Friday, March 24, 2006
Lost Airman Laid to Rest
The WWII airman found frozen in a Sierra Nevada glacier last October is being buried in his hometown in Minnesota today. I posted on this several times, most recently when his identity was announced last month. The New York Times has an interesting piece with much detail on how the DoD forensics lab solved the mystery of Leo Mustonen's identity.
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4 comments:
I'd like to read (or maybe write) a book called "Flesh" about how we interact with bodies dead or alive, including our own and those of animals.
Last night on the news they told about a soldier in Iraq brought by helicopter and nearly exploded. The medic carried him in his arms off the copter and handed him off to the emergency surgery team, who began to run with him. His foot fell off. In the emergency surgery, the soldier died. They sent someone back to look for his foot to be buried with him.
Prairie Mary
Mary
There is a physical anthropologist at the University of Tennessee named William Bass (I worked for him once 30 years ago) who has a fenced plot of land on campus called the Body Farm. He gets cadavers and leaves them there buried (or not) in various different situations to study the decomposition process. He wrote a book on it that might interest you.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399151346/sr=8-13/qid=1143241894/ref=sr_1_13/102-3299516-7437712?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Reid,
I think I'll pass on the buried cadaver book. Did you go see the exhibit of plasticized and dissected Chinese unfortunates?
Prairie Mary
I watched something on CBC about the body farm. On the surface it's absolutely disgusting and visually very disturbing but it has a valuable purpose. Apparently the police can use this info for identifying a poor lost body (How long it's been left for dead). But there's still something sad about it, like a whole field of unfinished business.
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