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Personal effects handled with love
ABERDEEN, Md. - The personal stuff they carried to war, the remnants of lives lost in Iraq, was spread neatly across long tables in a drafty warehouse last week. Mortuary affairs troops wearing surgical gloves at the Joint Personal Effects Depot went about the tedious work of counting and separating out what belonged to the soldier and what belonged to the government.In three years of war, Lt. Col. Deborah Skillman, the depot's commander, said her unit at the military's Aberdeen Proving Ground has cut the time for getting the personal effects back to the families from 45 to 22 days. But the checklist efficiency does little to relieve the stress of handling, photographing, and doing the inventory on the last items a fallen comrade may have held, laughed about, cared about. "You're touching somebody's life here," said Army Capt. Cathy Carman, 34, of Eustis, Fla., who is in charge of the section that carefully, almost reverently, packs and boxes up the belongings for shipment home. "It's an emotional job, nobody here will argue about that," said Carman. She gestured to a box of tissues kept nearby for the 120 troops and civilian personnel, many of them retired military, who handle the items belonging to soldiers and Marines killed in action. Driver's license, house keys, letters from home, a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, diaries, cigarette lighters, Air Jordans, photo albums, children's drawings, Christmas stockings. Also the spent cartridges from the farewell salute fired by the service member's buddies in Iraq. Much of the depot's work goes to the reserve troops of the 246th and 311th Quartermasters Cos. from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. These are the 92Ms - "92 Mikes" in military jargon - for their jobs as mortuary affairs specialists. Many in the Puerto Rican contingent answered the emergency call to search for remains in the 9/11 Pentagon attack, and some have gone to hunt for the remains of the missing in Vietnam and Laos. At Aberdeen last Tuesday, Staff Sgt. Raul Rivera, 40, of Lares, P.R., stressed that all items passing through the depot, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, are considered precious. Rivera pointed to a torn-up piece of a brown paper bag with "We Love You" in what appeared to be a child's scrawl written in crayon upon it. "We don't know what that is. Maybe it's something a kid in Iraq gave to him. It was in his stuff and that's going home," Rivera said. "Even a paper clip, that's going home." Civilian worker Tammy Stoneberg, 45, of Havre de Grace, Md., gently held up a small black rock. "Don't know where this rock came from or why he wanted it," she said," but it's gonna go back too." Smiley-face stick-ons, Halloween "Freaky Teeth," copy of "Kiplinger's Safe Investing," a Nicaraguan cigar box, a Hickory Farms Beef Stick Summer Sausage, pack of Kool menthols. When a soldier is killed in Iraq, his unit will inventory and pack up the things he kept at his bunk site in rucksacks, sea bags and foot lockers. The personal effects of the 2,310 troops killed in Iraq have all gone first to the Dover, Del., Air Force Base and then to Aberdeen. The belongings of thousands of troops who were wounded and flown out of Iraq also pass through Aberdeen, and are either sent home or to the soldier's home base. Skillman paused to think of the most unusual personal effect she has sent home. "Has to be the motorcycle" that was somehow acquired by a soldier in Iraq, Skillman said. She's also had to deal with full-size refrigerators, 50-inch TVs and a prized moose head that a soldier had toted to the desert. Playing cards, Trivial Pursuit - the "Saturday Night Live" Edition, Star Wars Galactic Battleground DVD, "The Soldier's New Testament," "Live from Baghdad" starring Michael Keaton, a computerized chess set, Perfect Poker poker game set. There are rules and regulations about what can be returned. Anything bloodied, or burned by a blast, will be destroyed. Anything remotely pornographic will be tossed. Helmets and body armor are government property and stay with the unit to be analyzed by Army medical examiners. A sore point with many families had been the military's initial reluctance to return the desert camouflage uniforms worn by the troops, but the Pentagon now permits the next of kin to have them if they have not been bloodied. Special care is taken at the depot to wash and press the cammies and meticulously fold them so that the chest nametag is the first thing seen by the family opening the package. Sometimes, ways around the regulations are found. Skillman told of a stray dog that became attached to a soldier at a forward base in Iraq. When the soldier was killed, the family learned that the dog had puppies. The family asked for one, but it wasn't permitted. Nobody knows, and nobody wants to know, how one of those puppies found its way into the U.S. at just about the time that the soldier's unit came home. But the family had a new best friend. Posted by: Fred 2006-03-22 |
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