Vic Socotra

03 August 2009

Concurrent Return

(US Military KIA Returned With Honor Under Concurrent Return)

The return of the last MIA from the first Gulf War is a signal moment. It is the first American war overseas in which everyone lost is now accounted. Scott Speicher was the last one to come home.

It is too soon to say if that standard will be continued in the long struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the expectation has been established that none will be left behind.

Technology plays a significant part in this astonishing commitment to our troops. It was not possible to identify those who went missing and were later found in the old days, particularly in the great meat-grinders of the global conflicts.

When last I checked, the American missing from the last century went something like this: 3,500 from WWI; 80,000 WW II; 8,000 Korea; 1,600 Vietnam.

It is a lot of people, nearly a hundred thousand strong. The government says that maybe half of that number might actually have discoverable remains. It is a lot easier in the case of those that were interred overseas by the Army Graves Registration Commission, and it’s successor organizations.

War is a messy business, and record-keeping, initially started during the Civil War, only became standardized during World War One. Both the British Empire forces and their junior partner, the American Expeditionary Force, adopted a policy of interring the fallen near the places they were killed.

You can understand that the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of caskets was simply not affordable once the guns fell silent except for the privately wealthy (whose sons used to go to war). It was determined to be more egalitarian, not to mention cost effective, to decorate the hallowed ground where they fell.

General Black Jack Pershing was instrumental in the effort to establish the American Battle Monuments Commission, established by Congress, which currently maintains two dozen overseas military cemeteries that contain the graves of nearly 125,000 American war dead.

They are solemn places of great emotional power, and most of the elegant marble gardens are in France. The tradition continued after WW II, and the cemeteries of Normandy are today the focus of remembrance of the War in the West.

Korea marked a dramatic change. If you recall, the Northerners rampaged south, pinning the United Nations forces in the Busan Perimeter, then the great break-out, the landings at Inchon and Wonson and the dash north to the Yalu River.

All along the paths of advance the fallen were cataloged and buried, pending the cessation of hostilities. Of course, then the Chinese entered the war in October, and the Americans made the desperate withdrawal south through Frozen Chosin.

They took their dead with them, when they could, since no one wanted the fallen to suffer the same indignity as that of the German dead interred in their cemeteries in the East. The Red Army despoiled all that stood in its path, and desecration was a general order.

Starting on Christmas Day of 1950, the United States made a sweeping change regarding the handling of the dead. Henceforth, rather than burying them in temporary cemeteries for future disposition, the bodies were immediately returned to CONUS. The policy is known as Concurrent Return, and accounts for the absence of American cemeteries in South Korea or Vietnam.

There is a WW II-era pre-concurrent return policy facility in Manila, for example, that includes the dead of the brief Colonial period that followed the Spanish War, and one in Panama, where the Zone was once considered US soil. They augment the capacity of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, cupped in the Punchbowl crater in Honolulu, USA.

I used to visit that lovely place when I lived at Pearl Harbor. Like Arlington, it has a solemnity and tranquility that is quite remarkable.

It seemed infinitely preferable to the fate of General Nicholson and his resting place in Delhi, much less the fate of the British Army’s 44th Regiment of Foot (East Essex), which was wiped out on the retreat from Kabul in the first Afghan war. The bones of their dead, unburied in 1842, can still be found near Gandamak near the Jagdalak Pass

Anyway, with the policy of concurrent return, there has been no particular reason to worry about the condition of our overseas fallen. At least there wasn’t, until I got word that an old shipmate had passed away last March in a place so far away that it took this long for the word to arrive.

Bobbie K. Hubbard retired from the Fleet as a Master Chief, and I can assure you that he was thoroughly Old School, one of a crusty breed whose like has passed out of the inventory.

I am drinking the morning coffee from a small curious teacup that Hubs gave me in Yokosuka in remembrance. The rim is decorated in silver, and the logo on the side reads: C.P.O.- Mess- Open-Yokosuka, curled around the image of a Torii gate.

Japan is where I served with him, on USS Midway, but that is not where Hubs lies now in death.

It has been a long way around the rose bush to get to the point of that, I know, and we will not be home just yet. I will have to tell you where Hubs will spend the rest of this epoch tomorrow.

The man was a force of nature. Old nature. If you had told him about the policy of concurrent return, he would have snorted, pinned you against a locker, and told you to go straight to hell.

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