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Friday, March 24, 2006
Life in war zone means dealing with death
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taqaddum, Iraq — The two Marines arrive at midnight, carrying a black body bag on a stretcher.
They put it on a stand over a pile of sawdust, placed there to absorb spills. Inside the bag lies a young American killed in combat. His hands are draped across his chest, almost as if he were sleeping. Lance Cpl. Chris McGlauchlen, 19, of Morgan County, Ga., straps on a light blue surgeon’s mask, turns to another Marine and asks, “Are you ready?”
For these Marine reservists from a Marietta-based unit, life in the war zone means dealing with death on a daily basis.
Their Personnel Retrieval and Processing Company, the first of its kind, has the emotionally draining job of collecting the bodies of service members, cataloguing the remains and shipping them back to the United States for burial or cremation.
In past wars, most Marine units recovered the bodies of their own troops, a stressful task that can delay their missions. Now, these Marines free up their comrades to focus on fighting.
While they are not in front-line combat, these Marines must deal with other risks, most of them emotional.
Some say they feel alienated from other Marines because of what they do. They say troops from other units give them strange looks, avoid them or refuse to enter the building where they handle the remains.
For others, it’s the difficulty of dealing with the finality of death.
“The thing that bothers me is I have to know their names. And my memory is really good. I don’t want to know their names,” said Pfc. Vincent Carroll, 20, a construction worker from Dallas, Ga.
Carroll inventories body parts and personal belongings of the dead. He deals with the details of a dead person’s life: dog tags, family photos, wedding rings.
“For me, we are the only family they have right now,” he said. “We are trying to get them ready so they can go home as soon as possible.”
Since arriving in February, these Marines have handled more than 25 sets of human remains at this sprawling air base and at two other camps in western Iraq’s violent Anbar province. The dead have included U.S. and Iraqi troops and civilians, even insurgents. Some died from grisly, catastrophic wounds. Others appeared unscathed.
Carroll and his fellow Marines say they are handling the stress better than they expected. They heard horror stories during training at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., in January. Their instructors warned them not to make emotional connections with the dead so they wouldn’t later grapple with haunting memories.
But one Marine now associates the smell of diesel with dead bodies because his unit stores corpses in large refrigerators powered by the fuel. He also found himself identifying with a dead man who was carrying love notes from his girlfriend.
After viewing the dismembered, headless body of a man killed by a roadside bomb, a second Marine dreamed of dodging bombs with his own wife and infant daughter and stepping over the man’s corpse. He said he hallucinated the next day, seeing a stray part of the victim’s body that wasn’t there.
A third Marine had trouble after seeing an officer pray over a dead Marine he commanded. The image was too personal for him.
“Sometimes, to me, it doesn’t even look real. I picture that I am back in training and it isn’t real. I guess that is my defense mechanism,” said Lance Cpl. Adam Dierks, 23, of Virginia Beach.
Their officers are trying to keep their spirits up while making their headquarters appear less gloomy.
They have remodeled the inside of their building, a former Iraqi hangar. For privacy, they built plywood walls around their lab. They installed more lights inside to rid the place of its shadowy atmosphere. They removed green sandbags from the roof that spelled out: “No One Left Behind.” And they have stopped a longstanding practice in Fallujah of writing on a wall the names of all dead U.S. service members they send home.
“You talk about tormenting yourself. That is a self-inflicted wound,” said Maj. Eric Young, 33, of Pittsburgh, an energetic officer who is trying to keep his Marines mentally fit while preserving the dignity of what they do.
“It’s what you make of it, and if you want to hang your head, you could bring a lot of people with you and leave here with some real issues.”
The Marines assigned to this unit try to ensure that each set of remains is treated with dignity. But the bodies of dead Americans are given special honors.
The ceremony for the dead Americans begins as soon as the Marines learn that another body is on the way.
One Marine removes an American flag from a plastic bag and spreads it across a makeshift plywood table, meticulously smoothing out the creases and wrinkles. The flag is then starched and ironed before it is fitted over a silver, coffin-shaped case that will hold their “angel,” their name for dead service members.
And then they wait for the remains to arrive in a still, nearly soundless airplane hangar, quietly bracing themselves for what they will see.
Once the remains are removed from the body bag, one Marine begins an inventory of the man’s personal belongings. He spreads them across an examination table. Dollar bills, credit cards, an identification card with the man’s photo.
A noncommissioned officer from the dead man’s unit quietly steps into the lab to identify him. “How are you doing? Do you need anything,” Young asked the man.
“I’m fine,” the man replied before confirming the victim’s identity and fading into the background. With the inventory complete, the Marines zip up the body bag.
“One, two, three,” McGlauchlen says as he and others lift the bag and place it in the transfer case. They also tuck the man’s personal belongings and some official documents into the case.
A Marine reaches out and smoothes some faint wrinkles forming on the flag atop the case. The men crowd around it, their heads bowed. A chaplain steps into the lab.
“Oh, God of grace and glory,” begins 1st Lt. Aristides Fokas, 42, a chaplain from Lancaster, Pa. “We thank you for giving him to us, his family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn. Give us faith to see in death the gate of eternal life, so that in quiet confidence we may continue our course on earth, until, by your call, we are reunited with those who have gone before.”
Led by Cpl. Mike Cullinane, 37, of Marietta, six Marines lift the metal case and march with it into the early morning darkness outside. Two others open the doors to an immense white refrigerator, almost the size of a tractor-trailer. Several stand at attention, solemnly watching the ritual, their faces bathed in bright light pouring out of the cooler.
With the body safe inside, the Marines break formation, filing quietly back to their headquarters. Some linger outside, dragging on cigarettes to combat the stress. Others crash hard on couches in a dimly lit dayroom, quickly falling asleep.
They will not rest long. They are about to repeat a similar ceremony for the same man at the airfield. A plane is coming to take him home.
