Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COMMENTARY . Ban on Media Coverage of War Dead . June 25, 2004

Read comments from other scholars and writers about the ban on media coverage of the arrival of war dead at Dover Air Force Base:

Photo of Dover caskets

While the ban on photographing the war dead coming back to Dover Air Force Base has been reaffirmed by the Senate, at the same time all over the country there are very public ceremonies for the war dead going on, where governors of states and many besides military and family and friends of the dead do see them. It seems to me a curious kind of down-sizing or outsourcing of mourning -- a ban on it at the national level, and yet at the individual town and state level all across the country, people aren't afraid at all to see the coffins of the war dead. It seems incoherent to do that. Historically, it's a very peculiar move to make. I know it has a lot to do with Americans' reluctance to face death. It's part of our national character quite often to be squeamish about it. We turn away from the realities of it quite often, in ways that are very different from other kinds of societies (and even different from the way America was a century ago), where death is faced much more directly.

There seems to me something very strange and very wrong about not allowing acknowledgment and not seeing the war dead arrive. I can see how it can be misused if people wanted to use it for propaganda reasons, but the problem is that bringing the dead back in flag-draped coffins in a furtive manner makes it seem out of step with the honor that should be paid the war dead. Throughout history, if you are going to honor the war dead like that it's a civic function, whether it's Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 or Pericles' funeral oration in the middle of the fifth century in the first year of the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides tells us about. Having the war dead or some symbol of them seen -- in ancient times it would be their ashes; it would be their graves at Gettysburg; or having the coffins there today -- is all part of the reality of war. It's an absolutely necessary first step for mourning, and it seems to me an odd misstep, for whatever reason -- as if the nation somehow couldn't face the reality of what the war is actually producing.

The word for private citizen in ancient Greek is the same as our word for "idiot" -- "idiotes," a private person. I know that the privacy of families and private grief are very much honored now, but people are also citizens of the country, and these are citizens who fought and died for our country. While we have private identities, we also have civic identities. The war dead were doing their civic duty and were killed in the line of duty, and it seems to me it is part of the duty even of the people in the families or their friends or those who are mourning for them directly to realize that it's not simply a private show. You can't have a privatized war the way we seem to be doing. I can't see the difference between trying to make Dover completely private and privatizing the war. To do that seems to short-circuit the whole meaning of national service. It's not at all a good idea.

Back in the spring when there was a first move to try not to show the coffins of the dead, Senator McCain bounced back very quickly and said that was simply unpatriotic. That was a very forthright statement on his part. At the time it confounded those who didn't want to show the coffins and who thought that to be an unpatriotic action. Senator McCain was coming not only from his own life history and his service in the Vietnam War, but also I think from his dismay if not his rage over the way people are trying to escape the reality of what is going on in war. In fact, it does a dishonor to the memory of the dead to pretend that it didn't happen, to see no visible evidence of it, to sweep it away and make it a private grief. I really think what it comes down to is a misdirected, misconceived application of privatizing. Privatizing has happened so much in our government that we imagine we can even privatize grief and mourning for the dead. If you're going to have a civic life and a civic identity, that's a terrible move and a very peculiar move.

Let me give you an example of what we could be losing as a country. We are nearing the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. When Till's body was brought back home signed and sealed and fastened shut with the state of Mississippi seal, his mother insisted on the coffin being opened. The point was that what had happened to Emmett Till wasn't going to be hidden and buried, and the photographs that resulted were shocking. This is nothing like that. The coffins that are shown as they arrive are not identified. There could be alternatives to that as a way of honoring the dead, but why is it Congress's or a senator's right to tell us how we can or cannot honor these people? What is the problem there for civic identity?

When I am not allowed to see something for a very definite political reason, I suppose censorship would be a good term for it. This certainly happened in the Second World War, where it was very easy to see pictures of dead Japanese and Germans, but for quite a long time you did not see pictures of dead American soldiers. That was censorship at a time of war.

I'm not quite sure what other term you could use for this but censorship. The question is: Censoring what? For me it's mortality, the reality of death. The dead went out soldiers, and this is how they come back to their country. Why can't we face that? We are facing it locally, which is odd. It's a kind of decentralizing or a kind of confederate approach to it, if you will. There is no controversy at all about all the states across the nation regularly honoring the dead; nobody is flinching from it. It seems the one place where the government wants to control things is in Washington. You could, if you wanted to, draw parallels between the way the government would like to control the arrival of the war dead and also control how much we know about what's going on in Iraq itself right now.

