Soldier Dead
How We Recover, Identify, Bury, & Honor Our Military Fallen
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first book to address the complicated issues surrounding what happens to members of the United States Armed Forces after they die.
Why does recovering the remains of servicepeople matter? Soldier Dead examines this question and provides a thorough analysis of the processes of recovery, identification, return, burial, and remembrance of the dead. Sledge traces the ways in which the handling of our Soldier Dead has evolved over time and how these changes have reflected not only advances in technology and capabilities but also the shifting attitudes of the public, government, and military. He also considers the emotional stress experienced by those who handle the dead; the continuing efforts to retrieve bodies from Korea and elsewhere; and how unresolved issues regarding the treatment of enemy dead continue to affect U.S. foreign relations.
Skillfully incorporating excerpts from interviews, personal correspondence and diaries, military records, and journalistic accounts—as well as never-before-published photographs and his own reflections—Michael Sledge presents a clear, concise, and compassionate story about what the dead mean to the living. Throughout Soldier Dead, the voices of the fallen are heard, as are those of family members and military personnel responsible for the dead before final disposition. At times disturbing and at other times encouraging, they are always powerful as they speak of danger, duty, courage, commitment, and care.
“A timely and detailed investigation into the moral conscience of American society which will be of interest to anyone concerned with the human costs of war. An important and passionate book which deserves a wide readership.”—Chris Shilling, University of Portsmouth, UK
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is not a book for the faint of heart; Sledge's subject, from which he does not stray far throughout this dense work, is battlefield death and what becomes of soldiers' corpses. He presents a deeply researched, detailed history that features many photos, most of them depicting either freshly dead or decayed bodies of American military men arrayed on battlefields, mainly from the Civil War, the Korean War and WWII. That includes shots of the remains of GIs disinterred from cemeteries in Germany, unburied remains on a WWI battlefield in France, and African-Americans collecting the bones of dead soldiers on the Chancellorsville battlefield in Virginia. These photos, to say the least, do not make pleasant viewing. In his narrative, Sledge carefully and conscientiously examines such thorny questions as why soldiers put their lives at risk to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades and why the American military continues to expend enormous funds and personnel hours searching for the remains of Americans killed in the Vietnam and Korean wars. Oddly for a serious-minded book of this sort, Sledge injects himself, and his quest to find the answers to these questions, into the narrative in a very personal introduction and extended "
