Life magazine published a photograph of a young woman with a Japanese skull sent by her navy boyfriend in the Pacific. A few months later, after flying missions over New Guinea with the air force, the renowned aviator Charles A. Lindbergh touched down in Hawaii, where a customs official nonchalantly asked whether he had packed bones in his luggage. Lindbergh was not surprised: in New Guinea he had heard that soldiers routinely worked over corpses—removing shinbones to carve into letter openers and pen trays, extracting teeth to pocket the gold fillings, and placing heads in swarming
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