Burying America's brave soldiers

They are described in the abstract, an intangible, a number, a whisper of a tragedy in the voice of the evening news anchor reading the body count from the latest ambush or bombing overseas. They are the soldiers who have fallen in battle and whose lives now are chalked up as new additions to the list of the dead. Yet, what happens to these brave men and women after the brutality of war extinguishes their lives? Who cares for their lifeless bodies? Will their remains make the final journey back to the town they once called home? Moreover, why is it important to understand how the military handles the deaths of soldiers?

Unless a soldier is a family member or hails from our hometown, most of us who are not indoctrinated in the policies of the military have no clue about the sequence of events that follows the wartime death of military personnel. It has been said that, thanks to television, wars now are fought in our living rooms. We see images of buildings reduced to piles of crumbling mortar and vehicles violently transformed into charred and blackened steel. We even may glimpse the limp bodies of "enemy dead" strewn along the roadside. What we do not see, however, since the Federal government no longer allows media coverage, is the dignified return of the remains of U.S. soldiers as they arrive stateside in flag-shrouded transfer cases.

"We typically ask, 'Why is this policy in place?' But what we should also ask is, 'How, as a nation, do we honor the deaths of the soldiers who've died while serving their country?'" muses Michael Sledge, author of Soldier Dead. "The war is public but, as the remains of the soldiers return unannounced, the nation has lost its chance to understand the true cost of war and to grieve for these soldiers and honor them and their families

"The military's policy on dealing with dead soldiers has evolved over the years, but to understand the significance of today's treatment of the war dead, you have to go back to the earliest battles involving U.S. troops to see how the policies have been shaped and how they've changed over time."

Sledge explains that there is a tangled web of political, social, religious, economic, and physical issues that dictates how the military identifies, recovers, and handles the remains of soldiers who have died in battle. Certainly, the military will go to extraordinary lengths to retrieve a fallen soldier who is unaccounted for, hoping to ease the pain and uncertainty of family members who are left wondering if their soldier really is dead or held captive by enemy forces.

Indeed, Sledge concludes, "behind each fallen soldier is a family who pays a price that can never be measured by the dollars any government spends to feed, house, and arm its troops."

COPYRIGHT 2007 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning