Army soldiers are training to bury fellow troops in temporary graves en masse for the first time in decades, rehearsing how the U.S. military would respond if it sustained a high number of casualties while fighting a still-blazing war. Soldiers with the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command and the 20th Engineer Brigade, based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as religious support personnel like military chaplains, used diggers and excavators to see how effectively they could be used to help preserve bodies intact until they could be identified and repatriated to the U.S. Army hasn't needed to do this on a large scale since the Korean War, the U.S.
Army said in a statement. The Korean peninsula is still divided today after the 1950-1953 war, during which nearly 37,000 U.S. personnel were killed. In the past quarter-century, U.S. forces, rather than excavating large temporary graves, have instead quickly evacuated deceased soldiers back to the U.S. during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When lots of casualties are being sustained in a conflict, military teams specializing in looking after soldiers' remains cannot individually bury or observe specific religious rituals for each person, the military says. On top of this, operations to attack or defend against an enemy force will likely still be continuing. U.S. military rules state commanders at all levels are responsible for caring for the remains of deceased soldiers and military personnel and making sure they can be identified further down the line.
As standard, a temporary internment plot has five trenches, able to hold 100 casualties in total. During the North Carolina drills, U.S. Army soldiers used bulldozers and other vehicles to fill the space of each plot in an average of one hour and 15 minutes, the military said.
The remains of up to 2,400 soldiers could be temporarily buried in 24 hours, using eight bulldozers and four military excavators, the Army said. "This exercise allowed us to take a critical look at how we respect, honor, and systematically manage our fallen in a high-intensity conflict," Sergeant 1st Class Delbert Ruede, from the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command, said in a statement. "If we went to war tomorrow, we would be making this up as we went along.
What we are doing here is taking a scientific, field-tested approach so that we can maintain positive control and respectfully care for our fallen." The Fort Bragg exercises were the first time in more than 20 years that U.S. Army chaplains, and personnel dedicated to religious affairs in the military, received training in how to contribute to temporary gravedigging on the battlefield, the Army said. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Rebecca Flood and Tony Phillips.
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