handling the body simply froze, then began to sob.
Late that night, Patterson opened to the first page of a new leather-bound journal.
"Today we had our first KIA," he wrote. "One of my Marines had a tough time. . . . I'm doing OK. Some tears and some bad dreams. God give me strength.
"We will remember," he wrote, and closed the book. He wondered what he had gotten himself into.
The pace picked up. On the first recovery mission in the field--the site of a huge roadside bomb attack--a reservist on the team who ran a funeral home in Massachusetts and had seen hundreds of corpses in civilian life, was staggered by the devastation. With tears in his eyes, Cpl. Daniel Cotnoir, a ruddy 31-year-old father of two, steadied himself with a hand on Patterson's shoulder.
Beyond wildest dreams
"Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this," Cotnoir whispered to Patterson. "I thought I had seen everything. I hadn't."
Over the coming days and weeks, they learned. They learned to expect the shock of seeing bodies in the same uniforms they wore. They learned to live with bags packed and refrigerated truck ready to run. Within 20 minutes of receiving a call, they would be on the road with everything from forensic brushes to mechanical "jaws of life" for recovering remains. They rooted in charred bits of steel wreckage. They took cover while under gunfire before resuming the search.
Back at the hangar, they broke into teams of four. Two people handled each body, removing ammunition, searching for shrapnel with a metal detector, carefully setting aside personal effects. They found photos of wives and girlfriends, good-luck charms, eyeglasses, an unmailed letter home with the words, "I am going to be OK." An ultrasound. Two others searched for identifying details such as dog tags and tattoos while recording the effects of war: width of puncture wounds, degree of burns, performance of bulletproof vests.
The numbers climbed. When they had eight in one day, they slept in shifts. By mid-May they had processed 62 bodies. They have come to call them "fallen angels."
The job was taking a mounting emotional toll. One member of the group dropped out. But the others have stayed. Lance Cpl. Christian Slater, a brawny 21-year-old from New Orleans with a shaved head, knew a guy who worked the same job last year and was left emotionally wrecked. Slater searched for his own way to handle it.
"I just try to separate myself, just think about each step I'm supposed to do," he said. "I try to keep myself as set off from them as possible."
Cotnoir, the reservist, talked to the younger men about staying removed.
"It's almost like a fake mental wall that you build up, and some people need to build a higher wall than others," he said.
But Cotnoir also learned to spot the danger signs of others sinking in too deeply.
"They will stand there and stare," he said. "They place themselves in that Marine's shoes, imagining what might have happened. And you try to talk them out of that. Don't project yourself onto what that Marine might have gone through."
Patterson requested and received a satellite phone and an Internet connection to ensure the Marines had as much contact with family as possible.
Often, the hardest part was watching another Marine arrive to identify the dead. Many of them were bandaged, walking over from the nearby medical trauma center after weathering the same incident that killed a comrade.
"They are the only ones here from that unit who can make the identification, who can say, `I came in with him, I was in the firefight with him,'" Cotnoir said.
It was nowhere in the Marines' manual, but Cotnoir turned to using his experience preparing for open-casket funerals to help patch up the remains, to make the scene as bearable as possible.
"I can close their eyes, close their mouths, and present a clean image like any other funeral they would be used to seeing, where the body looks more at peace and resting."
From here, the military flies service members' bodies to Kuwait. If they haven't been draped in flags by then, it is done before they are relayed to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for official identification.
For other bodies, the destination is Fallujah or nearby towns. U.S. troops may disarm and treat a wounded Iraqi on the battlefield, in some cases bringing him to the military hospital at the base. If he dies, the mortuary affairs unit takes over.
All treated alike
"We treat every person as if he was a guy just walking his kid to school who was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Patterson said. "If we get into that--well, he is the enemy--that is not our thing. They are all somebody's kid."
Patterson calls local contacts and provides a photo, a time and place of death, and a request for information. Sometimes he delivers the remains to a family, and other times they come to the base with a plain wooden coffin.
"I have an Iraqi tea set and I lay it out. I talk to the interpreter. We sit," Patterson said. "We say we're sorry for your loss. He says, `It's Allah's will.'"
After two months of this work, Patterson is weary.
"I know now that men are not bulletproof. I'm not sure that my Marines have realized that yet," he said.
With every new face he thinks, "He could have been the president of the United States. He could have been the guy who cured cancer."
He wonders what life will be like for him after all this. He has been eyeing a 70-acre horse ranch in northern Maine. His son could be happy there. It's got a nice old Victorian house on it. It's quiet.
On a still afternoon, he opens the steel safe in his office and stares at the tall stack of manila folders inside, each with a name and case number in black ink across the top.
"If you'd have told me four months ago that I'd have filled this safe with folders, I wouldn't have believed you," he said.
"I could tell you about every single kid who has gone through here," he said after a long pause. "I cry for them all."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0405260265may26,1,7819213.story?coll=chi-news-hed |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.” T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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