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Authors: Timothy McDougall
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having lunch with them at a nice restaurant in Atlanta when he and the kid were on leave from Fort Benning. Their son thought it was funny that he, Anderson, had no family whatsoever, and kept bringing it up throughout the meal.
The parents hated that their son was going to get cut up in the autopsy. They were practicing Jews and this was against their religion. But suicide was an even larger sacrilege. The body was holy, in life and death, and only for God to take, in His time.
Anyway, the Army would have ignored the parent’s objection except that Anderson said right away he thought it was an accident. The kid’s family was incredibly thankful for this. That was a long phone call, the one he had with the parents, because they wanted to know how their son was in his final days, what he said, how he was feeling. Anderson assured them he was full of life, which he was, and looking forward to the day he would be coming home.
It really was just an unfortunate mishap. The kid had gone out of their tent to urinate in the middle of the night, and didn’t want to walk the few extra yards to the temporary latrine. So he stepped over to the edge of a nearby canal and relieved himself over the side. Unfortunately, he had taken up smoking recently, more to look Army tough than anything else, and was drowsily trying to light a cigarette at the same time as he was peeing. He slipped and fell in.
The kid’s family had a big question. Why they were camped so close to an obvious hazard? But it wasn’t the Army’s fault either, to be fair, Anderson thought to himself at the time. The nature of being in the Army was to be in constant danger, everything was about expediency. Laying blame was tricky.
The autopsy itself was standard. Standard, as Anderson learned from the young Army pathologist doing the duty at the time, meant they started with a million more photographs of the body (which Anderson could agree was necessary, and heck, the body is past caring, but it still gnawed at Anderson that photos had to be taken at all) before the corpse is weighed. The body is then placed on a slab and a rubber brick is placed under the back to make the chest jut accessibly, causing the arms and head to fall away. Then a deep Y-shaped incision is made which begins at the shoulders, meets at the breast bone and continues down to the pubic bone. Once this is complete, the thick layer of skin is then pulled back to expose the ribcage and neck muscles. More cuts are made and the ribcage is sawed through, separating it from the skeleton.
With the organs now exposed, removal and examination is quite easy. Everything is taken out methodically, weighed and sampled. Veins are opened (there’s hardly any blood because of an absence of blood pressure), stomach and intestinal contents are recorded.
Once the main body has been gutted completely, the rubber brick is slid back under the head to facilitate sawing the top of the skull open. The crown cap is then pulled away making it easy to sever the brain from the spinal cord and lift it free for examination.
The pathologist finished in a little over an hour but said it could have taken up to two hours, even longer in tricky cases. But this was routine. Even unnecessary Anderson thought. The bruising on the kid was easy to make out. His head was banged on the side, and his leg and arm on the same side were broken badly indicating he was trying to brace himself from the impact of the fall. If he were trying to kill himself he would have taken a swan dive, Anderson recalled thinking at the time.
Anyway, the Army pathologist said Anderson could leave but Anderson waited while they reconstituted the remains. This consisted of placing the organs into a plastic bag and dumping them back into the empty chest cavity somewhat like how you see the heart, liver, kidney and neck packaged within a Thanksgiving turkey, only on a human scale. The chest and skull cap were then sewn back up.
Anderson remembered he never
The parents hated that their son was going to get cut up in the autopsy. They were practicing Jews and this was against their religion. But suicide was an even larger sacrilege. The body was holy, in life and death, and only for God to take, in His time.
Anyway, the Army would have ignored the parent’s objection except that Anderson said right away he thought it was an accident. The kid’s family was incredibly thankful for this. That was a long phone call, the one he had with the parents, because they wanted to know how their son was in his final days, what he said, how he was feeling. Anderson assured them he was full of life, which he was, and looking forward to the day he would be coming home.
It really was just an unfortunate mishap. The kid had gone out of their tent to urinate in the middle of the night, and didn’t want to walk the few extra yards to the temporary latrine. So he stepped over to the edge of a nearby canal and relieved himself over the side. Unfortunately, he had taken up smoking recently, more to look Army tough than anything else, and was drowsily trying to light a cigarette at the same time as he was peeing. He slipped and fell in.
The kid’s family had a big question. Why they were camped so close to an obvious hazard? But it wasn’t the Army’s fault either, to be fair, Anderson thought to himself at the time. The nature of being in the Army was to be in constant danger, everything was about expediency. Laying blame was tricky.
The autopsy itself was standard. Standard, as Anderson learned from the young Army pathologist doing the duty at the time, meant they started with a million more photographs of the body (which Anderson could agree was necessary, and heck, the body is past caring, but it still gnawed at Anderson that photos had to be taken at all) before the corpse is weighed. The body is then placed on a slab and a rubber brick is placed under the back to make the chest jut accessibly, causing the arms and head to fall away. Then a deep Y-shaped incision is made which begins at the shoulders, meets at the breast bone and continues down to the pubic bone. Once this is complete, the thick layer of skin is then pulled back to expose the ribcage and neck muscles. More cuts are made and the ribcage is sawed through, separating it from the skeleton.
With the organs now exposed, removal and examination is quite easy. Everything is taken out methodically, weighed and sampled. Veins are opened (there’s hardly any blood because of an absence of blood pressure), stomach and intestinal contents are recorded.
Once the main body has been gutted completely, the rubber brick is slid back under the head to facilitate sawing the top of the skull open. The crown cap is then pulled away making it easy to sever the brain from the spinal cord and lift it free for examination.
The pathologist finished in a little over an hour but said it could have taken up to two hours, even longer in tricky cases. But this was routine. Even unnecessary Anderson thought. The bruising on the kid was easy to make out. His head was banged on the side, and his leg and arm on the same side were broken badly indicating he was trying to brace himself from the impact of the fall. If he were trying to kill himself he would have taken a swan dive, Anderson recalled thinking at the time.
Anyway, the Army pathologist said Anderson could leave but Anderson waited while they reconstituted the remains. This consisted of placing the organs into a plastic bag and dumping them back into the empty chest cavity somewhat like how you see the heart, liver, kidney and neck packaged within a Thanksgiving turkey, only on a human scale. The chest and skull cap were then sewn back up.
Anderson remembered he never
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