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The ashes of cremated body parts from some of the nation's war dead were dumped in landfills until 2008, unbeknownst to their survivors, an Air Force general acknowledged Wednesday. The practice was stopped, and remains from cremated body parts now are disposed of at sea, Air Force Chief of Public Affairs Brig. Gen. Les Kodlick said.
The landfill disposal of the ashes was first reported in The Washington Post. Kodlick issued a statement describing instances prior to 2008 when families had authorized portions of remains to be disposed of. Another Air Force official, speaking on background, emphasized that these situations did not involve bodies but "parts of bone and other DNA material.
" Military escorts accompanied the remains to a crematorium near Dover Air Force Base Mortuary, which processes remains of service members killed overseas, the statement said. After cremation, the ashes were escorted back to Dover, Kodlick said, and then turned over to a contractor "for further incineration and disposition in accordance with medical disposition." "The common practice was that any residual matter remaining after incineration was disposed of by the contractor in a landfill," Kodlick said. "We could have done it better," he said. The Air Force official speaking on background emphasized that families had authorized disposal of those remains, but did not know the ashes would be put in a landfill.
Air Force base mortuary workers dumped soldiers’ remains in landfill.
Officials at an Air Force base mortuary responsible for handling the remains of dead American soldiers dumped the ashes in a Virginia landfill without telling the relatives of the fallen heroes, according to a report. Between 2003 and 2008, the Dover Air Force Base mortuary cremated soldiers' body parts and handed the ashes over to military contractors, who unceremoniously ditched them in a landfill in Kings George County, Va., The Washington Post reported. Officials told the newspaper the practice didn't apply to entire bodies, only pieces of body parts that they couldn't identify or parts that were retrieved from war zones after the fallen had been buried. The soldiers loved ones had authorized the military to handle such parts, but couldn't have known that the remains were being thrown away, the Post said. The mortuary stopped the dumping in 2008 and has since been placing the ashes in urns and formally burying them at sea from aboard Navy ships.
The policy change was of little comfort to Gari-Lynn Smith, who told the Post she didn't know part of her husband's remains were thrown in the landfill after his 2006 death in Iraq until the Air Force alerted her in a letter last spring. "My only peace of mind in losing my husband was that he was taken to Dover and that he was handled with dignity, love, respect and honor," she said. "That was completely shattered for me when I was told that he was thrown in the trash." News of the landfill dumping came a day after federal investigators said they had uncovered widespread "gross mismanagement" at the mortuary, the largest in the nation and the main entry for fallen soldiers coming from battlefields overseas.
The grim findings included reports that workers had lost body parts and sawed off a soldier's arm so his body would fit in a casket, the Post reported on Tuesday. Air Force officials blamed the sloppy undertaking on the high number of dead bodies arriving from overseas and other factors that made it difficult to carry out proper burials. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said the military heard about the problems in May 2010 after whistleblowers complained that shoddy management had turned the mortuary into a house of horrors. Three of the mortuary's supervisors, a colonel who was in charge and two civilians, were identified for turning a blind eye to the messy work. However, they were not fired, Schwartz said, because they didn’t act deliberately.
But Office of Special Counsel, a federal watchdog group, disagreed, and accused the mortuary chiefs of trying to cover up the incidents by firing one of the whistleblowers, the Post reported. "The Air Force basically tried to make the Air Force not look too bad," James G. Parsons Sr., an autopsy and embalming technician who complained about the mortuary's conditions, told the Post earlier this week. Congress and veterans groups urged the Pentagon and the military to crack down on those responsible.
"The VFW demands that the Departments of Defense and the Air Force get to the bottom of this," said Richard L. DeNoyer, the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said in a statement. “You only get one chance to return our fallen warriors to their families with all the dignity and respect they deserve from a grateful nation — and that mortuary affairs unit failed." Defense Department spokesman George Little said Wednesday that the Pentagon had not ruled out "further accountability."
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