McFeatters — Landfill not suitable for human remains

By DALE McFEATTERS

Scripps Howard News Service

One of the many attributes that speak so well of the American military is the care it takes in retrieving its fallen and providing for final interment. The great military cemeteries here and in Europe are testament to that care and pride.

Somehow, however, the military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware has been dogged by a series of incidents where human remains were mishandled.

The initial scandal was that, between 2003 and 2008, unclaimed or unidentified body parts of the victims of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were cremated and turned over to a private contractor who mixed them with biomedical waste and incinerated the remains.

What little was left over was dumped in a landfill, hardly a proper resting place.

News accounts say the practice stopped in 2008 in favor of burying the ashes at sea, a practice that has some place in military tradition.

Now comes the disclosure, mentioned only briefly in a report on management flaws at the Dover mortuary, that the partial remains of 9/11 victims at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pa., where United Flight 93 crashed, aborting one of the terrorists’ planned attacks on Washington, were also sent to a landfill.

The whereabouts and the chain of custody of the remains seem to be a matter of considerable and unnecessary confusion.

The Somerset County coroner said all the unidentified remains from the location near Shanksville were buried in three caskets at the memorial site as part of ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But apparently some material from the victims of 9/11, perhaps most likely from the Pentagon site, that could not be tested or identified was disposed of in a landfill.

The military’s mortuary attendants have a grisly and unpleasant, though necessary, job and one can understand why they and their superiors just want to hurry up and be done with it, even as more bodies arrive from battlefields.

This revelation follows a series of disclosures about Arlington National Cemetery, which should be the gold standard of military resting places, where bodies were placed in the wrong graves, graves were doubled up and funerary urns bearing ashes were found in heaps of discarded materials.

There is no excuse for this careless disposal of even unidentifiable remains. The weapons of modern warfare, sadly, ensure that this will not be the last time we face this problem. Surely there is a solution that is dignified and respectful. A landfill isn’t it.

Dale McFeatters is chief editorial writer and a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.