A young veteran and mortician in Seattle, Washington, has taken on a very special task — caring for the unclaimed remains of veterans who have died and making sure these servicemen are buried with honors.
This has been a salve for this vet’s own war wounds as well. In 2003 James Lindley, 34, was among the U.S. forces in the Kuwaiti desert waiting for orders to invade Iraq. Lindley and other Marines were told they had just nine seconds to don their gas masks in the event of an attack.
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Lindley found the atmosphere of dread overwhelming, as The Wall Street Journal noted in its article about Lindley’s work. When his squadron moved into Iraq, Lindley remained behind on guard duty. It bothered him that while he was relatively safe in Kuwait, his comrades were heading straight for danger.
“I feel guilty because there’s a lot of Marines who saw combat, saw their friends die, things that are very, very traumatic,” he told the Journal.
When his enlistment ended in 2004, Lindley felt damaged by the experience. “The nature of my trauma boils down to just the fear of dying,” he said. The VA eventually declared him 70 percent disabled from PTSD, cognitive disorder and depression.
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In 2010, he married a woman with two children and they moved to Pacific, Washington.
Lindley’s one real friendship was with Stephen Scattareggia, a buddy from his Marine squadron who moved to Arizona after his service. The men spent hours playing online video games together, communicating via headsets.
“We were in each other’s ear every day of our lives since the Marine Corps,” Lindley told the Journal. “He was like my brother.”
But early last year, Scattareggia pulled his car over in Surprise, Arizona, and killed himself with a rifle blast. “I couldn’t be there to help him,” Lindley said.
Shortly after the shock of his friend’s death, Lindley began caring for deceased veterans, with surprising results for his own mental health. “Every time I’m helping one of these guys, it’s like I was helping my buddy.”
He ensures the unclaimed remains of indigent King County veterans are laid to rest at Tahoma National Cemetery with the military honors they earned as servicemen. “I do what I can,” Lindley told the Journal, “which is take care of them when they’ve passed, when nobody else is there to do it.”
This sacred duty first presented itself last summer when King County contacted Lindley about a Korean War veteran whose remains had been at the medical examiner’s office since 2013. In just over a week, he arranged a military funeral, the WSJ noted.
After that, Lindley decided he would take on the processing of every single indigent veteran in the county, a “time-consuming, money-losing effort for him and his employer,” wrote the WSJ.
“That’s a terrible thing to think about, that I might be forgotten.”
If no one steps forward to claim a body in King County, the remains go to a mass grave. Indigent veterans are the exception — those remains are set aside.
Thanks to Lindley, last summer 32 black plastic urns were moved from the medical examiner’s office to the basement of the Columbia Funeral Home. Once the VA confirms a veteran’s eligibility, Lindley schedules a military funeral and arranges for mourners. Thanks to Lindley’s involvement, “the county medical examiner no longer cremates suspected veterans. Instead, they turn over the bodies for burial in caskets paid for by the Department of Veterans Affairs,” the WSJ article noted.
“This is where they belong,” Lindley said. “This is where their brothers and sisters are.”
This unassuming young man finds relief — and his personal mission — in providing this final dignity to those who served.
“I wouldn’t want to be forgotten,” Lindley told WSJ of the work he and his funeral home do. “That’s a terrible thing to think about, that I might be forgotten.”
Service runs in the family: Lindley’s grandfather served as a Marine during the Vietnam War.
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