An Image Of Grief Returns

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For the past 13 years, the Pentagon has barred reporters from witnessing the transport of soldiers' flag-draped coffins to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. But in a strange coincidence last week, those images, which had become so iconic that many Americans did not realize they were prohibited, resurfaced in two places. On April 18, the Seattle Times ran a photo taken by an employee of a defense contractor in Kuwait of a plane filled with coffins. The cargo worker, Tami Silicio, was promptly fired. Then Russ Kick of Tucson, Ariz., put 361 Dover photos (all from the past year, including images of the coffins of the shuttle Columbia crew) on his site, www.thememoryhole.org — having sprung them from the Air Force through a Freedom of Information Act request. But that was "apparently just a mistake," says a senior Pentagon official. "We don't want the remains of our service members, who have made the ultimate sacrifice, to be the subject of any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified," says John Molino, a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense. The Pentagon barred release of any further photos, but by then, of course, the images were everywhere.

The bigger question was why they had been absent for so long. In the 1980s, Dover, which houses America's largest military mortuary, was a stage for public grief: the 241 Marines killed in Lebanon in 1983, the crew of the space shuttle Challenger and the casualties of Panama and Grenada all passed through for publicized ceremonies attended by politicians and widows. Then, at the start of the first Gulf War in January 1991, the Pentagon barred media from the ritual. Critics speculated that the White House wanted to avoid the embarrassment it suffered two years earlier, when networks showed coffins returning from Panama in a split screen beside President George H.W. Bush joking with reporters at a news conference about the invasion. In announcing the ban, the Pentagon cited a need to protect the privacy of soldiers' families.

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But there has been no real agreement on the issue. The A.C.L.U., along with a support group for military families, sued to overturn the ban. The case was dismissed in 1996. The Pentagon has intermittently bent its rules. In 1996, it made public the return of the remains of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 32 other Americans who died with him. In 2000, after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the caskets once again appeared before cameras.

America's largest military-families group officially supports the ban. Joyce Raezer of the National Military Family Association in Alexandria, Va., says there is "no apparent consensus" among the group's 27,000 members, so it has chosen to err on the side of caution. "Some families tell us they find the pictures disturbing," Raezer says. Others disagree. Jane Bright, whose son Evan Ashcraft was killed in Iraq last July, spoke at a rally in Dover in March: "Let the media and the rest of America see the coffins ... It's the least we can do. Our children did not live in secrecy; they should not be shrouded in secrecy upon their passing."

During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt disagreed with the military's decision to censor newsreels because he was worried that the public might get apathetic. What the New York Times wrote then remains true today: "Government propaganda is conflicting, confused, and hydra-headed ... it pulls in opposite directions, often on the same day."