At the peak of the Iraq war, twenty or thirty bodies passed through this room each week. Since 2004, around six thousand autopsies have taken place here. Every person (and dog) who dies in the service of the US military is autopsied. It was not always this way. Before 2001, autopsies were reserved for cases in which there was no witness to the death, or the cause was not obvious. Stone gives the example of a suspected homicide, then pauses. “Though technically it’s all homicide.” Homicide, from the Latin homo, for man, and -cidium, the act of killing. He means murder: prosecutable homicide.
Six thousand homos cidiumed in the prime of their lives. What does this job do to a person? For one thing, it makes him very tired of that question. “We’re doctors, and these are our patients,” was the stock answer I got. I imagine it’s a tough kind of doctor to be. Most people study medicine with the hope and intent that their work will restore health, end pain, extend lives. Save lives. Because of Feedback to the Field, the work of these medical examiners does save lives. But not the ones they interact with day to day.
Stone brings me over to the H. T. Harcke Radiology Suite, where dead men and women are given CT scans. A whole-body CT is a heavy dose of radiation, but the dead don’t have to worry. Certain things like bullet trajectories and angles of entry are easier to see in the clean, gray-scale imagery of a CT scan than they are in a flesh-and-blood autopsy. Colonel Harcke himself is on hand to show me the basics of forensic radiopathology. He is the Harcke for whom the lab is named. I assumed that this was in tribute to his pioneering contributions to the field. “There’s two ways that happens,” he says when I mention it. “Die or give two million dollars. I’ll let you figure out which it is.”
Using a mouse, Harcke scrolls through the topography of an anonymous body. As we travel from scalp to boot heel, IED fragments flare like supernovae. Metal reads as bright white against the grays of muscle, blood, and bone.? The contrast is stark and telling. In the face of velocitized steel, even the strongest among us are mush. Fragility is evident even in the terms MEs use—soft tissue, an eggshelled skull.
On the way back to Stone’s office, we stop to talk with Pete Seguin, the statistics guy. On his desk is a sheaf of photographs, printouts of the cases from the combat mortality meeting. “They don’t look real,” he says of the bodies. “They’re like dolls.” I’m not sure where he’s buying his dolls. I look at Stone.
“He means porcelain dolls,” Stone says. “The white skin.” Seguin explains lividity, the pooling of blood in a corpse. When the pump shuts down, gravity takes over. Because the dead are transported on their backs, they come to autopsy white as geishas, the blood drained from the face, chest, the tops of the legs.
“But then you see them back there . . .” Seguin means in the autopsy room. “That’s a whole different experience. It’s too sad.” I can barely hear him. “These are all young people. Our kids. It makes you ask questions. Like, Was it worth it?”
In the autopsy room there’s a pair of platformed aluminum stepladders on wheels. I thought the ceiling was being repaired. “No, it’s for perspective,” Stone had said. The autopsy photographers need to get up high to get the whole body in the frame. I guess war is like that. A thousand points of light, as they say. Only when you step back and view the sum, only then are you able to grasp the worth, the justification for the extinguishing of any single point. Right at the moment, it’s tough to get that perspective. It’s tough to imagine a stepladder high enough.
___________
* Female soldiers, unlike males, receive vouchers to shop for their own underthings. The US military is gearing up to buy uniforms embedded with photovoltaic panels—shirts that can recharge a radio battery—but it is not up to the task of purchasing bras for female soldiers. “I’ve done that sort of shopping with my wife,” said an Army spokesman quoted in Bloomberg Business. “It’s not easy to do.”
? Usually the victim’s, but occasionally a fragment from a suicide bomber. According to Stone, there has not been a documented case in which a piece of a terrorist’s bone was the cause of death. (Medical examiners do not use the term “organic shrapnel.” That originated in Falling Man author Don DeLillo’s cranium.)
Acknowledgments
This book began with an email from a reader: Brad Harper, a retired Army pathologist. In the course of our correspondence, I mentioned I’d been toying with the idea of a book on military science but had assumed that access would trip me up. Should I try it anyway? Yes, insisted Harper. He brought me to the military morgue in Dover and introduced me to colleagues. He took me to USUHS to see his friend Sharon Holland, who has contacts all over the military medical world. When I allowed that one of the things I wished to write about was genital trauma, Holland did not flinch. She picked up the phone and called James Jezior at Walter Reed. Hey, Jim, might you have a surgery this writer could observe? Yes, said Jezior. Though he’d need to ask the patient. And surely here would be my first no: Hey, Captain White, could some strange writer lady come out and watch your operation? But White, too, said yes.
And so it went. Over and over, when the easy answer, the sane answer, was no, people said yes.
Hey, Jerry Lamb, ridiculously busy technical director at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, could you find someone to approve my spending a few days at sea on a Trident submarine? Though it’ll take fourteen months and two-hundred-some emails to make it happen? Yes, said Lamb.
And might that submarine be yours, Chris Bohner and Nathan Murray of the USS Tennessee? Though I’ll be traipsing through the missile silos with no security clearance? Yes, they said. Bring your notebook and your dingbat questions. Kick Kedrowski out of his rack. Tie up the head every morning.
Hello, Mark Riddle, could I follow you to Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, even though it means you’ll have to escort me all day every day for an entire week? And then later will you spend your holidays reviewing my manuscript?
Hey, Randy Coates, and hey, Rick Redett, I hear you’re doing some cadaver trials. Could I join you?
Hey, Kit Lavell, hey, Eric Fallon, could you work me into combat simulations where I don’t belong?