“My heart has been torn out so many times, I can hardly count.” As 2,312 bodies of troops slain in Afghanistan were returned in flag-draped coffins, one chaplain was there to receive them.
This is where presidents stood and generals saluted because this is the place where the price of the war in Afghanistan was made plain.“This,” the minister says, “is holy ground.”
After two decades of it, two decades of decimated bodies returned home, of survivors so haunted they turned to a bottle or their own gun, of folded flags and mournful trumpets and torn families, it’s finally ending. America’s longest war is nearly over. And Sparks will walk away, left with the emotional remains.Dover Air Force Base has housed a mortuary since 1955, when airmen first received the dead in a pair of Quonset huts.
And in a waiting area for relatives, copies of “When You Become a Single Parent After a Loss” are lined on a bookcase and a blackboard in a play area has a child’s drawing of a family with the letters “RIP” hovering overhead. By the time he’d been at it for 21 years, he’d risen to lieutenant colonel and was starting to think about his military retirement. Then Sept. 11, 2001, arrived. He was called to active duty and assigned to the mortuary, where the Pentagon’s dead were being brought, and where he was to be a source of solace for those charged with the somber task of identifying, autopsying and preparing the dead.
Though Sparks had rarely spent time at the mortuary before 9/11, he found he was unwittingly prepared. As a seminarian, he volunteered as a pallbearer, and as a young minister, he shadowed a mortician friend at work. Dying congregants kept him in and out of hospices and hospitals for years. The military calls the movement of remains, from planes onto grey Ford cargo vans with the silhouette of saluting servicemembers painted on the back, “dignified transfers.” Aside from the quiet commands of seven-member honor guards who carry the boxes, the short prayers of the chaplain typically are the only words spoken during the ritual, and feeling the weight of such a responsibility, Sparks wrote a new one for each of the more than 400 times he was called to that duty.
Seconds felt like minutes as he blinked away tears, took a deep breath and coaxed his voice to emerge. At the start of the war, Sparks’ attention was almost exclusively on the mortuary staff. But a 2009 policy change offered troops’ next of kin the opportunity to travel to dignified transfers at government expense, bringing a surge of families to Dover and a second congregation to Sparks.
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