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'Dear John Doe' Letters Sent to Families of Fallen Soldiers

by Karen Hatter | January 11, 2009 at 02:16 pm

238 views | 24 Recommendations | 6 comments

The U.S. Army is apologizing to approximately 7,000 families for generic form letters that were sent to the families of slain soldiers, meant to inform them of services and gifts available to the families of fallen soldiers.

From an item at CNN:

The letters also had improper address information at the top of the correspondence. Instead of the receiving family's name and home address, the letters said "Army Long Term Case Management."

The letters were printed by a contracting company and sent by the U.S. Army Human Resources Command's Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Center in Alexandria, Virginia. The center issued a formal apology Wednesday, according to the statement.

The entire article can be read here.

Click here to view a copy of the form letter.

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Pythiian1

at 13:20 on January 12th, 2009

It is truly unfortunate and offensive to the families of these fallen soldiers.

Surely, the military could have assigned at least a person to oversee proper handling of such somber news to the families. It is a painful and traumatic piece of news to the family of the fallen soldier - the soldier and her/his family deserve far better.

Rhonda J Mangus

at 16:36 on January 11th, 2009

Karen, thanks for this story. I share Pythiian1's sentiment.

BMCWrites

at 19:51 on January 11th, 2009

Sure, it's unfortunate, but no harm was intended. Please let the world know when you achieve perfection and when you operate mistake-free in the manner which you demand others operate.

Karen Hatter

at 21:09 on January 11th, 2009

As the United States military, and the office assigned to handle the correspondence sent to these unfortunate families, have some form of organizational process that should have been in place to review these letters before they were sent, with the correspondence passing through possibly any number of stations/desks, your attempt to allude to imperfections related to myself, an individual, not an organization, bears no correlation.