An extremely disturbing news story of what happened to the remains of 272 U.S. service members has recently been picked up by news outlets and has began recirculating in media again, after initially making the news in 2011.
We tend to assume that when young men and woman have made the ultimate sacrifice and paid with their lives for their country, their remains will be treated with great care and the utmost respect every step of the way. As the story revealed, this is not always the case.
The shocking news was unraveling in Washington and elsewhere about how some U.S. service members’ remains have been treated in the years between 2003 and 2008. NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, Jim Miklaszewski, reported:
“Dover Air Force Base is the first stop for all of America ‘s war dead on their final trip back home. But behind the dignified ceremony there’s a growing scandal over the fact that many partial remains of US service members were unceremoniously dumped in this Virginia landfill, and it’s a far greater number than previously disclosed. Over four years, the Air Force dumped more than 2700 cremated partial remains in the landfill. Nearly 1,000 of those remains had been identified through DNA , belonging to 274 US military killed in the wars.”
Miklaszewski said the U.S. Air Force never informed service members’ families of the practice, leaving the families feeling shocked and betrayed. Air Force officials had struggled earlier that day to explain how human remains could be cremated, then dumped right along with medical waste. Democratic Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey allegedly had been trying to get to the bottom of the Dover issue for months and suggested the Air Force was trying to cover it up:
“It is such an obvious, flagrant desecration that if they didn’t know it, they didn’t want to know it.”
But Miklaszewski continued to list more problems of the undignified treatment of the service members’ remains in Dover:
“Partial remains of some service members have been lost. And in one case, the mutilated arm was sawed off a deceased Marine so his uniform would fit for burial. All this follows the startling revelations that Army personnel at Arlington National Cemetery had buried some veterans in the wrong graves or lost their remains altogether. There are two ongoing investigations here at the Pentagon into Dover , and Air Force officials said today they will apologize to those 274 families involved in the landfill controversy, but only if they call.”
While opinions may differ of how well the U.S. is looking after its citizens while they are still alive, most will surely agree that to give your life for your country, and end up dumped in a landfill together with medical waste, is just horrid. And to this day, we don’t know how many troops were involved, because the Air Force complained that they would have to comb through the records of more than 6,300 troops to find out, according to GroopSpeak. But the Air Force chain of command has accepted responsibility, and in 2009, then newly-elected President Barack Obama lifted the media blackout for military casualties. Today the military heroes are getting the respect they deserve.
