A Heart Job: Attending to Army casualties, survivors

By David Ruderman, U.S. Army Human Resources Command Public AffairsJuly 8, 2015

A Heart Job: Attending to Army casualties, survivors
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A Heart Job: Attending to Army casualties, survivors
2 / 4 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Case support section chief Gerald Henson checks a days ahead folder at the U.S. Army Human Resources Command's Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center on Fort Knox, Kentucky. A days ahead book is provided to survivors of Army casualties to he... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
A Heart Job: Attending to Army casualties, survivors
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"Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan." - President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

FORT KNOX, Ky. (July 6, 2015) -- The mission of U.S. Army Human Resource Command's, or HRC, Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, or CMAOC, remains constant over time: to render full honors and dignity to America's warriors past and present, and to attend to the needs of their loved ones and survivors when they are gone.

Though the mission never ends, the organizational structure of casualty and mortuary affairs within HRC has evolved significantly over the past decade, driven by the operational requirements of an Army at war. In fact, until 2009, casualty and mortuary affairs used to be separate endeavors.

"They used to be separate in so far as some handled the wounded, some handled just the deceased. What we've done is combined it all into a notification/operations cell," said Roger Dray, chief of the notification section, a native of Delphos, Ohio.

"When I first came in there were two separate branches, casualty and mortuary," said Logan, deputy director of the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Branch. "The mortuary people would make sure the Soldier was buried properly and the casualty people would make sure all the benefits were done properly. In order for us to provide better service, we combined them in 2009."

The move to a case management system was mandated in 2006 by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but it took until 2009 to implement because of functional restructuring and the underlying personnel changes needed to make it happen.

"That was a very difficult thing to do," said Logan, who hails from Hamburg, New York.

"We are not deterred by budgetary and structural challenges," said CMAOC director Col. John A. Cooper. "We know and believe our leadership will ensure we have the resources to perform our mission. While these challenges require us to think differently, they have no impact on the quality of services we render to our fallen and their loved ones."

One major innovation involved the establishment of a separate branch to focus on the development and implementation of regulations, policy and procedures without becoming overwhelmed by day-to-day operations. Today the policy, plans and training branch concentrates on writing and managing the five governing Army regulations and two Army pamphlets to determine mission requirements in the field for both CMAOC and the casualty assistance centers, or CACs.

"I like to think of us as being the enabler," branch chief Theresa Lever said. "We're the ones who review the law, the doctrine, codify the law and policy, and other regulation too."

Lever said her staff of 15 are dedicated to managing policy for casualty, mortuary and memorialization efforts, as well as line-of-duty and fatal incidents brief procedures.

While the Army G-1 is the proponent for casualty and mortuary affairs for the Army, policy is written in CMAOC and approved by G-1, said Erick Hoversholm, chief of the policy, programs and plans team.

"The regulations we write and maintain are mortuary, casualty, line-of-duty, fatal incidents brief and memorialization, plus the two pamphlets that provide guidance for casualty and mortuary," he said.

Hoversholm, who hails from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was enthusiastic about the ongoing re-writing and realignment of the five regulations into one series, which will streamline their use in the field.

"Now all the regulations will be in the 638 series. We consider that kind of a big victory, not only for the staff but more importantly for the field. In the past they used to have to hunt through the different series to find the regulation. We're pretty excited about that because not only does it put all the regulations there, but it ties in with CMAOC - our mission and vision are now all supported by our policy being in one place. It is kind of the hub of the wheel," Hoversholm said.

The revisions being published now incorporate changes gleaned from feedback to practices undertaken during the major combat operations of the past decade. The previous casualty regulation, for instance, was last updated in 2007, and mortuary policy had been last published in 2000, reflecting the needs of a pre-9/11 world.

"That will be a fresh update. So many things have changed because the way we are fighting has changed," Hoversholm said.

"For the last dozen years, we have fallen in on existing capabilities. That policy and doctrine worked in Afghanistan and Iraq for years, but now we are going into remote areas of the world and taking casualties we hadn't taken before. We had an established system for bringing back someone who was killed in action in Afghanistan. We did not have an established system for bringing back someone from Africa. Again, the policy becomes more and more important as we go into more contingency type operations," he said.

