Spreading a gospel for the dead: Marines teach MEDCEUR military medics

  • Published
  • By Lance Cpl. Jad Sleiman
  • MEDCEUR Public Affairs
DANILOVGRAD ARMY BASE, Montenegro --  It's not your everyday Marine Corps instructional slide show. Before the familiar "Questions?" screen rolls, a dozen images of bodies ravaged by combat in Iraq flash before the class.

A Personnel Retrieval and Processing Marine stands by signaling his assistant to change slides in a small multimedia room tucked away inside the Danilovgrad Training Base in central Montenegro, Sept. 11.

His audience, military medical specialists from nine central and eastern European countries, nearly silent before the show, break into thinly hushed conversation as hands shoot up from behind desks during the first of three classroom days. Some asked where the bullet holes were, unaware of the many different and gruesome ways death visits a battlefield.

The Marines and their students were brought together for Medical Training Exercise in Central and Eastern Europe 2010, or MEDCEUR '10, an annual U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff-sponsored exercise meant to improve mass casualty disaster response and increase interoperability between the U.S. and participating nations.

The six Marines, based out of PRP Company Anacostia, Va., and Detachment PRP Syrma, Ga., are tasked with training their counterparts in the handling and processing of the human remains left in the wake of a catastrophe.

Gunnery Sgt. Octavius Shivers, the non-commissioned officer in charge of Det. PRP, has been attending MEDCUER since 2007. The bulk of the exercise's approximately 250 participants will be preoccupied with the living, but Shivers and his Marines want them to remember the dead.

"The knowledge for processing and taking care of remains is not out there," explained Shivers, acknowledging the shortcomings of both U.S. and foreign militaries.

"If you go back even to World War II a lot of remains were left unidentified, hence the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. That's why now we are pushing all the knowledge that we have out there, out to everybody."

Pushing knowledge is a big part of the PRP Marines' job. The Marines have long had the B-billet "grave register," but the dedicated occupational field, open exclusively to volunteers from the Reserve, became official only five years ago. Born in the midst of two wars, the new PRP Marines faced a steep learning curve - one that's taught them to teach.

"Every drill weekend we're doing classes, running mock S and R's (search and recoveries), running mock anything that pertains to our job," said Octavius, explaining that extra job training must be squeezed in whenever there's time for it because PRP Company, the only unit of its kind in the Corps, is constantly deploying and redeploying its own ranks.

Training his Marines, he said, has prepared him to train foreign soldiers.

Later in the class, Shivers crawls into the jet-black body bag he and his Marines call a "human remains pouch."

"Oxygen, he needs oxygen!" jokes one of the students in a thick Serbian accent.

Shivers is all too familiar with the total darkness of the flip side of the bag, having conducted similar training in its use countless times over the years. The memory of his first time inside, however, still lingers.

"It was kinda eerie," he recalled. "Because I know that when I actually process a remain and I unzip that bag I know he's not getting back out."

The students are out of their seats hovering over Shivers as another PRP Marine explains the proper way to lift and open a bag. When Shivers finally climbs out, asks "we good?" and opens his eyes, some of the students laugh and applaud as if relieved he came back.

Next on the curriculum are body searches. A couple Marines play dead on their stretchers and try not to laugh while their students learn to feel around pockets and necklines for personal effects. To surviving loved ones, watches and wallets often become priceless reminders of those that once carried them.

There's also paperwork: records of search and recovery, anatomical charts, statements of recognition of deceased, records of identification processing, convoy lists of remains and records of personal effects.

The PRP specialist's forms include fields that read semi-skeletal, flesh covered, burned, intact and decomposed - with three different degrees of decomposition. There are boxes for hair color, age, build, wounds and scars. Everything about a casualty and his or her possessions must be documented.

"If he had a thousand one dollar bills that means you need to write down each dollar bill and the serial number for each one of those dollar bills," Staff Sgt. Chris Mitchell, a PRP specialist with Det.PRP, told his class.

It's detailed work, but dignity, the Marines stressed, can't be lost in the details.

"One of the big things is how we move remains, whether it be when we're just carrying them or in a vehicle, everything has a purpose behind it," explained Staff Sgt. Troy Heitzer, training chief with PRP Company Anacostia, Va. "When we carry a transfer case we always carry them feet first. It's a symbolism thing that they're still walking with us."

The Marines offered their students the example of a "dignified transfer," the solemn, military manner in which they load processed casualties onto a plane before turning about and exiting. It's not quite a ceremony, they said, but it's something.

Often, an airplane out of country marks the end of a PRP mission. The beginning, however, isn't always so peaceful.

The final period of instruction focuses on how to actually go out and secure casualties downed in the field. Though they get their official training at an Army mortuary affairs school in Fort Lee, Va., PRP specialists don't like being called Mortuary Affairs Marines. That's because they take special pride in the 'R' in PRP -- retrieval.

"I guess it goes back to the motto that 'we never leave a man behind,' that we'll allocate manpower and resources to bring them back," explained Sgt. Joseph Connelly, the PRP Company PRP specialist who taught the search and recovery classes.

They teach the class how to methodically comb an area for remains; start a hundred yards from where the first remains should be, and search a hundred yards past the last one found. Keep in mind, they tell the class, that while you search for a casualty; the enemy may be searching for you.

Groups of students, numbering no more than two dozen each, get the same two-hour class only once. Next, they'll rotate out to continue with classes like mass casualty triage and chest trauma surgery, more optimistic courses closer to the central aim of the exercise: saving lives.

Whether they'll ever get the chance to use anything the Marines taught them or even know what to do if the chance arises, is unclear. None of their students, mostly medics and surgeons, work as mortuary affairs professionals and one day of class is, after all, only one day of class.

"Hopefully some of them can go back to their units and build or start some kind of mortuary affairs program," Shivers said. "What we give them here is a good fundamental base."

During the final field exercise of MEDCUER '10, the Marines set up a mock PRP collection point and man it alone while their students work in separate faux triage and surgery centers ever concerned with heart beats and breathing. The living are sure to trump the dead when resources are limited, and the Marines know they can't turn military docs into PRP pros overnight. They can only share what they've learned and hope for the best.

Still, every year when MEDCEUR's organizers ask if a tiny group of Reserve Marines wants to tag along again, the Marines say yes.

Come next year they'll be in Macedonia, still spreading their gospel.