This afternoon, as we scattered the ashes of my father-in-law in a garden cemetery, I couldn’t help thinking about the dead soldiers returning from Iraq. My father-in-law, as those who have read my
Diary know, was a veteran of World War II.
Fortunately, for him and his family, he didn’t die on foreign soil and come home in a casket or a body-bag or what the military is now grotesquely euphemizing as "transfer tubes." He came home physically whole, and, whatever psychological trauma he endured on those long, dangerous bombing missions he kept to himself right to the end. The war in which he fought – the good war, as some like to call it – ended three generations ago. Only one of his feeble old comrades was able to attend the memorial service. That war, and my father-in-law's part in it, were mentioned only in passing at the ceremonies today. I longed for more.
As often happens, my thinking about the small personal stuff got me to thinking about the bigger public stuff. Specifically, what’s the proper role for the public when dead soldiers return home? I ask this regardless of whether we think a particular war is "good" and just, or a monstrously immoral waste of life, ours and those with whom America is fighting. Should we turn away –
or be forcibly turned away – so that the color guard can perform its duty in secret and the family can grieve alone? Or should every man and woman who dies at the command of a nation’s leaders be greeted by high emissaries of those leaders, in full view of any American who wishes to observe?
I’m torn. Faux patriots could twist these sad homecomings into something they most decidedly are not: justification for the policies that led to their deaths in the first place. Taken in that light, and the outrage on the deck of the
USS Abraham Lincoln, I almost welcome George Bush’s decision not to show up at any funerals or to give photo-op salutes to the remains of soldiers.
Nor, as much as I have opposed this war from its inception, would I want to see homecomings or funerals become venues for antiwar demonstrations, even those cordoned-off, half-mile-away protests this Administration calls freedom of assembly.
On the other hand, a foul reek attends this policy of shielding us from fallen Americans. Never before has there been such a concerted government effort to keep their images out of the public arena.
Tim Harper’s
story in yesterday’s
Toronto Star explains.
An excerpt:
"The administration has clearly made an attempt to limit the attention that would build up if they were showing Dover [ Air Force Base ] every day," says Joseph Dawson, a military historian at Texas A & M University. The White House policy works — to a point.
If there are no pictures of caskets being delivered to U.S. airbases, citizens don't think of them, analysts say.
Dawson says television pictures of the wounded at Walter Reed would be a jolt to Americans as they head out to dinner or are thinking of the week's NFL matchups.
Right now, he says, they likely equate war casualties with highway accidents: They know both kill and don't need to see graphic photos.
"The administration may have to come to grips with this in the months to come. This strategy depends on how long this war goes on. I have to wonder whether it might be a good idea to have a monthly remembrance to reflect on how this campaign is going."
The need for reflection in America is important, Dawson says, because the country seems to have lapsed back into a state of complacency.
"The country should be asking whether these men and women are putting their lives on the line for a justifiable purpose."
The Bush strategy, he says, is to divert focus from the dead and the wounded until — or if — his administration's policy can be judged a winner, then laud the men and women who gave their lives for freedom.
But it is really rooted in the perception in some quarters that the media cost the U.S. the Vietnam War.
There you have it. Instead of a wholly understandable policy of keeping the spotlight out of the grieving family’s eyes, we have just another bit of spin from the Ministry of Propaganda.
