Bush Ignores
Soldiers' Burials
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
October 30, 2003
On Monday and Tuesday, amid the suicide bombing
carnage that left at least 34 Iraqis dead, three more U.S. servicemen were
killed in combat in Iraq. In the coming days their bodies will be boxed up and
sent home for burial. While en route, the coffins will be deliberately shielded
from view, lest the media capture on film the dark image of this ultimate
sacrifice. It is almost certain, as well, that like all of the hundreds of U.S.
troops killed in this war to date, these dead soldiers 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 8-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 over the past week
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 or not 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.
"Bush's inaction is a national
disgrace," said one Gulf War I vet, speaking off the record.
"I'm distressed at the lack of
coverage – amounting to government censorship – of the funerals of
returning U.S. service members.
"Bush loves to go to military bases near fundraisers," he continued.
"The taxpayers pay for his trip,
then he rakes in the cash. Soldiers are ordered to behave and be quiet at Bush
events. What a way to get a friendly crowd! The bottom line is that if
Bush attended a funeral now, it would highlight a few things: 1) There's a war
going on, stupid; 2) There are bodies flying home in coffins censored by the
Pentagon; and 3) Bush is insensitive to families and veterans."
Even as a propaganda strategy hatched by a PR flak, Bush's absence at funerals
or memorial services – or even being photographed greeting the wounded – is
starting to look less savvy. On September 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 Colombia'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 United States. (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 I vet 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're fighting a war that the president says is not a war anymore but still is
... they haven't restored democracy, nor did they find any weapons – and they
are being shot at every day."
"It goes back to the reasons behind this war in the first place,"
continued Sheehan-Miles, executive director of the Nuclear
Policy Research Institute. "We've got this constant rhetoric that
supporting the troops is the equivalent of supporting the President's policies.
If you're against the war then you're not for the troops. And this is one of the
key things that show the lie of that. The President, the Pentagon and, to a
lesser extent, the Congress has shown that they don't have any regard for the
people who are fighting the war on their behalf."
Sheehan-Miles noted that the Bush
Administration has in recent months sought, and in many cases received, major
cuts or elimination of funding set aside for school districts that host military
bases (since the troops are exempt from paying the taxes to support these
schools), combat pay, Veterans Administration per capita expenditures, life
insurance benefits and base housing modernization, all the while dramatically
lengthening deployment periods. Soldiers are so badly paid their incomes are
usually too low to receive Bush's ballyhooed per-child tax credit, Sheehan-Miles
adds; while living conditions in Iraq are considered grim even for a war zone.
"I correspond with people in the military," says Sheehan-Miles.
"One of my friends was in a combat battalion who just came back; they were
basically just hunkered down there trying to stay alive. He's not going to talk
about it though; he's a 20-year vet with a career on the line."
Add to all this the fact that the rate of U.S. military
casualties is rising rather than falling, and it becomes understandable why
some veterans' 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 (IL.) 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.
Christopher Scheer is a staff writer for
AlterNet. He is co-author of the "The
Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq."
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