Editorial Observer: Accounting for the Invisible Casualties
of War Shouldn’t Be a Matter of Politics 
 
November 14, 2003 
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL  
 
One of the most enduring memories from the funeral of my 
friend Michael Kelly, who was killed covering the war in 
Iraq for Atlantic Monthly, was standing by his open grave 
in a cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., watching an Army officer 
in dress uniform make his way through the cold, persistent 
drizzle and up the small hill to Michael's wife and boys. 
He spoke to the family quietly and then got down on one 
knee on the wet artificial turf that had been placed there 
in a vain attempt to shield the mourners from the earth. He 
gave the boys a flag and a medal.  
 
Michael Kelly was not one of their own. He was brash and 
brave, but distinctly unmilitary. Yet the Army took pains 
to make this simple gesture that drove home the way the 
military honors death: it endows that inescapable but 
inescapably tragic part of their lives with a sense of 
moment, of ceremony and dignity, and most of all it faces 
death squarely and honestly.  
 
This is a central part of the warrior's culture, but it is 
all too often missing from the way President Bush is 
running the Iraq war. As the toll nears 400, the casualties 
remain largely invisible. Apart from a flurry of ceremonies 
on Veterans Day, this White House has done everything it 
can to keep Mr. Bush away from the families of the dead, at 
least when there might be a camera around.  
 
The wounded, thousands of them, are even more carefully 
screened from the public. And the Pentagon has continued 
its ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped 
coffins to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, denying the 
dead soldiers and their loved ones even that simple public 
recognition of sacrifice. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of 
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained rather lamely that the 
ban had been in place since 1991 - when ano! ther President 
Bush wanted to avoid the juxtaposition of his face and 
words with pictures of soldiers' coffins.  
 
Some Republicans say it would take up too much of the 
president's time to attend military funerals or meet the 
coffins returning from Iraq. "They're coming back 
continually," the conservative commentator Bay Buchanan 
said on CNN on Tuesday. "The president cannot be flying up 
there every single week."  
 
But someone of rank from the White House could and should 
be at each and every military funeral. Ideally, Mr. Bush 
would shake the hand of someone who loved every person who 
dies in uniform - a small demand on his time in a war in 
which the casualties are still relatively small. And he has 
more than enough advisers, cabinet secretaries and other 
officials so attending funerals should not be such an 
inconvenience.  
 
The White House talks about preserving the privacy and 
dignity of the families of the war dea! d. But if this was 
really about the families, the president or Vice President 
Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would be 
handing flags to widows and mothers in the time-honored 
way. And if protecting the privacy of Americans who are 
suffering was such a priority, the White House wouldn't 
call in the cameras to watch Mr. Bush embracing victims of 
every hurricane, earthquake or suburban California 
wildfire.  
 
Along with the coverage of these casualties, the coverage 
of combat in Iraq has virtually ceased. The "embedded" 
correspondents who reported on the stunningly swift march 
to Baghdad during the invasion are gone. The Pentagon has 
ended the program. The ever-upbeat Mr. Rumsfeld likes to 
say that the attacks on American soldiers are brief and 
relatively few in number, compared with the number of men 
in arms in the field in Iraq. But without real news 
coverage, it's hard to know the truth.  
 
Letters from American soldiers who have died in Iraq, 
published on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday, suggest that Mr. 
Rumsfeld's accounting may be highly selective. Shortly 
before he died on June 17, Pvt. Robert Frantz wrote this to 
his mother: "We've had random gunfire within a 100-meter 
radius all night, every night, since I have been here. It 
kinda scares you the first couple nights, but you tend to 
get used to it."  
 
The idea of a slow, painful and bloody holding action in 
which gunfire is a nightly occurrence contrasts sharply, 
perhaps too sharply for comfort, with the display of 
overwhelming force, low casualties and lightning-swift 
conclusions that Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld put on in the 
spring. The administration undoubtedly feels that showing 
coffins on television or having the president attend 
funerals would undermine public support for the war. (The 
ban on covering the arrival of coffins at Dover was in 
effect during the popular Afghanistan war, but was not 
enforced.) That seems like more of an acknowledgment of how 
fragile that support is than any poll yet taken.  
 
The Bush administration hates comparisons between Iraq and 
Vietnam, and many are a stretch. But there is a lesson that 
this president seems not to have learned from Vietnam. You 
cannot hide casualties. Indeed, trying to do so probably 
does more to undermine public confidence than any display 
of a flag-draped coffin. And there is at least one direct 
parallel. Thirty-five years ago, at the height of the 
Vietnam War, the Pentagon took to shipping bodies into the 
United States in the dead of night to avoid news coverage.  
 
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