Arlington Cemetery’s Mishandling of Remains Prompts FBI Criminal Probe
Jerry Markon and Christian Davenport, The Washington Post (June 29, 2011)
The Justice Department is investigating the mishandling of remains at Arlington National Cemetery in a broad criminal inquiry that is also seeking evidence of possible contracting fraud and falsification of records, people familiar with the investigation said Tuesday
I have no idea who is going to make the documentary film about the rise and fall of Arlington National Cemetery but it is going to be a long and complicated movie. Twists and turns will emerge from nowhere and then suddenly it will turn out that the FBI was investigating the whole situation.
At this point, nothing which emerges from the ongoing and unstoppable Arlington cemetery train wreck surprises me. Nothing. The Washington Post has been singlehandedly leading the charge on this case. Now we have FBI Agents, a federal grand jury handing out subpoenas, and increasingly obvious cases of multi-million dollar fraud.
Here’s the rub: it’s only going to get worse. That’s my guess after following this case since day one.
Earlier this week, NPR ran an interview with Jess Goodell, author of the new memoir Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq. The new book is Goodell’s account of her time as a Marine working in the Mortuary Affairs Unit in Iraq in 2004. Terry Gross interviewed Goodell in a segment entitled Death and After in Iraq: Memoir of a Mortuary, which you can listen to here.
The Mortuary Affairs Unit is the platoon tasked with recovering and processing the remains of fallen troops. Out in the field, Goodell and her unit would recover bodies and body parts and bring them back to base for further processing. Then they would prepare the remains for shipping back home. Back at base, Goodell’s job was to document identifying marks on the body like scars or tattoos, etc. The next step involved going through pockets of the dead soldiers to recover anything that could be given back to the family. In an excerpt from the book, Goodell writes:
He gave us step-by-step instructions. “Roll him over to document his wounds.” We may have known that a Marine was hit by bullets or a grenade, but we may not have known where. But when we tried to turn him over, we couldn’t. Rigor mortis was setting in and he was already beginning to stiffen, except for his waist, which was like a pivot point. Even when we strained to turn him over, we could not. It was awkward and we were silent except for The Sir’s slow, calm, firm instructions. “C’mon guys, you were trained on this and you know what to do,” he reassured us. And so, eventually, we did it. “Okay,” The Sir said, “now write down any distinguishing marks, any tattoos.” So we did. “Now, write down which body parts are missing and shade the missing parts black on the outline of the body.” So we did. We followed The Sir’s directions, marking the wounds, drawing the tattoos, shading the missing parts black. We had to be told throughout what to do next and how to do it.
We don’t yet have a copy of the book at my library, so I have not had a chance to read it. Publisher’s Weekly’s review is here. However, it looks like an interesting read not only for Goodell’s account of her time in the Mortuary Affairs Unit, but her experiences with the brutal and sexist culture of the U.S. Marine Corps. The NPR interview touches a bit upon this aspect of Goodell’s experience as well.
As the author talks about being diagnosed with PTSD, it struck me that perhaps the underlying factors are not only related to the handling of corpses, but the objectification and degradation of her own body as well. In the interview, her measured, almost dispassionate voice made me wonder if parts of her own body and mind had died in Iraq, not unlike the soldiers she was tasked with recovering. The coping mechanisms that the soldiers employ without even really knowing that they are doing so—the turning inward, the antisocial behavior—mask this pain quite well, at least for a while it seems.
At the end of the NPR interview, Goodell talks about her decision to study psychology and her desire to help other soldiers with PTSD, citing the need for more counselors who had personally experienced serving in Iraq.
TV Review: Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die
When life is finally squeezed of all its juice, Terry Pratchett finds there’s tea on tap
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian (June 13, 2011)
I cried and cried towards the end of Terry Pratchett’s documentary on Assisted Dying. My tears arrived not at the end of the documentary, where Pratchett watches UK citizen Peter Smedley die in Switzerland at the Dignitas Clinic. Rather, I began to cry when the various individuals involved in this documentary started traveling to Switzerland. I can only explain my emotional response as tears of respect for Peter Smedley and his wife as he chose death over a physical life increasingly controlled by motor neurone disease.
The documentary, Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, was shown on BBC 2 Monday night and it created a week’s worth of commentary. Most of it predictably either for or against everything in the documentary.
I do not know what to say any longer about the UK’s debate on Assisted Dying. Indeed, the Death Reference Desk has a number of pieces on Assisted Dying debates in both the UK and the United States. You can review all of those previous posts here. It’s worth noting, I think, that when Death Ref started in July 2009 some of the first posts were on the UK’s Assisted Dying debates.
