How We Bury the War Dead (WSJ)

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704269204575270841057314162.html

MAY 29, 2010
How We Bury the War Dead
Bringing fallen troops home is a fairly modern idea. Today, the military sees it as a sacred duty
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and GARY FIELDS

The U.S. military didn't always bring home its dead. In the Seminole Indian Wars in the early 1800s, most of the troops were buried near where they fell. The remains of some dead officers were collected and sent back to their families, but only if the men's relatives paid all of the costs. Families had to buy and ship a leaded coffin to a designated military quartermaster, and after the body had been disinterred, they had to cover the costs of bringing the coffin home. Today, air crews have flown the remains of more than 5,000 dead troops back to the U.S. since the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan began...

Bringing fallen troops home is a relatively modern idea. Until the late 19th century, military authorities did little to differentiate and identify dead troops. Roughly 14,000 soldiers died from combat and disease during the Mexican-American War of 1846, but only 750 sets of remains were recovered and brought back, by covered wagon, to the U.S. for burial. None of the fallen soldiers were ever personally identified. The modern system for cataloguing and burying military dead effectively began during the Civil War, when the enormity of the carnage triggered a wholesale revolution in how the U.S. treated fallen troops. Congress decided that the defenders of the Union were worthy of special burial sites for their sacrifices, and set up a program of national cemeteries. During the war, more than 300,000 dead Union soldiers were buried in small cemeteries scattered across broad swaths of the U.S. When the fighting stopped, military authorities launched an ambitious effort to collect the remains and rebury them in the handful of national cemeteries. The move "established the precedent that would be followed in future wars, even when American casualties lay in foreign soil," Michael Sledge writes in "Soldier Dead," a history of how the U.S. has handled its battlefield fatalities.

The first time the U.S. made a serious effort to repatriate the remains of soldiers killed overseas came during the Spanish American War of 1898, when the military brought back the remains of thousands of troops who were killed in places like the Philippines and Cuba. The relatives of fallen troops in both world wars were given the choice of having their loved ones permanently interred in large overseas cemeteries or brought back to the U.S. for reburial. Those who wanted their sons or husbands returned to them were in for a long wait. Fallen troops had been buried in hundreds of temporary cemeteries near the sites of major battles throughout Europe. When World War I ended, the families of 43,909 dead troops asked for their remains to be brought back to the U.S. by boat, while roughly 20,000 chose to have the bodies remain in Europe. The war ended in 1918, but the first bodies of troops killed in the conflict weren't sent back to the U.S. until 1921. World War II posed a bigger logistical challenge, since American war dead were scattered around the globe. Nearly 80,000 U.S. troops died in the Pacific, for example, and 65,000 of their bodies were first buried in almost 200 battlefield cemeteries there. Once the fighting ended, the bodies were dug up and consolidated into larger regional graveyards. The first returns of World War II dead took place in the fall of 1947, six years after the attack at Pearl Harbor. Eventually, 171,000 of the roughly 280,000 identified remains were brought back to the U.S.

Today, the remains of 124,909 fallen American troops from conflicts dating back to the Mexican-American war are buried at a network of 24 permanent cemeteries in Europe, Panama, Tunisia, the Philippines and Mexico. The military reshaped its procedures for handling war dead during the Korean War, when territory changed hands so many times that temporary U.S. battlefield cemeteries were at constant risk of falling into enemy hands. In the winter of 1950, the U.S. launched a policy of "concurrent return," which called for flying the bodies of fallen troops back to the U.S. as quickly as possible. The military now goes to tremendous lengths to recover the remains of fallen troops. In March 2002, a Navy Seal named Neil Roberts fell out of the back of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan and was cornered and killed by militants on the ground. The U.S. sent in a second helicopter to attempt a rescue, but six members of its crew were killed in the ensuing firefight...