One of the most important jobs in support services in the Army is the Mortuary Affairs and Burial specialist. The Army Mortuary Affairs specialist is responsible for duties that relate to military personnel who are deceased, from whatever cause. This can be from both on the job battle type death, or death from natural causes. The Mortuary Affairs and Burial Specialist in the Army deals with duties that relate to deceased military Army personnel, to include collection, recovery, transportation, evacuation and initial tentative identification of deceased personnel. This is a very personal and support related specialty, and a person needs to be able to deal with seeing death on a repeated basis.
Army Mortuary Affairs and Burial specialists are responsible to inventory, move, evacuate and safeguard the personal effects of deceased military Servicemembers. They also serve as members of the elite identification and recovery mortuary specialists at the U.S. Central Command Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. Some of the duties that you may have as a Mortuary and Burial Specialist may include: Evacuating and removing remains found to standard collection and storage facilities, conducting searches for the personal effects and identification for deceased Servicemembers, transporting the personal effects and remains of military personnel to collection points, logging and recording the location of remains recovery on maps, charts or sketches, recording fingerprints and dental impressions for remains identification, and helping to decontaminate human remains that have had biological, chemical or nuclear contamination from an outside source.
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Nine weeks of Basic Army Combat Training prepares you for individual advanced training. Your training will be six weeks in length, and will consist of both in the field and classroom mortuary and burial procedure training. After you finish technical school you will be assigned most likely to a larger command where you can further your training under skilled senior enlisted Mortuary and burial specialists. As you rise in rank you will assume more responsibility including helping train junior mortuary team members, and being responsible to supervise and oversee different burial and mortuary operations. Senior enlisted mortuary and burial specialists supervise and are responsible for: Ensuring that the deceased personal effects are inventoried, recovered and secured, handling and processing of human remains, assisting in the recovery, search and processing of human U.S. Armed forces remains, and advising senior commanders on base and in the field on various burial and mortuary affairs.
