Center cares for the living and the dead - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Center cares for the living and the dead

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — Playing host to reporters and photographers along with families drastically changed how the Air Force’s mortuary affairs unit here operates.

Tasks such as tracking a casualty from the site of death all the way to Dover had never been done before. Now, mortuary workers must know exactly when a body will arrive to ensure that the family and journalists come on time.

The Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center didn’t exist until January, six months before the Pentagon enacted the policy April 5 to host reporters and fly up to three immediate family members here to watch their fallen service members return. .

Each fallen service member received a “dignified transfer” ceremony, and the port mortuary prepared service members’ bodies to return to their hometowns. There wasn’t what the center now calls its “front-of-the-house operation.”

Just six days before the first family traveled to Dover under the new policy, mortuary officials didn’t have the equipment, or any specially trained service members. The Air Force, which is the lead agency for the Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, sent reinforcements.

Airmen from Air Mobility Command traveled to Dover to teach airmen how to track aircraft across regions. Twelve public affairs personnel traveled from the Pentagon to set up a Web page and to handle the crush of media.

Now, more than half of the mortuary’s 165 workers — 91 — are military members: 72 airmen, 14 soldiers, two Marines and three sailors. The service members have had more training to run dining halls than mortuaries.

“We’re just cooks,” said Col. Robert Edmondson, the unit’s commander. “We are food services and lodging guys. We had never done a command and control function.”

Today, three Toshiba flat screens mounted inside what used to be a closet broadcast up-to-the-minute status updates of each fallen service member traveling to Dover as well as his or her family’s location.

Tech. Sgt. Brenda Stubbs, the assistant dining hall manager at Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash., helps run the command and control division.

“I have never had any experience in running an operations center before, but you figure it out,” Stubbs said. Since the program began in April, each family who has visited Dover has been surveyed.

“Almost all said, ‘I’m glad the military brought me here, and it helped in the closure process.’ This is the beginning of the acceptance and closure process,” Edmondson said.

At 1:15 a.m. Sept. 10, Marine Staff Sgt. Aaron Kenefick and Army Pfc. Zachary T. Meyers returned to their families.

Their relatives arrived in a blue school bus. A strong wind whipped across the flight line as a team of officers headed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen marched inside the 747.

The chaplain offered a prayer for the fallen before the Army and Marine Corps carry teams arrived. Soldiers and Marines wearing their combat uniforms and white gloves carefully and deliberately lifted their brothers in arms out of the jet, onto the K-loader and into the mortuary truck.

As each transfer case passed, the servicemen saluted. Airman Mercedes McCoy-Garrett slowly closed the truck doors. The wind calmed. Sobbing could be heard over the generators vibrating on the concrete. An airman started the mortuary truck’s engine. Slowly, it drove off the flight line.

Two more sons had returned.