I'm coming at this question from poets like Homer and THE ILIAD and tragedy. People can frame it ethically if they want to, but I'd like to call attention to something more pointed that's going on. Consider, for example, the bomb blast at Hiroshima in 1945. You could certainly debate the ethics of that. You could certainly talk about the science that went into it. But what about the human suffering that goes on and how people come to terms with it? What about the death not only of the soldiers but the suffering of their families and friends? Why not focus on that? Why not pay attention to what's going on there instead of abstracting it into an argument about whether we should or should not pay honor to them? The ethics of it -- again, I detect that fatal contemporary American desire to separate out and control questions or issues that are at the center of our lives so that they can be moved off to the margins of what's going on. We don't see the coffins come in, but locally we can see them. The national impact thereby is diminished. Instead of seeing the coffins for what they are, objects of mourning, for people who need to be wept over and missed -- instead of seeing those for what they are, instead of seeing our reality of the war, the death that is going on, we get off into a specialized question of ethics -- about whether or not people are right to do this. I find the move toward posing abstract ethical questions about this on the same level as I do letting the locals take care of it: Anything to diminish the national forum, what's going on in Washington, the reality of it all. We can't see what's going on in Fallujah and other places, and that prison [Abu Graib] -- we're only gradually learning what was going on there, and the more we learn the less we like what we know. Similarly, I find the fear -- it's not a matter of taste or ethics. What is it people are afraid of in not wanting these coffins to be shown?

Photo of Dover caskets

If you look at poets who have dealt with war, or read memoirs even of recent wars -- Michael Herr says in DISPATCHES about the Vietnam War: Death is what it's all about. But nobody can cover that very well, and people will go to any lengths to talk about anything else they can rather than face the reality of it. There is something that's making those who oppose the viewing of the coffins afraid, but what is it they are afraid of? I don't think it has to do with sensibilities and family at all. When politicians don't want us to do something, there is something they don't like. I can draw a direct parallel with Maya Lin's great Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. It emphasized the deaths of people to an absolutely unprecedented degree in American memorial art. In much the same way, the focus on mortality, on the dead, was something that many politicians reacted to instinctively. They didn't say they were afraid of it, but they did everything they could to control it. I feel that same politicians' desire to control something they fear might get out of hand. If you see too many coffins you might begin thinking about the deaths of people in war too much, and that's always a dangerous thing for politicians to have to face.

-- James Tatum is the Aaron Lawrence Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College and author of THE MOURNER'S SONG: WAR AND REMEMBRANCE FROM THE ILIAD TO VIETNAM (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

More often than not, once historians have gained access to the pertinent records, they find that decisions to suppress photographs of the dead have been a sign of weakness. They are an indication of an administration's fears of wavering public support for specific policies.

Recent discussions over whether or not to ban photographs of coffins of U.S. service members killed in Iraq have emphasized general principles rather than such political considerations. Supporters of the ban speak of the need for privacy for families of the dead, and opponents of the ban speak of the need for an informed public.

From the American Civil War to the present, those with influence over what images of war reach the public have taken into account such principles. However, in addition, context always matters. To give one example, during the first nineteen months after Pearl Harbor officials withheld almost all photographs of Americans killed in World War II because they feared such images would demoralize the public. From September of 1943 until the end of the war in the summer of 1945, the government released increasingly graphic photographs of the American dead because they feared that as Allied victory became more certain, public complacency might lead to a less fervent commitment on the home front. Photographs of the dead served as an incentive to keep employees on the job and working to the maximum of their strength.

Responses to the Vietnam War gave rise to the assumption that pictures of American casualties lessened public support for war, but the American experience during World War II demonstrated that in certain contexts photographs of the American war dead can be an effective way of intensifying commitment to the war effort. In the present, as in the past, not only general principles, but also consideration of the probable impact on public attitudes, guide government officials, journalists, and others involved in shaping the visual presentation of war.

Popular conceptions of the Vietnam War also obscure the historical reality that government officials are more likely to encourage publications of photographs of the dead if they believe they enjoy wide support for their policies. Vietnam might seem to contradict this because as public support dwindled late in that war the publication of horrific images increased. However, the government had no control over this because of decisions made early in that conflict, when public support was high, not to set up an official censorship apparatus similar to the ones put in place for the two world wars. During the early years of World War II, the attack on Pearl Harbor mobilized the public, but it also made it difficult for the Roosevelt administration to persuade the public of the wisdom of making victory in Europe the first priority and therefore encouraged suppression of photographic reminders of the costs of a prolonged multiple-front war.

Photo of Dover caskets

It may be decades before scholars gain access to documents that allow a convincing account of the evolution of current policies regarding photographs of coffins of U.S. service members killed in Iraq. One thing we can say for certain is that the story will need to take into account political goals as well as the principles emphasized in public debates.

-- George H. Roeder, Jr. is professor of liberal arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of THE CENSORED WAR: AMERICAN VISUAL EXPERIENCE DURING WORLD WAR II (Yale University Press, 1995).

To forbid Americans from witnessing the final homecoming of the dead from the Iraq War is a callous, low-minded act of audio-visual doublethink. The banishment from sight of our war dead blots out what should be a searing memory.

