Yesterday I was going to post a link to this story in the Seattle Times which describes one stop on the way home for the American soldiers and marines killed in Iraq — a loading bay at the US military section of Kuwait International Airport.
The article begins: “The aluminum boxes, in ordered rows, are bound by clean white straps on freshly scrubbed pallets. American flags are draped evenly over the boxes.”
The painfully antiseptic quality of those words pervades the piece. And it is one which, quite apart from your political views, it’s worth your time to read — each of these young Americans, motionless in a box, the focus of a tragedy beginning to unfold thousands of miles away, silent.
The focus of the story is a 50 year old mother of three, a civilian contract worker, Tami Silicio, who works at the loading bay in question. The article tells the broader story of the processing of these remains through the prism of Silicio’s work in that process.
The article ends with these three grafs …
Since the 1991 Gulf War, photographs of coffins as they return to the United States have been tightly restricted. And few such photographs have been published during the conflict in Iraq.
On the April day depicted in the photograph that accompanies this story, more than 20 coffins went into a cargo plane bound for Germany. Silicio says those who lost loved ones in Iraq should understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home.
Silicio says she shares her motto, “Purpose and Cause,” with colleagues who appear worn down from the job: “We serve a purpose and we have a cause â that’s what living life is all about.”
As the second graf notes, the article is paired with a photograph of coffins on those pallets in the hull of a cargo plane. Apparently, Silicio, who took the photograph, had sent a copy to a friend. The paper got it from the friend. They contacted Silicio. And things went from there.
Now, I don’t know the precise timeline and cause and effect. But this photo came up just before a batch of similar photos from Dover Air Force Base, which were apparently the product of FOIA requests from the Pentagon, hit the Internet. And Silicio’s photo seems in some sense to have opened the floodgates.
Today, the Seattle Times reported that Silicio and David Landry, a co-worker she recently married, were fired over the photo by the civilian contractor that employed them, Maytag Aircraft.
“I feel like I was hit in the chest with a steel bar and got my wind knocked out. I have to admit I liked my job, and I liked what I did,” Silicio told the Times. “It wasn’t my intent to lose my job or become famous or anything.”
Now, I have a degree of ambivalence about this question of media coverage of the fallen soldiers coming back to Dover. For many opponents of the war there is an unmistakable interest in getting these photographs before the public in order to weaken support for the war. There’s no getting around that. I don’t mean to imply that most who want these pictures out believe that, or even that that’s an illegitimate goal. And there’s a long record of governments managing bad news during wartime to keep up civilian morale.
But one needn’t oppose the war to find something morally unseemly about the strict enforcement of the regulations barring any images of the reality behind these numbers we keep hearing on TV. There is some problem of accountability here, of putting on airs of national sacrifice and not having the courage to risk the real thing, some dark echo of the Rumsfeldian penchant for 4th generation, high-tech warfare where data transfers and throw weights replace bodies at every level.
Of course, the rationale for this policy of barring these images is that to publicize them would be an invasion of the privacy of the families. And certainly if the issue were one of barring photographers from private funerals, perhaps that notion would have merit. But the idea that the privacy of the families is advanced by barring any sort of public grieving and witnessing of these sacrifices just seems ridiculous on its face — especially when we are often talking about rows of anonymous flag-draped coffins.
All the arguments aside, there’s something wrong about the fact that we’re seeing none of this.
Then there’s Silicio.
Every job has rules. Civilians working in war zones probably have more than most. And taking pictures of things you’re not supposed to take pictures of and allowing them to be published is probably high on the list.
But here we have a situation where this woman was the first one to give Americans a view of something they should have seen a year ago. And for that she loses her job.
For all the rules, this is a case where the sum (her getting fired over this) isn’t more or less but just entirely different from the sum of its parts.
Whatever the rules say, that fact that she lost her job over this is wrong.
