Gloria Crothers made the sad pilgrimage to Dover Air Force Base in 2009 to see her son, who was killed in Afghanistan, return to American soil.
Like hundreds of families before her, she watched the short, quiet ceremony, in which white-gloved troops carried a transfer case bearing her son’s remains from a cargo aircraft.
The military mortuary that receives America's war dead and prepares them for burial lost portions of human remains twice in 2009, prompting the Air Force to discipline three senior officials for "gross mismanagement." (Nov. 8)
On Tuesday, the base in Delaware became the latest of the nation’s hallowed military places to be sullied by charges of mismanagement and scandal.
“How can you not know what body parts belong to what soldier?” said Crothers, of Conowingo, Md. “That is very disrespectful to the person who just sacrificed their life for the country. This is not acceptable. It’s just not.”
Officials at the Dover mortuary did not let her see the body of her son, Sgt. Michael Heede Jr., saying it was too damaged. She protested, because her son’s fellow Marines had told her that his body was still intact. Seeing any part of him, even just a limb, would help her accept his death.
“I know every tattoo he had,” she said.
Crothers’s son wasn’t one of the 14 cases of abuse at the mortuary, but as with many relatives who have lost loved ones, the news of the problems at Dover only heightened her concerns.
“I had doubts about my son being in that coffin, and now I have more doubts,” she said.
Federal investigators’ charges of “gross mismanagement” at the Dover mortuary echo earlier failings at Arlington National Cemetery and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
All three are places where military families carry out mostly private vigils.
Each of them — an airfield, a now-shuttered hospital and a cemetery — have become part of the country’s civic religion. Presidents visit them to show that they do not make life-or-death decisions without being sensitive to the costs of war.
Americans regularly profess their admiration for the military’s sacrifices. But the problems at these three consecrated sites have provoked questions about the nation’s commitment to honor its war wounded and dead.
“It is disturbing that at places where the rubber really meets the road we screw it up,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and a history professor at Boston University whose son was killed in Iraq. “There is a gap between our professed regard for the military and how soldiers are treated.”
Then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates fired the secretary of the Army and the general in charge of Walter Reed in 2007 after The Washington Post exposed the dismal state of treatment for wounded troops there. At Arlington Cemetery, top officials mishandled remains and wasted millions in botched contracts. The cemetery is still trying to account for every grave.
The failings at these three places contrast sharply with the care and attention that the nation’s fallen receive from their fellow troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today’s wars are unusual in the manner in which each dead service member is honored. Soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan hold memorial services for each comrade. At home, military units erect monuments bearing the names of their fallen troops.
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