The hundreds of people who lined the streets in Lexington Saturday to honor Josh Harris were doing exactly what they should have done: paying respects and offering gratitude to Harris, a Navy SEAL who died while fighting in Afghanistan.
Lexington's a small town, and it seemed that almost everybody there knew Harris and his family.
Similar scenes have played out in Winston-Salem and Mount Airy and Lewisville and other communities when they have suffered the loss of one of their own in war.
But in these days of the volunteer military, there are many families who do not have relatives or close friends deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. There are many Americans who have barely been affected by these wars, and who, from day to day, more or less forget that Americans are still serving and dying -- more than 4,000 to date.
Rep. Walter Jones, whose district in North Carolina includes Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, the Cherry Point and New River Marine Corps air stations and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, thinks that it should not be so easy for Americans to overlook these sacrifices. Jones, a Republican who became an early opponent of the Iraq war, particularly does not think much of what amounts to the Bush administration's efforts to hide the grim truth about war deaths.
Jones has wisely introduced a bill that would force the Pentagon to allow accredited journalists to cover arrival ceremonies for coffins coming home to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
It's well known that news coverage of the returning coffins of those killed in Vietnam helped turn the public against that war. Then, during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, a ban was imposed on news photos of returning war dead.
The current Bush administration has expanded the ban, saying in 2003 that there would be "no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning or departing from Ramstein Air Base or Dover Air Force Base."
Jones' bill is not proposing to invade a family's private grief or to turn funerals at national cemeteries into media events. The individuals in the coffins unloaded in solemn ceremonies at Dover in Delaware are not identified by name.
The National Press Photographers Association, led by Bob Carey, the chairman of the Department of Communication Studies at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, applauds the bill. Carey issued a moving statement last month saying that "as a photojournalist and educator, my role is to teach the youth of today the importance of our freedoms. I can state unequivocally that my colleagues mean no disrespect to the uniform or the families when we have covered these moving events."
Far from it. Showing the somber sight of flag-draped coffins bearing fallen heroes being returned to U.S. soil as the wars continue is an important way of honoring the dead. Americans should not be able to forget those who are dying for us. The toll of war should never be hidden away.
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