US Army practices digging mass graves in North Carolina, trains troops to bury up to 2,400 bodies a day

The US Army has conducted a large-scale exercise in North Carolina where troops were taught how to dig mass graves and prepare bodies for rapid emergency internment. Per a press release from the Army, from Captain Thomas McCarty of the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command, the exercise was the second phase of “Operation Dragon Covenant.”

Capt. McCarty says this was “a test-of-concept exercise designed to evaluate and validate procedures for large-scale battlefield temporary interment” and was intended to evaluate “whether heavy earthmoving equipment could excavate and backfill temporary plots rapidly without causing structural collapse or damage to remains.”

This was a serious undertaking, involving soldiers from the 3rd Corps Sustainment Command, the 20th Engineer Brigade, and Unit Ministry Teams working together to decide what the most efficient way to dig a mass grave is.

Why do they need to do this now?

The exercise reportedly did get the desired result. Sgt. 1st Class Delbert Ruede, the senior fatality management NCO, explained that while it’s obviously easy to just bury a bunch of bodies, it’s much harder to do it sensitively: “Backfilling without desecrating the remains is where the real skill lies. Every operator has a different skill set, and soil conditions play a huge factor. Doing this in dry sand is completely different from frozen ground, clay, or mud. Getting our operators’ actual stick time on this specific task gives us data rather than assumptions.”

The exercise also showed that a single engineer company with eight bulldozers and four High Mobility Engineer Excavators can bury up to 2,400 human bodies every 24 hours. They also took time to pay attention to religious considerations, saying that the speed of digging mass graves inevitably means you’re going to be throwing in bodies of people of different religions, but there’s a solution:

“We consulted with Chaplains from various low density faith groups for advisement. The consensus was that by consecrating the site before remains are placed in the ground reassures families that their loved ones are treated with reverence, dignity and honor despite the inability to provide a memorial ceremony in a contested combat environment.”

However, it remains unclear why the Army feels the need to check its mass grave-digging ability. They do say this is for “large-scale battlefield” operations, though there are no public indications the US Army is about to engage in infantry warfare on a battlefield. But at this point, all we can confirm is that the US Army is now fully prepared to bury a lot of human bodies very quickly.