During the Second World War, the emblems of American dead were everywhere -- gold stars in windows, wreaths on doorways, black armbands on coats. Misjudging the determination of a democracy that well knew "why we fight," government censors initially banned photographs of American combat casualties, but by 1943 the pages of LIFE and YANK were printing austere tableaux of GIs killed in action -- a marine crumpled in the surf, a paratrooper cushioned in the snow. Rather than shrink back from the pain, newsreels and wartime documentaries guided home front Americans in how best to remember and grieve. A sequence in John Ford's DECEMBER 7TH (1943) pauses at a newly dug grave to give names and faces to a selected honor roll of the dead at Pearl Harbor. A mature acknowledgment of the cruel but necessary cost of a just war, the spirit was reverent and clear-eyed. Then, as now, the media drew a curtain over the most grisly evidence of the impact of modern armaments on the human frame, but no one pretended that the dead were not with us, that there was not a corporeal referent to the War Department telegrams.

Of course, in terms of the present policy, the operative wartime back-story is not World War II but Vietnam. A constant stream of body bags transmitted by television is a bad news cycle beyond spin control. Yet it was not the images of carnage on the nightly news, or even the weekly body count tally, that eventually turned Americans away from that war. It was the endless chaos, year after bloody year, the blizzard of white noise and jump-cut flashes with no rhyme, reason, or light at the end of the tunnel.

To justify the No Trespassing sign posted at Dover Air Force Base, the Bush administration has cited the wishes of some military families for privacy and dignity. Harsh as it is to say, however, the families are not the only ones who need to grieve. A funeral is a private ritual, a family affair, not to be crashed by a blow-dried airhead shoving a microphone into the faces of the bereaved. But the return to native soil at Dover is a public ceremony. The quiet, respectful observance of the cadences of a religious-military pageant -- via an unobtrusive camera with a telephoto lens and a single pool reporter -- would permit members of a larger family on to the grounds to pay their respects.

"If it is not on television, it didn't happen," goes the glib line. The families waiting for the coffins know better. Still, ever since the funeral of JFK, the camera has been the portal through which Americans, collectively, bear witness and mourn their loved ones. The refusal to permit this solemn catharsis can only bespeak a fear in Washington that the coffins will come to represent not a noble sacrifice but a tragic waste.

-- Thomas Doherty is chair of the film studies program at Brandeis University and author of PROJECTIONS OF WAR: HOLLYWOOD, AMERICAN CULTURE, AND WORLD WAR II (Columbia University Press, 1999).

Photo of Dover caskets

The dead belong to the nation. That is part of the sacrifice of joining the military. Alive, soldiers give up their freedom, suppress their individuality, and chose not to live in a democratic institution. In death, the war dead must continue this sacrifice with honor, and in silence.

Why must they be invisible, too, upon their return to the United States? Anonymous flag-draped caskets in transit from carnage-filled battlefields to hallowed cemeteries back home are a sacred sight that is sorrowful and moving, profound and inspiring. These martyred heroes will be remembered because they placed their bodies in mortal danger to defend the great religious values that give life to the United States of America: freedom, democracy, individualism.

The faceless dead, without personality or marks of identity, have symbolic power beyond that of any one corpse on its own. This is why the Bush administration wants to control these images: the body politic is placed in great jeopardy when the symbolism of the dead is publicly challenged, or worse, reconfigured to serve popular resistance to the war. When that happens, as it did so forcefully and effectively near the end of the Vietnam War, regimes crumble, administrations dissolve, and political cultures are transformed.

The only ritual display of the dead sanctioned by the current government during these times of war must serve national unity and regenerate collective identity. Think back only a year to the media circus surrounding the embalmed bodies of Hussein's sons, a vital moment in the war effort when the enemy dead had to be seen by the entire world to revive domestic support for the military ("We are making progress so lives are not being sacrificed in vain") and to send an international message to terrorists from this administration ("We are coming after you wherever you run").

Certainly the recent over-saturation of public mourning for former President Ronald Reagan led to a fixated gaze squarely focused on the transportation of that flag-draped casket from sea to shining sea. This dead body conveyed and created a national celebration of the same basic religious values that are so often communicated when the body politic must survive, indeed transcend, particularly troubling deaths: freedom, democracy, individualism. In death, remembering Reagan's own personal story highlighted these values for immediate public consumption and long-term political vitality.

The public circulation of images depicting the return of the war dead, however, poses a peculiar dilemma for the administration: will images of the dead inspire the country to continue to support the war and supply future martyrs whose deaths are required in the battle against terrorism? Or will the dead be used to stir up anti-war efforts that claim these young lives are being wasted in an ill-conceived, ultimately ineffective global war on terror?

The masters of war understand the political uses of the dead and the critical need to manage their place in the social order. Ironically, the religious principles for which this war is being fought -- freedom, democracy, individualism -- have been suspended in the name of respect for these dead. The global war on terror, surely just beginning if President Bush is reelected, will continue to produce casualties whose deaths make sense only when understood in relation to these sacred doctrines. The war dead will be returned home without public fanfare or ceremony, invisible to Americans living in yet another time of trial, securely hidden from public view and therefore harmless as political symbols of resistance.

-- Gary Laderman is associate professor of religion at Emory University and author of THE SACRED REMAINS (Yale University Press, 1996) and REST IN PEACE (Oxford University Press, 2003).

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