Who Made That Military Dog Tag?

During the Civil War, more than a quarter of dead soldiers remained unidentified. “I saw two human skull-bones, one pelvis and two jaw bones lying on a stump with no trace of a grave,” a newspaper correspondent wrote in 1866 about his tour of Southern battlefields. Even mothers could not recognize the weathered corpses of their sons. In order to increase the chances that they would receive proper burials, soldiers bought customized name tags made of metal or wood. When pinned on the lapel or worn around the neck, a tag could help bring the dead soldier home. “Soldiers did a lot to try to be identified,” says Luther Hanson, curator at the U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum. “Some soldiers even wrote their names on the bottom of their shoes.”

During the Spanish-American War, a military chaplain named Charles Pierce pushed to make these improvised tags official. As he worked in the Manila morgue, Pierce noticed that the bodies of soldiers who’d elected to wear pins had a much better chance of being sent home, and so he drew up plans for a military-issued tag: round, aluminum, the size of a half-dollar. “It is better that all men shall wear these marks as a military duty than that one should fail to be identified,” he wrote.

By World War I, soldiers wore two tags. “One tag remained with the body, tied around the legs or ankles or feet,” Hanson says. “And one tag was put outside the coffin, or it might be nailed to the cross or Hebrew star.” The tags soon evolved into mementos with powerful symbolism. “In many cases, the tags are presented to the family,” Hanson says. “The tag is a link between the soldier and his loved ones.”

Elias Krakower is a Vietnam veteran and a volunteer with the Dog Tag Project of the POW/MIA Awareness Committee of N.J., a group that delivers lost tags recovered in Vietnam to their former owners or to the families of the deceased soldiers.

Do you still have your own tags? I have a duplicate set of my tags that I carry in my motorcycle bag. The original tags I gave to my eldest grandson. These tags — you rarely give them a second thought when you’re wearing them. But when someone is killed in combat, the tags are removed. It’s a very traumatic experience to have to take the tags off someone else.

You recently returned a set of tags to a veteran who survived combat. How did he react? Yes, we delivered them to a veteran who lost his tags in a firefight in Vietnam. He had taken the tags off his neck because they clinked and made noise. When he got them back, he cried. It brought back that moment when someone was trying to kill him.

Friday 25 January 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/who-made-that-military-dog-tag.html?_r=0