Honor Those Who Die in Uniform, Don’t Hide Them

They’ll be burying Thomas Steiner this morning.

They’ll be burying him in the tan uniform of the California Highway Patrol. He was wearing a uniform last Wednesday afternoon, when a teenager looking to make his bones with some gang of thugs stepped out of a red four-door Nissan older than he is and allegedly fired three shots into Thomas Steiner. The teenager was shooting the uniform, not the man. But it is the man they’ll be burying this morning.

If Thomas Steiner’s services are conducted with the sorrowful choreography of those who have gone before, we will have the crack-and-slap of rifles being shot and shouldered in salute; the flag, folded in a sharp, starched triangle, laid into the arms of the widow. Thousands of cops will be there, and hundreds of public officials, and dozens of news cameras.

All of us will be able to bear witness to this public exhibition of a public loss, and to reckon the price of public service.

Imagine multiplying this one death, this one grave site, by more than 700 lives, 700 coffins, 700 flags, and you have the ranks of American military killed in Iraq.

You will have to imagine them, because you are not allowed to see them.

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I am looking at other coffins, under the same flag.

Spread across my desk are black and white news photographs of soldiers’ bodies and soldiers’ coffins.

February 1965: The American ambassador to South Vietnam watches services for eight dead soldiers conducted alongside the plane that will carry their bodies back home.

April 1967: Medics hustle the bodies of dead Marines from a Vietnamese battlefield to a waiting helicopter; the coffins and the flags will come later.

March 1951: Rabbi, minister, priest and politician walk past the unmistakable shapes under the stars and stripes, the bodies of Los Angeles’ first soldiers killed in Korea.

September 1954: Flag-wrapped coffins are lifted by winch from the deck of a ship, as Army, Navy and Air Force men salute.

February 1942: Three months after Pearl Harbor, the coffins of dead sailors rest on the deck of a warship, beneath the outstretched hand of a priest and the long barrels of guns.

September 1942: Soldiers in dated doughboy hats stand before a long row of coffins of men killed in the Battle of Midway.

And June 1945, two months before the war’s end, a photograph that you cannot see without tears filling your eyes: a San Diego Marine colonel kneeling in the dirt of a foreign land, praying alongside the flag-covered stretcher bearing the body of his son, killed on Okinawa.

Democracy has no more public act, no more shared event, than going to war. The pictures on my desk are the proof of it.

So why is it that some aspects of this war in Iraq are still being conducted as furtively as a mugging?

The nation took a body blow on Sept. 11, 2001. It stood ready to sacrifice. Instead, it was encouraged to show its patriotism by hitting the mall. No knitting socks, no rolling bandages, no gas rationing. Heck, we got a federal budget that whacked $400 off child-care credits for the working poor but dangled a tax credit as big as six figures in front of the self-employed who bought the biggest fuel-sucking SUVs they could lay their driving gloves on. And to perpetuate that demi-war, neat and antiseptic, we have a president like the MSN butterfly, flitting on ahead to shield us from truths that may be unpleasant or ugly or painful.

Last Veterans Day, I wrote about the first Bush administration’s 1991 edict banning photographs of coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. After decades of iconic pictures of presidents, heads bowed, standing at the coffins of the American dead from Beirut and Panama, Kosovo and Nairobi, the lens cap was snapped back on.

But last week came the photographs of coffins in the belly of a home-bound plane, pictures taken by an American military contract worker in Kuwait. After the photos were printed in the Seattle Times, the company fired her and her husband.

A few days later, a Tucson man who uses the Freedom of Information Act like a crowbar to pry loose secrets he thinks shouldn’t be secret opened his mail and found an official government CD-ROM with photos of flag-shrouded coffins at Dover Air Force Base. He put them up on the Internet; the Pentagon said they’d been released to him by mistake.

It can’t be the sight of death, or coffins, or flags that’s made the Bush administration so skittish. All three have figured large in Bush campaign ads: the ruins of the mass grave of the World Trade Center, firefighters carrying someone’s flag-shrouded remains from the Gehenna of Ground Zero.

These other dead Americans, the soldiers, the Marines, the National Guardsmen -- they were killed by foreigners, too, and according to the White House, by some of the same “evildoers” who colluded in the 9/11 attacks. Why, then, is the sight of flag-covered bodies fit for campaign commercials, but not for news photographs?

I came across a different TV ad from the Bush campaign of October 2000. It was called “Trust,” and in it, candidate Bush said, “I believe we need to encourage personal responsibility so people are accountable for their actions. And I believe in government that is responsible to the people.”

Dear Mr. President: Thank you for that. But when, exactly, will that happen?

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We bid goodbye to Thomas Steiner today. We will witness and acknowledge the wrenching cost of his public service. He deserves no less honor; we, who hired him to put on that tan uniform, deserve no less honesty. And the 700-some Americans who also died in their uniforms, on duty and for duty -- on a street in Fallouja, or a desert road outside Baghdad -- deserve both.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. Her earlier columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison.