On Sunday, fifteen more U.S. soldiers died near Fallujah, Iraq, when a helicopter transport was shot down by enemy fire. Their remains — like those of the other 363 American military fatalities since the U.S. attacked Iraq — will be boxed and sent home for burial. While en route, the coffins will be deliberately shielded from the media. And it is almost certain, as well, that these dead will be interred or memorialized without the solemn presence of the President of the United States.
Increasingly, this proclivity on the part of President Bush to avoid the normal
duty of a commander-in-chief to honor dead soldiers is causing rising irritation
among some veterans and their families who have noticed what appears to be a
historically anomalous slight.
“This country has a lot of history where commanders visit wounded soldiers
and commanders talked to families of deceased soldiers and commanders attend
funerals. It’s just one of these understood traditions,” says Seth Pollack,
an eight-year veteran who served in the First Armored Division in both the first
Gulf War and the Bosnia operation. “At the company level, the division level
. . . the general tradition is to honor the soldier, and the way you honor these
soldiers is to have high-ranking officials attend the funeral. For the President
not to have attended any is simply disrespectful.”
Repeated questions on the matter posed to the White House earned only a series
of “We’ll call you back” and “Let me get back to you on that” comments from
press officer Jimmy Orr.
Soldiers in the field, say veterans who have been there, have a lot more on
their mind than whether the President has been photographed with a flag-draped
coffin. But for those vets’ rights activists who have not only noticed but begun
to demand answers from the Bush Administration, the President lost the benefit
of their doubt by his actions over the past six months.
“I was really shocked that the president wouldn’t attend a funeral for a soldier
he sent to die,” said Pollack, who is board president of Veterans for Common
Sense. “But at the same time I’m not surprised in the least. This administration
has consistently shown a great deal of hypocrisy between their talk about supporting
the troops and what they’ve actually done,” he added.
“From the cuts in the VA budget, reductions in various pays for soldiers deployed
. . . to the most recent things like those we’ve seen at Fort Stewart, where
soldiers who are wounded are not being treated well, the administration has
shown a blatant disregard for the needs of the soldiers.” Pollack was referring
to 600 wounded, ill and injured soldiers at a base in Georgia who were recently
reported to be suffering from terrible living conditions, poor medical treatment
and bureaucratic indifference. During a recent stop at Fort Stewart, President
Bush visited returning soldiers but bypassed the wounded next door.
Even as a propaganda strategy hatched by a PR flack, Bush’s absence at funerals
or memorial services — or even being photographed greeting the wounded — is
starting to look less savvy. On Sept. 8, Washington Post columnist Courtland
Milloy wrote of one D.C. family’s outrage that the President had not only been
unable to attend the funeral of Spec. Darryl T. Dent, 21, killed in Iraq while
serving in the District of Columbia’s National Guard, but hadn’t sent his condolences
either.
“We haven’t heard from him or the White House, not a word,” Marion Bruce,
Dent’s aunt and family spokeswoman, told Milloy. “I don’t want to speak for
the whole family, but I am not pleased.” A month later, after it was revealed
by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post that the Pentagon was for the
first time enforcing a ban on all media photographs of coffins and body bags
leaving the war zone or arriving in America, more critics came to believe in
their heart what their guts had been telling them for some time: that the White
House was doggedly intent on not associating the President with slain American
troops, lest it harm the already tarnished image of the Iraq occupation as a
nearly bloodless “cakewalk” for the U.S. (One official told Milbank that only
individual graveside services, open to cameras at the discretion of relatives,
give “the full context” of a soldier’s sacrifice: “To do it at several stops
along the way doesn’t tell the full story and isn’t representative.”)
“I’m appalled,” said Gulf War veteran Charles Sheehan-Miles, when asked about
the lack of attention paid the dead and wounded. “The impact of the president
not talking about [casualties] is huge — it goes back to the whole question
of morale of the troops back in Iraq . . . they haven’t restored democracy,
nor did they find any weapons — and they are being shot at every day.”
Given that the rate of U.S. military casualties is rising rather than falling,
it’s clear why some veteran advocates are so frustrated with the president’s
lack of attention to decorum. And for some military families, anger at the war
in general is driving otherwise private people to go public with their concerns.
“With any military family, most of them feel very isolated and afraid to speak
out,” Paul Vogel, whose son Aaron is posted in Iraq, told the Barrington, Ill.,
Courier-Review. “It’s a very frustrating thing for a military family
to realize they’re paying the price for a war that, at least for military families,
is really hard to get all patriotic about. It seems to be unwinnable and unending,
and those are the worst words anyone in a military family could hear.
“Our feeling is Bush needs to be as noble and as contrite as he can be to
say, ‘Hey, we made a mistake, and we need help.'”
Perhaps a funeral would be a good place to start.
The price of Enduring
Freedom
Confirmed U.S. casualties in Iraq from March 20 through
Nov. 4 exceed 2,550 soldiers:
Killed in action: 255
Wounded in action: 1,839
Killed in non-hostile incidents: 123
Wounded in non-hostile incidents: 340
Sixteen soldiers from Illinois have died in Iraq since
the beginning of hostilities in March.
Source: Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count, based on information
supplied by the U.S. Central Command in Tampa and the U.S. Department of Defense.
For more information, seelunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx
There is no reliable source of information on Iraqi
casualties. The Associated Press has reported that 3,240 Iraqi civilians died
between March 20 and April 20, but those numbers were based on surveys of about
half of that nation’s hospitals. The actual number is considered to be much
higher.
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2003.
