“They don’t look real,” says a statistician who has a stack of photographs of the corpses “they’re like dolls. Only then, when the military is fully and completely done with him, is his body wheeled out of the morgue, through the locked doors that lead to the mortuary and his waiting family. Chris Hedgess biography, bibliography, list of books, with the current titles, summaries, covers. For this is the service member’s final duty to the state: offering his or her body for a process called “Feedback to the Field.” During an international video conference call, 80 people look at photographs of the warrior’s naked body - black bars appearing across the groin and eyes - to talk about what went wrong and what might be improved upon the next time corpsmen and surgeons confront such an injury. Every military person killed in action is autopsied, the bodies arriving in the States with any lifesaving equipment - tourniquets or breathing tubes or IVs - still attached. The final chapter recounts Roach’s visit to the morgue of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, a place she bizarrely finds less depressing than the Chick-fil-A, Wendy’s, Dover Liquor Warehouse and McDonald’s she had to drive past to get to it.
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