Honoring fallen soldiers an elaborate ritual

BY GRAHAM RAYMAN | Newsday Staff Writer

December 27, 2006

In those sad weeks after a roadside bomb killed her brother, Jeanin Urbina looked forward most to the arrival of a nondescript crate from Iraq.

Inside the box, Urbina hoped to find Wilfredo's diary, along with his spare uniforms and other personal effects. She wanted a clearer picture of the final months of his life.

When the shipment arrived, however, every page had been removed from the diary. Jeanin was furious. She tried to find out what had happened, but she says she never got an explanation from her brother's unit.

"I can understand crossing out a few lines here and there for security reasons, but not the entire book," she said in a recent interview from her home in Baldwin. "To this day, I'm still angry about it."

As the Urbina story illustrates, mistakes can occur in the complex process of bringing a dead soldier home for burial. Most observers agree, however, that the military handles combat deaths with far more sensitivity than it did back in World War II or Vietnam.

"Technology has made notification much more efficient, allowing officers to find families and begin providing support much more quickly," said Bonnie Carroll, founder of TAPS, a Washington group that assists families who have suffered the death of a member of the armed forces.

During World War II and the Korean War, the Pentagon notified families with a tersely worded telegram. Then, during the Vietnam conflict, the military began contacting families in person, but very often, for those who got the difficult assignment, they had only on-the-job training.

Today, after decades of trial and error, the death process is now an elaborate ritual governed by hundreds of rules, which direct every step from the battlefield to the cemetery. The Army manual on the subject, for example, fills 161 pages in small print.

Take just one item: a soldier's personal effects. The Army's rules say they must be assembled, carefully cataloged, and returned home promptly, including possessions in the combat theater and at the home base; even the soldier's car.

Typically, two service members in formal uniforms arrived to make the death notification in person to a parent or a spouse. After that, a specially trained casualty assistance officer arrives, usually the following day, to help the family organize the myriad aspects of mourning, such as the shipment of the body, the viewing, the memorial service and the burial.

These officers also assist families in filling out paperwork for government benefits, including the government life insurance payment.

The military typically uses duty officers to make the initial notification because the job is considered too stressful to give to one person again and again.

During the Vietnam War, that was not the case, said Buzz Hefti, a retired Marine who performed 50 death notifications in the Pacific Northwest at the height of that conflict. He often drove hundreds of miles to inform a family of a death.

"The guy who I replaced told me what he did and that was my training," said Hefti, who left the Corps as a lieutenant colonel, and became a defense industry lobbyist.

On his first case, Hefti went alone. He never did that again. "I learned that I needed personal support, and you never know how a family is going to react," he said.

"In that job, you come to understand how a family is affected by a tragedy for the rest of their lives," he said. "I felt I was kind of like a country minister. I look at a young captain today, and I'm quite amazed that anyone can go out there and do that."