Ceremonial Burial

Commander Dan Gross provided the program at Kiwanis here in Seward today where he has been a resident for the last several years. As a reservist, his deployments include Iraq and Kuwait 2007-2008, and Dubai in 2012 and numerous others while on active duty. He is now involved with the Navy program of returning the remains of fallen service members to their families here in the United States for Ceremonial burial. He told of the large number of bones that continue to show up in Vietnam and the efforts involved in their identification. Families have a choice of bringing the remains home for burial or having them interned in a Military Cemetery. He has conducted a funeral within the past couple weeks for a recovered and identified individual from Wahoo, NE that had been lost for some 50 years. He told of the dignity involved in the transportation of each individual. The remains are placed in a casket with a personal escort who stays with it even to his having spent a night in an Airline Terminal baggage area. It was interesting to hear on our local Nebraska news this evening of 2 cases of returning remains.