Furman grad worked 9/11 mortuary

Dr. Eric Berg worked at Dover Airt Force Base Port Mortuary after the attacks

The Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs is equipped with 23 state-of-the-art autopsy stations. The mortuary opened Oct. 28, 2003, replacing the 48-year-old facility where Berg worked. It is the Defense Department's only stateside mortuary. (U.S. Air Force photo by William M. Plate Jr.)

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9/11. Furman

By Lyn Riddle

SEPTEMBER 8, 2011 11:17 a.m. Comments (0)

It was the tables that disturbed Dr. Eric Berg the most.

Several card tables in a room about the size of half a tennis court covered in the common stuff that makes up everyday life. Driver’s licenses, toys, passports, cell phones, wedding rings. Watches. The kind with hands and wind-up stems. All stopped at 9:37 a.m., the time American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon.

“That was spooky,” Berg said.

Berg was a pathologist at the community hospital at Fort Campbell in Kentucky on Sept. 11, 2001, and as an Army doctor it was his job to go to Dover Air Force base and autopsy the bodies of the 120 people at the Pentagon and the 59 on the airplane who died.

“I was most grateful I had a job to do,” he said. “Most people wanted to help but didn’t know how.”

Berg is a 1974 Furman University graduate and went on to the medical school at Mercer in Macon, Ga. He joined the Army in 1978. By 2001, he had served in Operation Desert Storm and was an Army colonel.

On that September morning, he watched the reports from New York on a television in his laboratory’s waiting room. Then he learned the Pentagon had been attacked and he knew he, as a regional medical examiner, would be needed.

He got in his car and drove to Dover Air Force Base Port Mortuary in Delaware. Medical examiners drove there from all over the country, he said.

Never before had he faced mass casualties. Never before had he had so many official onlookers in his autopsy suite. This was a criminal investigation on the largest scale and involved all sorts of federal agencies including the FBI and FAA. American Airlines sent representatives as did the Department of Defense.

And he knew if it came to it, he’d have to testify in a trial.

Also there were people to comfort those attending to this grim work. The USO and Red Cross. Government officials came by, including then Sen. Joe Biden.

Two times a day for two weeks a helicopter brought remains. Bodies whole, charred, fragmented. Sometimes remains were delivered in a plastic bag.

All but five people on the missing list were identified. Five others were not on any list. They were of Middle Eastern descent. They were men. They were the hijackers.

Berg left there feeling he had contributed something significant in a time of national tragedy.

In the years that followed, he was involved in a number of high-profile cases. He went to Shreveport, La., to prepare the remains of the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts for flight to be autopsied elsewhere. He flew from Baghdad with the Abu Ghraib prison detainees and autopsied the remains.

He thought about leaving the service before his forced retirement date but thought again when he realized he wouldn’t be able to be involved in such cases.

Berg retired in 2009 and works as a medical examiner for Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Clarksville, Tenn.

A few years after he worked the Pentagon case, he started wondering about the remains of the hijackers. He wondered if he worked on any of them.

He called and asked.

“Out of curiosity, did I touch any,” he said.

“You had your hands on two of them,” came the response.