I’m just watching “The Pacific” and during the battle scenes, I got to wondering how various armies collected their dead.
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My grandfather was a supply sergeant in WWII. He told us that when the troops pushed forward they would move into the area. They would triage any wounded that had been left and get them back behind the lines. They would gather the dead and put them in rows (both their side and the enemy). They would then strip the bodies of any military issued equipment (guns, knives, tools, helmets, canteens, etc.) (They would strip the enemies of all valuables, don’t want the enemy to have anything they can use against you) And then medical trucks would come up and the bodies would be placed on them and moved for shipment back home). The enemy bodies were left on the field unless the foreign country had an equivalent of the red cross that were allowed to cross the lines.
My uncles from Vietnam had very different stories of carrying their dead friends through the bush sometimes for days till they could get back to a base or get a chopper in for the wounded and dead.
And my own experience is that modern warfare in the middle east is very similar. Just a different kind of jungle with different gorilla fighters. Or you are going out to pick up pieces.
One of the things that Boston Dynamics is working on is a robot called a mule. It will accompany soldiers into the field carrying all their equipment. And then if a soldier goes down they can be loaded onto it’s back and using GPS it can the autonomously take the soldier back and then return. You see when a soldier goes down it can effect as many as 4 others tasked to carry them out.
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