It took Gari-Lynn Smith more than four years to learn what happened to the final remains of her husband, an US Army sergeant killed in Iraq.
However, the New Jersey widow never thought that knowing the truth would be worse than not knowing, or that her search would lead to the bottom of a landfill.
“I was told no one wanted my husband, so he was cremated with the medical waste and thrown in the trash,” Smith said in an interview last week from her home.
Her quest to find the truth about what happened to her husband’s remains led to an even more disturbing revelation last week as the US Air Force acknowledged it had dumped cremated partial remains of at least 274 troops into a Virginia dump — far more than previously acknowledged.
Her story, first told by the Washington Post, along with information from multiple whistleblowers about other mistreatment of fallen soldiers’ bodies became the catalyst for an investigation that found “gross mismanagement” at the Air Force’s mortuary in Dover, Delaware — the first stop on US soil for fallen troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is where the body of Sergeant 1st Class Scott Smith, a bomb-disposal technician, was flown in July 2006.
Smith was killed after he stepped on a pressure plate above a roadside bomb as he worked to clear the area.
Several limbs and much of his torso were lost in the explosion, his wife said.
CLOSED CASKET
Initially led to believe her husband’s entire body was returned, Gari-Lynn became suspicious after being told she shouldn’t ask to see the body before the closed-casket funeral.
Later, she ordered copies of the autopsy and learned there were additional remains located, leading to more questions.
This spring, after years of pestering Air Force officials, she received a letter from the Dover mortuary telling her some of her husband’s body was incinerated and sent to a landfill.
It closed: “I hope that this brings you some comfort in your time of loss.”
The Air Force later confirmed that other soldiers’ remains were incinerated and then handed over to a contractor who took them to the landfill in shipments of medical waste.
The Air Force said that remains were shipped to the landfill only in cases in which the family had previously signed a form saying it didn’t want to be contacted in the event more remains were found.
Scott Smith’s parents had signed the form in the days after his death.
The forms authorized the US Department of Defense to “make appropriate disposition” of any partial remains that might be discovered.
Gari-Lynn said she understood why his parents signed the form, but that it never specified that the remains would be thrown away.
“I just don’t understand how they get ‘appropriate’ and ‘landfill’ in the same sentence,” Gari-Lynn said.
“I obviously was completely outraged, upset and hysterical,” she added.
Smith contacted Democratic Representative Rush Holt, and together they pressed for more information.
The practice, which Holt believes goes back to 1996, was stopped in 2008, and cremated remains from such troops are now given a burial at sea, the Air Force said.
The Air Force disciplined — but did not fire — three senior supervisors at Dover, and US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has ordered a review of that decision.
NO APOLOGIES
“Nobody has ever apologized,” Smith said.
“I would like for them to sit across the table and look me in the eye and say that it was an appropriate disposition for my husband to be thrown in a garbage dump, mixed in with the rest of household garbage like last week’s leftover meatloaf,” Smith added.
Holt said he was shocked at the military’s response.
“They tried to minimize this and present it as a procedural error,” Holt said.
“I don’t think they understand the degree of dishonesty, disrespect and insensitivity that’s involved here,” he said.
Holt said the change of how remains are handled should be credited to the “persistence of Gari-Lynn.”
Gary-Lynn said she owed it to the legacy of her husband.
She described him as a man who helped stranded motorists in snowstorms and who wore a big, mischievous smile that “let us know that he knew something that the rest of us just didn’t know or didn’t get.”
He was a kind man, she said, and a man who took on a job assignment that others would run away from because he understood the honor and importance in saving lives and honoring those lost.
“Scott would be completely disgusted,” she said of the way the remains were handled.
“If he were here, I believe he would be helping me in this fight,” she said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the