The Air Force body parts problem: Someone at the top should go over this

By
Capt. John Byron (U.S. Navy, Ret.)

Best Defense guest columnist

CNN
December 8: "Backtracking on initial information about how it handled
the remains of American service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air
Force now says the cremated body parts of hundreds of the fallen were burned
and dumped in the landfill." The cremated remains of at least 274 fallen
service-members and those of 1,762 other unidentified body parts were
unceremoniously thrown into a county landfill as waste.

Two aspects of this mess bother me greatly. The first, obviously, is the
desecration of our warriors. Were an enemy to do this, we'd carpet-bomb them
into oblivion. But this is the U.S. Air Force, the practice may go back as far as
1996, and the only accounting so far has been administrative action against
three minor Air Force officials.



The second is that the Air Force is treating this primarily as a public relations problem,
dribbling out the information only after three whistle-blowers brought it public,
minimizing the scope until the facts ran them over, slow-rolling families
seeking information, bemoaning and refusing to do the work to account for the
individuals dumped in with last week's garbage, and perhaps, according to one report, even
fudging the truth on when the practice ended.



Astonishingly, Air Force now says, "I don't think there is another federal
agency in this town, I don't think there is another institution in this
country," that understands more about how to properly treat the remains of
fallen troops.

My view: this callous incompetence in the treatment of fallen warriors is
shameful, dishonorable, and unacceptable. It calls for the resignation of
either the Air Force Secretary, its Chief of Staff, or both. It's not a
colonel's problem.