Don't hide human toll in Iraq war

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Apr 25, 2006 by Doug Robinson Deseret Morning News

When I was a boy and the war of the day was Vietnam, the coffins were sent to our town. Coffins with American soldiers in them. Coffins carried by my father's airplane, among others.

My father was an Air Force pilot, and he flew regular missions to Vietnam from our home base in Dover, Del. He ferried supplies to the war -- everything from munitions, weapons and vehicles to toilet paper and food. For the return trip to Dover, they placed coffins in his empty C-141 Starlifter.

It was a long flight. He flew from Dover to Anchorage to Japan to Vietnam and then took the same route home. At intervals during the long flight home, he turned the controls over to his co-pilot and wandered the airplane to stretch his legs. He wandered the cargo bay where there was room to walk and move. There, he would see up to a dozen coffins stacked on each other.

"When I'd get up to stretch my legs, I would immediately think about those coffins, he recalls.

On the ends of the coffins, there were tubes that contained a rolled up paper with information about the fallen soldier -- name, rank, hometown, date of death, site of death, race, etc. Curious and moved, my father unscrewed the cap, reached into the tube, extracted the paper and read about the man in the box.

"I would take a sampling of them," he says. "They were just young kids, 19, 20 years old. I thought, what a waste. They were in the prime of life. It really saddened and bothered me. It made it more personal."

Normally the crew was inclined to joke and jabber during the long flights to make the time pass, but when caskets were on board the mood was different.

"The pilots didn't talk about it," he says. "I remember they didn't like to have them on board. It was just a sad thing. It was very quiet and somber."

To alert the ground crew to their special cargo, they used a code word on their radio when talking to the control tower. They never used the words "human remains" on the air, which is what they were normally called. All human remains were flown to Dover Air Force Base, where there is a large mortuary to handle them.

"During the height of the war there were a lot of them," my father says. "They were always handled with great care and dignity."

I thought of this the other day when I read that the remains of soldiers are still being flown to Dover, this time from Iraq, where they are dying at a rate of more than two per day. You'll rarely see images of this in newspapers because the government has banned the media from taking photos of coffins that arrive at Dover filled with U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq. (The Rocky Mountain News won a Pulitzer for a powerful photo of a widow by her husband's coffin at the Reno airport.) They tried to enforce the same policy during the Vietnam War.

The policy, of course, stems from the fear that such images would turn people at home against the war. It keeps Americans and the carnage apart. It keeps the war impersonal.

"They don't want the public to see what the great difficulties are," historian Robert Dallek told USA Today. "They're fearful that the public is turning against the war because it's frustrated by the losses of blood and treasure, in this case Iraq and earlier in Vietnam."

It's a form of propaganda. If we have soldiers abroad dying and facing horrors for Americans at home, shouldn't Americans at least bear the burden of seeing and knowing the realities of what those soldiers face? Should they be allowed to keep their heads in the sand, to be sheltered?

Shouldn't they see the real cost of war, regardless of whether that cost is judged to be worth it or not? Shouldn't they feel some small part of the pain that the victims' loved ones feel?

Shouldn't it be made personal, just as it is for the soldiers' families at home? Just as it was for my father and the pilots who fly them home?

E-mail: drob@desnews.com