A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong
only way God can find them. At the moment they’re all together, and I need God to find my daughter; I need God to find my wife; I need God to find my mother …’
What we brought in filled a body bag and a half. That was all we could find, so there was huge pressure. I actually sent everybody out of the mortuary for the day and said, ‘I’ve got to do this one myself,’ because juvenile identification is my area of expertise. So I laid out 12 sheets along the floor of the mortuary and, going through the material I had, I started to separate little bits out … You know, ‘That can’t be the five-year-old, so is it the eight-year-old or the six-year-old?’ By the time I’d done all that, we had something that I was absolutely happy represented each of the 11 people. But there were two 14-year-old boys, and all I had of them were arms, and they were pretty much bare bone by that point. I couldn’t separate them because they were both male and the same age. One of them had a Mickey Mouse vest attached to it. I said to the policeman, ‘Go and ask the father which of his children had a Mickey Mouse vest.’ He came back with the name of one of the twins, and I thought: that’s all we need.
We gave him back 12 body bags at the end of that day – the twelfth bag was what we couldn’t separate. It would be very tempting just to split that between the bags on the principle ‘He’ll never know.’ But that’s not the point. She [meaning her grandmother on her shoulder] won’t allow me to do that, because at the end of the day the man wants to be sure that in that bag is his wife; in that bag is his daughter …
It mattered very much to him, but it also matters to the courts because they could come along and say, ‘Right, open up that body bag.’ If what’s in that bag doesn’t equate to the named missing person you’ve said it is, then you’re not a credible witness, and every bit of evidence you’ve recovered can be discounted. You can’t afford to do that.
So we gave him back 12 body bags. And it was the most humbling experience of my life to hear him say, ‘Thank you.’ You think: God, for what he’s been through this is the absolute least we could do.
So are there temptations to do a little bit extra for the family, or for the police, or are the limits of your responsibility very clear?
It is generally very clear. Most of the time we don’t have involvement with the family, because you can’t afford to be influenced by their emotion and their situation. So most of our work is in clinical isolation. And you go the full 110% on everything you do, whether it’s for the police, the courts, the family or whoever, it doesn’t matter. But when the family element comes in, then you do end up, I think, going that extra little bit that you possibly shouldn’t. But you can’t not.
In a place like that you were probably working very long hours with little sleep – how on earth do you look after yourself?
If you’re the only anthro on the team and you haven’t looked after yourself and they need an anthro, then you shut that team down. So there’s a huge responsibility to look after yourself – to make sure that if you cut yourself you deal with it properly; if you get a tummy upset you deal with it properly, you drink enough water.
We also have a buddy system where you take responsibility for somebody else, who equally takes responsibility for you. If you start to see erratic behaviour, then you can pull them aside and say, ‘We need to talk.’ You’ll do that for them, and they’ll do that for you.
Also, part of the role of the senior officer in charge is welfare. We didn’t have that in the early stages of Kosovo, so we did work far, far too many hours. It became clear that people were going to burn out quickly, and the senior officer said, ‘No, today we’re doing nothing. We’re going to sleep late and eat well. You can read a book, phone home, do whatever you like, but we’re not working today.’ That becomes very important, but you can’t do that in all circumstances – it depends on the nature of the deployment. If you’re going in somewhere that’s particularly dangerous you may have a very tight time schedule, and then you don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We’re not working today.’
What keeps you going?
It’s the detective in all of us, isn’t it? Our mystery is: who was this person? And when you solve that, it’s a huge adrenaline rush. You think, ‘Yup, someone’s got their husband back. Someone’s got their wife, their daughter … I’ve made a difference.’ Even if it’s not going to make a difference to the courts, it’ll make a difference to somebody. And that’s grand …
Working in a big team in Kosovo was a bit like Big Brother. You take a bunch of people that wouldn’t normally choose each other; you throw them into a really difficult situation; you throw stresses at them – lack of sleep, lack of food – you make them work together. And yep, there are times when you will shout at somebody, lose your temper, but you know you’ve got to live with them again, so you get over it. It can be quite an experience! But the camaraderie you develop is hugely strong. And these are the people you can talk to, because, when nobody else will understand, they do.
The police brought some counsellors to Kosovo. And I mean, bless their hearts, they tried! But they never understood why we couldn’t take them seriously. Because they’d never worked with us, they didn’t know what we were doing.
So is this where the buddy thing came in – they suddenly realised you needed someone who knew the situation?
Yeah, absolutely. You’ll sit down at night with a beer, and you’ll just talk. But to have a counsellor come in and say, ‘Tell me how you feel,’ you think: for goodness’ sake, I’ve been here for 12 weeks – how the hell d’you think I feel? It can be counterproductive if you haven’t got the right counsellors.
In buddying each other, can you admit weakness?
Oh, absolutely. We had an officer out with us one time … We had been exhuming bodies in a field. It was miles from anywhere, so we couldn’t take the bodies back to the mortuary; we had to do the post-mortems on a sheet laid out in the field. This was a group of women and children that had been massacred, and they were really in a dreadful state. We’d just exhumed the body of a little girl and she was still wearing her sleep suit and her little red wellies. One of the officers made a mistake – the little girl was about the same age as one of his own, and he put his daughter’s face in his own mind on to this. I was working with the pathologist, and I looked up and thought: why’s there a row of policemen looking at me? Then I saw that behind them was this officer who was falling apart: it was the men’s way of giving him his moment of privacy and time to get over it.
So I took my gloves off, took my suit down and tied it round my waist, went over and gave him a huge hug. He broke apart, and he could then talk to me afterwards. We sat and we drank beer together that evening, and by the following morning he said, ‘Och, I shouldn’t have done that. I’ll never do it again, because it’s not my daughter.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not,’ you know? So you’ve just got to look out for it …
Going back to the beginning when you first did anatomy, how difficult did you find it? Were you ever squeamish apart from the rats?
When I was at school I had a Saturday job in a butcher’s shop, so from the age of 13 I’d dealt with cold, red meat. I’ve never been squeamish about carcasses, or cutting up meat. It’s natural. And to dissect a human body, to be able to look underneath the skin, is the most fascinating thing. It’s a real privilege to be able to see what we’re like inside. There’s nothing ghoulish about it. We’re all fascinated by bodies.
You were the first in your family to go to university, but how much support did your mum and dad give you over the years?
My mother was enormously proud. She had a scrapbook, bless her, of everything I’d ever done. My father is proud too, but he can never tell you. He’s an ex-regimental sergeant major, classic Scotsman, and he finds demonstration of affection really difficult. But I know how much he cares.
How easy is it to take off your white coat, go home and be a mum at the end of