San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
How DOD shaped Americans’ view of war in Afghanistan
The Defense Department wanted you to see the images of the final flag-draped coffins leaving Kabul last week — and then it didn’t.
On Aug. 27, the military released eight images from the somber procession honoring the 13 service members killed by a suicide bombing near the Abbey Gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport the day before.
The ramp ceremony was the last chance for those on the ground to honor the dead as they left the war zone.
The photos show young Marines in helmets and body armor carrying the silver transfer cases holding their lost friends. The red, white and blue stands out against the sea of tan camouflaged uniforms. The pallbearers look tired, mournful, resolute. Military members line the road and pay their respects.
On the C-17, Marines kneel and bow their heads over the fallen. The 13 transfer cases line the floor of the aircraft.
One photo shows two Marines with their arms around one another. They’re looking away from the camera. One Marine’s hand rests on the top of his buddy’s helmet.
These eight images encapsulate the war. Young volunteers thrown into a no-win situation. They’re patriots carrying an unimaginable weight amid perilous conditions. They joined a long list of people ensnared by fumbled foreign policy and an apathetic nation. Despite the rhetoric and chaos, they fought side by side and took care of each other.
Sadly, the Department of Defense’s handling of the images echoes another hallmark of the two-decade war — an insidious, pervasive and bureaucratic curation of the information the public saw from the war zone.
War efforts, like any institution, have a baked-in desire to keep themselves going. It’s hard to maintain support when the public sees and understands the true costs. So, we see a variety of policies and approaches to shield us from realities on the ground. More often than not, the government wrapped these measures in sound reasoning, like respecting the families of the fallen and “operational security.”
The efforts also resulted in vast over-classification of information, so the public often got some of the basic facts, but details providing nuance and context were unavailable.
The end result is small sleights of hand such as what happened to the eight photos from Kabul.
You see, after releasing the photos, DOD removed them from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, or DVIDS, the official repository of military imagery.
Lisa Lawrence, a DOD spokesperson, acknowledged the photos’ removal and said they “were posted in error.”
The move follows an old script that often veils the truth and departs from the military’s stated public affairs doctrine of “maximum disclosure, minimum delay.”
DOD banned media coverage of transfer ceremonies from 1991 through 2009. The change allowed families to determine whether media could cover the fallen’s arrival to Dover AFB in Delaware. It forbade media coverage of ceremonies at any location while en route to Dover.
Local commanders also often put additional restrictions on military photographers, for example.
More than a half-dozen times, on the Bagram flight line, I saluted flag-draped transfer cases of the dead as their friends carried them onto C-17s. At every ceremony, hundreds of people, including the most senior generals and State Department officials, stood to honor the fallen under the bright Afghan sun. A band played hymns. Chaplains provided comfort. After the jet’s ramp closed, we all walked away silently. And the families of those lost would never get to see any
of it because photography was banned.
Many of us thought that if we were killed, we’d want our families to see how our brothers and sisters honored us as we left Afghanistan.
Other coalition countries, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand, did not have such restrictions.
It’s rare to see such images here. We should be thankful to Marine 1st Lt. Mark Andries, the photographer who captured those photos, and whomever released them to the world.
Perhaps the DOD and politicians didn’t want these stark photos to bookend the war. Maybe they preferred images of troops helping Afghans, or that
green night-vision snapshot of the final soldier, a general, boarding the last plane out.
It’s tough to understand what’s really going on in a wartorn country on the other side of the world. The problem is compounded when the information is carefully shaped. These photos leave the question:
Would we have stayed in Afghanistan as long as we did if we had a better understanding of what was going on?
Regardless, the pictures from the Kabul ramp ceremony remind us of the immeasurable costs of war and serve as a warning against the government veiling the truth.