The Air Force's mortuary affairs department—those elite professionals who oversee the return of our nation's war dead with solemn reverence at Dover Air Force Base—has lost body parts of dead airmen on at least two occasions, according to a new government report.

Once it was "fragments of ankle bone" recovered from an F-15 crash in Afghanistan. The bones were in a plastic bag that was later found to be empty. The other one was "a piece of human tissue an inch or two in length associated with a soldier killed in Afghanistan."

It seems like the Air Force could come up with a real handy rule about this kind of scenario—something along the lines of, "Lose a Body Part? Then You Lost Your JOB." But no. No one was fired.

[Image via Getty]