Since policy changes can potentially impact CAC operations in the future, the PP&T branch reaches out to the casualty and mortuary community to ensure results are collaborative and based on current practice, he said.

"We bring in subject matter experts to talk to the CAC chiefs and, more importantly, to solicit questions from them. Then that feeds the annual CAC training," Hoversholm said.

Outreach to the field remains critical to ensuring support to families never falters. Plans, Policy and Training's, or PP&T's, Chris Stieb travels regularly with the U.S. Army Installation Management Command's, or IMCOM's, G-1 casualty program manager to monitor operations and ensure training and practices are up to date in the 32 CACs throughout the nation and around the world.

"We go every month to a designated CAC. We ensure they are doing the things they're supposed to do and provide any training they may need on the spot. If we have to adapt training to fix some of the gaps, that's what we do. You need everybody involved in the process to give the families the best service they deserve," said Stieb, who hails from Alliance, Ohio.

In addition, the PP&T Branch develops training for casualty notification officers, or CNOs, and casualty assistance officers, or CAOs, in the field and oversees support and execution for all military funeral honors missions, Lever said.

"We work well with IMCOM, with the CACs," said Logan.

A TEAM OF COMMITTED, COMPASSIONATE PROFESSIONALS

Above and beyond regulations and requirements, providing casualty and mortuary affairs support is a question of compassionate Army professionals, both Soldiers and civilians, doing whatever it takes to care for the Families of the fallen and render honor to the service of the deceased, Logan said.

"That's because of the people that are here. We work from the back. We don't need acknowledgement. We know. We're a very proud organization. We're here for the Army, anybody associated with the Army," he said.

"A lot of people don't know what we do here, or how we serve our nation and our Army, until they read about it or until they experience it," said Tony Shafer, chief of the case management section.

"We like to get the boys and girls home," said case manager Roscoe Tidwell. "We like being behind the scenes. We manage the case, but we advocate for the Families too. That's all we do."

"The Army, in my opinion, does a great job in being there to support the Family," said Barbara Bonnell, director of the Fort Knox CAC, located on Fort Knox, Kentucky. Bonnell, who hails from LaFayette, Georgia, but calls Radcliff, Kentucky, home, is responsible for all casualty assistance missions in northern Kentucky and across all or most of four other states.

"We in the CACs, we're there at the notification, those initial actions. And then there's the process to transition the next of kin to the long-term outreach folks. But the Army is available to them forever. As long as they want to be part of us, we are part of them," she said.

"We must praise the courage of the Family members bereaved by our wars," said Col. James H. Fitzgerald, deputy to the adjutant general of the Army. "Death's great unknowns are what haunt those who have survived. The Families, who display a folded American flag in their homes, are never really free of America's wars."

"You have to be called to do this," Bonnell said. "This is not the type of job you go in 9-to-5 and get a paycheck. You can't do it. It has to be a heart job. There are things that will hit you, that will stay with you forever because these are people, they are not cases.

"I wish the American public knew when a Soldier enlists, a Soldier is a Soldier forever," she said. "For us, if something tragic happens with that Soldier, we want to honor him or her, we want to honor their service. I don't care how they died, my job is to honor this Soldier, who offered to take care of us. No one conscripted him, no one forced him. They offered to do this. They volunteered to do this, and I think as a society we don't appreciate that enough.

"When something happens to one of them, the public has to understand the Army doesn't forget. We're not done as long as their Family wants anything to do with the Army. It's an elite society no one wants to join, and I just wish the public knew that we're there, and we do it because we want to do it," Bonnell said.

(Editor's note: This is the second in a two-part series examining the service and support rendered to America's fallen warriors and their survivors by the U.S. Army Human Resource Command's Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, based on Fort Knox, Kentucky.)

Related Links:

Read Part 1 of the series, Trusted Agents

Army.mil: Inside the Army News

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View photos from the USAHRC photo stream

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