Some pieces of that debate have changed but not significantly. The only anti-Assisted Dying argument that I will flag up as incorrect is the assertion that the deaths which people choose somehow diminish the value of hospice care. That is not true. Many many people choose hospice care at the End-of-Life and I wholeheartedly support that choice. But hospice care and End-of-Life care are different than choosing an Assisted Death. These things are related but they are not co-terminus. Advocates for both hospice care and assisted death often find themselves in televised debates but these same individuals are involved in entirely different kinds of conversations.
Most importantly, neither ‘side’ will ever agree. They just won’t. The best that anyone can work towards, I think, is a well regulated, extremely stringent law which both increases funding for hospice care and allows Assisted Dying. The model law is Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.
Every year, the state of Oregon publishes an array of statistics which explain how the law was used the previous year. Here is the 2010 statistic that I think most people would benefit from knowing:
Most (96.9%) patients died at home; and most (92.6%) were enrolled in hospice care at time of death.
In fact, you can read all of the 2010 statistics here.
If you are in the UK, then you can still watch the documentary until Monday night for free on the BBC iPlayer.
If you are in the United States then I would suggest that you watch the Frontline documentary The Suicide Tourist. I discussed that documentary earlier this year and it is extremely good. It also follows a person to Dignitas who chooses to die.
Barring either of these options, I have embedded a short clip from Terry Pratchett’s documentary.
Rest assured, these conversations about Assisted Dying in the UK will continue.
Life After Kevorkian
He fought for the right to assisted suicide. Now what should we do with it?
William Saletan, Slate (June 3, 2011)
I am a member of the Kevorkian generation. Those of us in our mid-to-late thirties and onwards into our forties are usually called Generation X (for those who still remember the 1990s…) but I really think that we are Kevorkian’s kids.
Jack Kevorkian, who died last week, began assisting suicides in 1990. As soon as he started this work, debates began about the legality and ethics of assisted dying. I have distinct memories of these debates, which started during my high school years and carried on into college.
I and my peers came of age and entered adulthood surrounded by End-of-Life debates. Most people have mixed feelings about what Kevorkian did but at least he made people talk about death and dying. And those conversations have had an impact over the years.
So say what you will about Jack Kevorkian but he really contributed to a debate that informed an entire generation’s future. And as we all begin looking towards the End-of-Life for our own parents, I know that Jack Kevorkian’s influence will be felt.
The Slate article by William Saletan at the top is the best essay/article that I found after Kevorkian died.
Here is how Saletan concluded his piece and I wholeheartedly agreed with him point by point:
Kevorkian didn’t have the answers. But he raised the right questions. We can’t criticize his flaws, temper his ideas, and praise the hospice movement without acknowledging what he did. He forced an open conversation about the right to take your own life. Under what conditions, and within what limits, should that right be exercised? Even if it’s legal, is it moral? What do you do when a loved one wants to die? Kevorkian didn’t take those questions with him. He has left them to us.
Just this past week, the Personal Health columnist for the New York Times, Jane Brody, wrote a compelling column about New York Doctors who are not comfortable discussing End-of-Life decisions with their patients. Doctors in the state of New York are now required by law to discuss End-of-Life planning and some MD’s do not want to do it. The copy title for Brody’s column sums up the situation: Law on End-of-Life Care Rankles Doctors
And then last weekend, WNYC’s radio program On the Media ran a story on how the ‘Death Panels’ allegation used by opponents to President Obama’s health care law received press coverage which seemed to validate the absurdity of that claim.
I could go on and on with the examples. Indeed, a version of each of these stories has been previously covered by Meg, Kim, and myself since the Death Reference Desk began in 2009.
Here, then, is my point: Jack Kevorkian got an entire generation of young people, now in their mid-to-late thirties and soon to be in their late forties, thinking about dying, and in such a way that I can only hope it helps End-of-Life conversations with aging parents and elderly grandparents.
Jack Kevorkian didn’t inspire my generation, per se, but he played a much bigger role in our development than most people realize.
I will wrap everything up with a video obituary by the NewsHour on Public Television.
PBS NewsHour: Jack Kevorkian, Doctor who Brought Assisted Suicide to National Spotlight, Dies
I do not know what to say any longer about the UK’s debate on Assisted Dying. Indeed, the Death Reference Desk has a number of pieces on Assisted Dying debates in both the UK and the United States. You can review all of those previous posts 
