... every effort will be made to recover your remains, and expeditiously evacuated from the battlefield.
Mortuary affairs specialists will clean you, dress you in a dress uniform, with all appropriate decorations, and arrange your return to the United States.
The Air Force will fly you home, first to Dover AFB, DE. No cargo besides human remains will be on the flight. If you were the only fatality, you'll be the only cargo.
A trained Casualty Assistance Officer will contact your next of kin to notify them of your death, and to assist in the preparations for your burial. Your next of kin my choose to bury you in a national cemetery, or in a private cemetery.
Within 24 hours of your death, the service will bestow a gratuity of $100,000 to your next of kin. This is tax free. It's available to cover the routine costs of death- funeral, transportation and lodging for relatives, that sort of thing. There are no restrictions on how it may be used.
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service will, within 30 days, pay all outstanding basic pay and allowances to your next of kin.
If you maxed our your Servicemen's Group Life Insurance (and you almost certainly did), SGLI will pay out per your instructions a benefit of $400,000. Like the gratuity, this is tax free.
If your family was living in government quarters at the time of your death, they will be allowed to remain for one year.
If they were living on the economy, they will continue to receive your Basic Allowance for Housing for six months.
If you were eligible for retirement at the time of your death, and signed up for the Survivor Benefit Plan, your spouse will receive an annuity roughly equal to 55% of your base pay for the rest of their live, or until they remarry (unless they remarry after age 55, in which case the annuity continues).
I just watched Gen. Kelly's remarks yesterday that I presume this post is in response to. Hell of a man. He and Mattis speak with the clarity of men that have already made their mark and don't give a damn whether you like what they say - you are going to hear the truth. Reluctant civil servants/politicans, the best kind.
Posted by: Krag | 10/20/2017 at 06:05 AM
I pray that all this applied to the victims of Fort Hood Terror attack....
Sgt. 1st Class Danny Ferguson
Sgt. Timothy Owens
Staff Sgt. Carlos Alberto Lazaney Rodriguez
Major Libardo Eduardo Caraveo
SSGT Justin Michael DeCrow
Capt John P. Gaffaney
SPC Frederick Greene
SPC Jason Dean Hunt
SSGT Amy Sue Krueger
PFC Aaron Thomas Nemelka
PFC Michael S. Pearson
CAPT Russell Gilbert Seager
PFC Francheska Velez
LTC Juanita L. Warman
PFC Kham See Xiong
Jerry
Posted by: Jerry | 10/20/2017 at 10:56 AM
A minor quibble. The next of kin is notified by a Casualty Notification Officer. After the initial notification is made, the CNO hands off duties to the Casualty Assistance Officer. The assumption is that the next of kin will not want to spend the next several months working with the person who told them their Soldier died.
No doubt the single hardest duty I have ever had was walking up to the door of the mother of a LTC to tell her that her son had been murdered while giving a safety brief. (Except that the CNO cannot go into those details with the family even if he knows them). It wasn't the notification because the wife had changed her mind and decided to notify the mother herself in the middle of the night, so when myself and the chaplain arrived before sunrise after a couple hour drive, the lights were on, she was up, and life as she knew it had already ended.
Posted by: Esli | 10/20/2017 at 12:31 PM
A portion of the movie "We Were Soldiers" involved the process of notification of the next of kin; telegrams delivered by taxicab. Seems rather cold now until you realize the only experience the gov't. had back then was with much larger volumes of casualties. If, God forbid, we ever got into another mass casualty situation, the notification process may be forced to return to something like that.
Posted by: timactual | 10/22/2017 at 01:36 PM