The photograph on the front page and Web site of The Baltimore Sun could not be more stark. In part, it's the composition: a series of repeated horizontal lines, from the red and white stripes of the American flags draping two caskets, one resting on a loader, the other being carried from the aircraft by a team of camouflage-clad Marines and both perfectly level with the ground.
But the true power of the photograph lies beyond the image. The two Marines, on a final journey home to Maryland after being killed in the war in Afghanistan, bear witness to the continuing and ever-mounting casualties there and in Iraq, conflicts that have remained largely out of sight and thus out of mind on the home front.
Until three months ago, an 18-year government ban kept the return of most fallen servicemen and -women at Dover Air Force Base hidden from view. The nominal reason was to shield grieving families from unwanted glare, but critics of the ban claimed it helped the previous administration mask the human cost of the increasingly unpopular wars.
So we've had this odd blind spot these past years, our military dead hidden from us, wars fought somewhere else and the ultimate sacrifices made by other people's sons and daughters, husbands and wives. And to be clear, it wasn't just the Pentagon or the White House that wanted to keep this from us; we were complicit in our own obliviousness. Even as we grew disenchanted with the Iraq war, the reaction was simply to avert our eyes.
In April, President Barack Obama lifted the ban. As long as the service members' survivors gave their approval and photographers and reporters followed a strict set of protocols designed to keep them away from the families, the news media now are allowed to record the arrival at Dover of their remains in what the military calls dignified transfers.
Since April 5, Dover has been the backdrop of 120 such homecomings, a spokesman for the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operation Center told me. (The number was current as of Thursday.) Belying the notion that relatives shrink from outside attention, more than 70 percent of the fallen service members' families - 86 of them - agreed to news coverage.
The families of Marine Sgt. Michael W. Heede, 22, of Edgewood and Staff Sgt. David S. Spicer, 33, of Olney were among them. On Monday, they were killed in an IED explosion in Helmand province in Afghanistan, part of the growing toll of an intense summer offensive against the Taliban.
