BY PETER BACQUÉ
Media General News Service
Published: July 7, 2008

FORT LEE, Va. — Led by Fort Lee, the Army is working to modernize its handling of the remains of its dead soldiers in 21st-century conflicts.

The military’s mortuary affairs technology hasn’t significantly changed in about 40 years — since the Vietnam War — said Jeff Leppo, a consultant with the Combined Arms Support Command at Fort Lee and himself a former mortuary-affairs soldier.

After taking a hard look at the Army’s mortuary operations, “we found out that we needed to make improvements in a couple of key areas,” said Lee Green, who is leading the support command’s modernization effort.

The critical area was improving the service’s ability to do its mortuary-affairs work on remains contaminated in chemical, biological or nuclear incidents. Another is finding better ways to preserve remains while they are being transported home, she said.

Caring for dead soldiers in a dignified and respectful way is one of the Army’s most emotionally sensitive missions.

More than 4,600 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s a tough subject,” Green said. “Most people don’t want to ask the tough questions till death happens.”

The Army provides mortuary services for the U.S. armed forces, and Fort Lee is the home of Army mortuary affairs, the specialist companies that collect, identify and return home the remains of dead soldiers.

“It’s one of the military occupations that not everybody can do,” Leppo said. “It takes special people.”

And, Green said, “They’re doing a super job now. We need to ... help them do their job better.”

Looming behind the military’s needs for mortuary services is the threat of a weapons of mass destruction attack or natural disaster overwhelming civil authorities’ capability to handle large numbers of fatalities.

The Army aims to make the mortuary affairs companies more rapidly deployable for combat or disasters, more responsive to the fast flow of battle, and more easily sustainable in the field.

The modernization initiative has focused on three key systems:
*a remains decontamination system;
*a next-generation remains transfer case; and
*a mobile remains-collection system.

Contractors demonstrated candidates at an all-services meeting on mortuary-affairs capabilities at Fort Lee last month.
The Army is putting $19 million into developing and buying a rugged remains decontamination system by 2011 or 2012, Green said.

“Probably the biggest funding requirement is in the research needed to help us be able to render all remains safe to give back to the family,” Green said.

But now, she said, “nobody in the world can process [contaminated] remains and say they are safe to transfer.”

Anchored in off-the-shelf commercial equipment, the system would include special remains pouches — the Army prefers not to call them “body bags” — designed to keep dangerous contaminants from spreading, and a connected series of tents for decontaminating and identifying bodies.

The next-generation remains-transfer case would be heavily insulated and actively cooled to forestall decomposition while bodies are airlifted back to the United States.

The Army wants to keep the cost of the new case, now under development, to less than $2,000 each. More than 5,000 of the current, unlined aluminum cases are now in the service’s inventory. If approved, the transfer-case program would have an estimated cost of $13 million, spread over the next five years.

The service expects to field the mobile integrated remains-collection system — a temporary, transportable morgue — next year.
The more than $60 million program will buy 117 of the mobile systems, Green said, each of which can carry the remains of 16 people in its refrigerated storage area, but still fold up to fit inside a C-130 airplane’s cargo bay.
“The [mobile systems] will allow soldiers to operate collection points on the move,” Green said. “That’s a huge increase in our capability.”

The Defense Department has made accounting for America’s military dead and returning their remains to the U.S. a top priority.
“We’ll make every effort,” said Green, “to recover every single service member who’s missing.”

Peter Bacqué is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.