Editorial: War’s indignities come home

Saturday, Dec. 17, 2005 | 7:26 a.m.

Debate over the dignity with which the bodies of U.S. military personnel killed overseas are handled when transported home resurfaced this week with the story of John and Stacey Holley, whose 21-year-old son Matthew was killed in Iraq on Nov. 15.

In a report on CNN Tuesday, the Holleys told of how they were aghast to learn that the body of their only child, a U.S. Army specialist who was a combat medic with the 101st Airborne, would be sent home to Southern California as freight on a commercial airliner.

The funeral home handling the arrangements for Holley's service walked the man's parents -- who are both Army veterans -- through the handling procedure that would be used when his remains arrived at San Diego International Airport-Lindbergh Field.

"They say ... the baggage handlers will unload all the baggage from the aircraft, and then they will bring Matthew down, and they will load him on one of those little carts, and they will wheel him over to the freight depot ..." John Holley recalled during the broadcast. The image, he said, was too much to bear.

The Holleys have called upon the Pentagon and Congress to bring dignity back to the process. And they are not the first family to raise the issue. Gay and Fred Eisenhauer of Illinois in May told of how baggage handlers in St. Louis took a smoke break a few feet from their son's American flag-draped coffin. And in October the Army launched an investigation into its process of notifying families after complaints that information being given was incorrect or delivered poorly.

Army officials this week told CNN that military personnel board the airliners and escort the bodies of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice "every step of the journey." But the fact remains that at some point in that journey, fallen heroes' remains are treated as just another box of cargo.

In 1991 then-President George H.W. Bush banned media coverage and photographs of coffins arriving at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base, the first stop for the remains of U.S. military casualties, to protect, he claimed, the privacy and respect for families. But it's a safe bet neither the Holleys nor the Eisenhauers would consider their respect "protected" by the privacy that only seems to protect the federal government and prevents the public from seeing what is actually going on.