The US disposed of creamated war dead body parts in a New Jersey landfill...

The Washington Post has an article of how Air Force personnel disposed of miscellaneous body parts and tissues that were received at the mortuary center at Dover Air Force Base during the middle of the last decade...disturbing to say the least. Given the parts were mostly for service members that had already been buried and whose family had consented to allowing the military to dispose of any body parts recovered post burial...but wow.  Here is the article...

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Remains of war dead dumped in landfill

Wow...just wow....

From a purely procedural point of view I can see how the practice developed...think about it body parts and tissues from hospitals are probably disposed of much in the same way throughout the world...but they should have realized that this was not "normal" tissues to be disposed of....I don't know, I remember when I was in casualty ops for CFLCC in 06-07 in the CAC we had a case where a M1114 that was sent back from Iraq to Camp AJ for a rebuild after being blown by an IED was being cleaned and a bit of a foot was found (not a frequent occurrence but it did happen sometimes as the mechanics took the trucks down to the frame)..we had to have mortuary affairs bag it and do a DNA match on it to try and find its owner....don't really remember what happened after that...I supposed it ended up in the Jersey countryside after it got back too....

I like the one perspective, that once dead the body is simply tissue and the soul departs....although I would not be willing to push my own religious or other views on the subject on anyone else to make them accept the practice as it was implemented at the time.

I would suggest that in Arlington we have a stream or some other body of water that is in the cemetery that we designate to have the cremated remains of US War dead and other veterans ceremoniously disposed in to provide dignity to the remains, closure for the family and provide a final place for all Americans to go and pay their respect to the sacrifices of our nations war dead and veterans.