A Matter of Honor: Veterans Laid to Rest at Last

Photo by Rob Finch “The Oregonian”

In the basements of funeral homes, hospitals and coroners’ offices across the country, plastic bags and cans containing the unclaimed cremated remains of thousands of humans sit on shelves, collecting dust. Some have been there for years or even decades. Many of them belong to U.S. military veterans.

This shameful secret has come to light in recent years, largely due to the discovery of nearly 3,500 containers of ashes in the dark corners of an Oregon psychiatric hospital. There, the tin “urns,” dented, rusted and water damaged, were stacked like so many cans of old paint on shelves labeled with masking tape. According to one estimate, as many as 1,000 of them may contain the cremains of deceased veterans.

How could this happen in a country where we claim to honor our veterans and the service they gave to protect our way of life?

The answer to that question lies in a complex tangle of bureaucratic red tape, strained relationships and financial distress. Some of the deceased had no known survivors, while some families simply failed to claim the cremains of their dead. At the Oregon psychiatric hospital, some of the ashes belonged to patients who died around the turn of the 20th century and were buried in the hospital’s cemetery. Their bodies were later exhumed and cremated to free the cemetery land for other purposes.

Righting the Wrong

Military Cremation Urns

The Missing in America Project (MIA) is a volunteer organization whose mission is to “locate, identify and inter the unclaimed cremated remains of American veterans” and “provide honor and respect to those who have served this country by securing a final resting place for these forgotten heroes.”

MIA is working to accomplish its goals through long-term, exhaustive searches conducted in cooperation with the American Legion and other volunteer and veterans’ organizations, funeral homes, state funeral commissions, state and national veterans administration agencies, and state and national veterans’ cemetery administrations. MIA is also spearheading a second-phase effort to ensure that, from now on, the remains of every veteran who dies will be identified, claimed and interred in a timely manner, with all the respect and honor due to those who have served our country so well.