Disposing of the Dead

One of the principles I try to convey to my students of military history and culture is that the fundamental, central experience of the soldier is to kill or be killed. All other activities of military personnel are designed to support that focal act.

The death of a soldier on a battlefield can be massaged and portrayed as either glorious or horrible, but dealing with the remains is always a problem. It used to be that the dead were left to crumble on the field of glory, unless the locals plundered the dead and disposed of the remains in order to be able to carry on their lives. Peasants looted the fields. In the case of Custer's last stand, the women of the tribes he fought came to loot and desecrate the corpses, with the same thoroughness they used to process buffalo after a hunt. But the Sioux were nomadic and would soon depart, too. Peasants of Europe and other places, who lived where their bellicose brethren fought, often had to clear their fields themselves before they could harvest or plant, and continue their lives.

The disposal of military dead has a long, evolving history. When the ancient Greeks were victorious, they brought their dead home for proper burial, but stripped the dead of the losers, leaving the bodies to be reclaimed by their people after peace had been settled. At Marathon, however, the victors honored their dead on the field of battle with a huge burial mound.

The Carthaginians in Italy burned their dead with great honors, but buried the Romans in pits. During the time of Sun Tzu (roughly 500 BC), the common soldier was without significance, so whether he won or lost, his body was thrown into any convenient trench, hole, or lake. Sometimes, the bodies were used to patch holes in the Great Wall, a singular mark of disrespect. Even Chinese generals were lucky to receive a ceremonial burial with honors and recognition.

Ancient and medieval Europeans almost always stripped their battle dead of valuable arms and equipment, but left the bodies to molder. The 14th century Battle of Wisby is an intriguing exception to this practice. Because of the heat and stench, the locals did not have the stomach for plunder and buried the dead as quickly as possible, creating a rich deposit of remains and equipment for future discovery by archeologists. Usually, the bodies were left where they fell, especially when disease and pollution were feared. When the Muscovites returned to Smolensk in 1654 to wage war with the Poles for possession of that city for the second time that century, the Tsar directed his forces to camp in the spot where his father's army had been situated 20 years before, but the forward units arriving at the location found it still polluted with the dead of the last war, whose bones stuck white from the green grass. The Tsar camped his forces elsewhere.

The dead lying around after a battle typically had a discouraging impact on armies' morale, and often both the victor and loser left the field as quickly as possible, no matter what loot could be had. Sometimes, battlefields were left littered with the dead as a way of intimidating the opposing armies who must march through a region.

The United States army began to build cemeteries and mark and record the burial sites of its soldiers during the early 1800s. The Mexican War of 1846-48 illustrates some of the problems the army faced with keeping track of its dead. Several years after the Battle of Buena Vista, when the government planned to commemorate its fallen dead with a monument, no burial sites could be found for the soldiers, though General Zachary Taylor collected and buried his dead following the battle.

Units dedicated specifically to the collecting, recording and burying of battle dead were created during the American Civil War. After a battle, the dead were buried near the field of struggle, and marked with temporary markers that often disintegrated long before anyone had a chance to locate and identify the dead soldier. The Union soldiers might prefer to bury their own dead more formally, but they frequently dumped southern soldiers into trenches or even down wells. It is believed that more than 40% of the dead from the Civil War were still not identified by 1870. In such cases future battlefield archeologists are often the ones who find and identify the dead, if they are identifiable.

Identifying the dead represents a modern innovation in the attitude of military forces toward their battle dead. The French were the first to use dog tags during the First World War. These tags were worn on the wrists at first, and then around their necks, in order to allow the identification of their bodies. The British and American troops followed their example. At the end of the war, the dead were gathered together into huge national cemeteries, but vast numbers still remained unidentified. At the battle of Somme, the British memorial lists 73,412 missing. Though they tagged their troops, the French did not bother much with their unidentified dead, and dumped French and German bones together into huge mass graves, the largest of which is at Verdun.

During the Second World War, the cemetery truly came into its own as a means for disposing of and showcasing the battle dead. The dead became, therefore, a part of their own memorial. Respect for the enemy's dead, however, was still much less than for one's own side. The Soviets did not pay much respect to the German dead, and even today, remains of Nazi soldiers are found around Volgograd, which was once Stalingrad. Neither did the Russians give much personalized attention to their own dead, preferring large mass graves, with huge Stalinist memorials. The American military was able to identify 97% of its fatalities from this war before 1950.

Following the Second World War, the Americans evolved a heightened commitment to their battle dead, and proclaimed a promise to bring their war dead home, no matter the cost, while their enemies’ – the North Koreans, Chinese, and North Vietnamese – dead generally remained in unmarked graves at the battle site with few, if any, memorials to mark them. This patriotic cry of "bring 'em home!" has morphed into a rather complex business for the military.

According to a recent article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Army has found that its 40-year old mortuary units are in need of improvement and expansion. More than 4,600 men and women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the pressure of these deaths has instigated a need for change. One area of reform has been deaing with "remains contaminated in chemical, biological or nuclear incidents." (I find this interesting because I have not heard of any deaths occuring because of such weaponry. To my almost certain knowledge, the casualties of these conflicts have resulted from conventional explosives and weaponry. The article states that this training is toward the eventuality of such fatalities.) A second point of change is the process of preserving and transporting remains back to the U.S. The Army wants its mortuary affairs companies to deploy more rapidly in response to combat and natural disasters, and to be more sustainable in the field.

Thus, three areas of concern: remains decontamination, transfer, and mobile remains collection.

1. $19 million will be spent to develop and purchase a remains decontamination system by 2012, in order "to render all remains safe to give back to the family." Such a system would include "remains pouches"--not body bags, which is no longer a polite term.
2. Remains transfer cases will be insulated and cooled to stop decomposition, and will cost about $2,000 each. An estimated $13 million will be spent over the next five years for the purchase of these new containers.
3. Another $60 million will be spent to organize 117 mobile remains-collection systems--mobile morgues, essentially. Each of these will be able to carry the remains of 16 soldiers, and still fit into the cargo bay of a C-130.

Beneath the high-tech glitz, however, the American ideal remains the same: "We'll make every effort," said Lee Green, from Fort Lee in Virginia, "to recover every single service member who's missing."