U.S. Army practices digging temporary battlefield graves | 26 Oct 2026 | The Army is preparing for the grim possibility of burying fallen soldiers on the battlefield, testing how fast it can dig temporary graves while preserving remains for eventual identification and return to families after the end of a conflict. During an exercise in North Carolina, engineers, preventative medicine teams, chaplains and fatality management specialists prepared for mass temporary interment not used on a large scale since the Korean War, the Army announced in a release last week. Phase II of Operation Dragon Covenant [?] challenged troops to test and validate temporary burial operations and remains preservation at a large scale. Engineer soldiers involved had to use their equipment to excavate and then fill burial trenches without damaging mock remains, made of skeletal models and water containers, so that hypothetical future forensic teams could unearth and repatriate them after the end of a conflict.