Charts had been set up on tripods on the military side of the office. Tasking lists and maps of the crash site were inescapable, so were calls from the funeral home, calls from the Italian consulate, calls from the search and recovery team, calls from this colonel and that colonel. It was all business for everyone in the office. Never mind that a pilot had died, never mind that we hadn t even been able to find all of his remains. Never mind that his flight patches were in our sink being scrubbed with chemicals to take the blood out.
Mortuary cases take precedent before all else, even things as simple as human emotion.
And at the end of the day all I wanted to do was cry, but nothing came. I went home and watched Jeopardy and stared off into space, knowing that at that very moment cadaver dogs from Oklahoma were sniffing out the missing pieces of the pilot, knowing the names of the parents who grieved in Italy, knowing more than I ever wanted to know about the whole affair. He fell from the sky in pieces, I thought miserably. Objects accelerate at a rate of 9.8 meters per second. I found myself mentally calculating the speed at which the body parts fell to the ground, not taking into account wind current.