THE LAST FULL MEASURE

American dead are coming home to Dover Air Force Base. There are no honor guards to welcome them; no flag draped coffins; no solemn ceremonies to honor the last full measure of their devotion. Their passing is not noted nor marked by the old men who sent them off to die in Iraq. Dover is off limits to the American press and television cameras.

23 British service men came home today. The Union Jack draped their coffins as one by one their comrades carried them off the transport plane. Generals and Admirals snapped to attention and saluted as they passed. Vestured clergy prayed and the regimental band played them home. The British public attended through BBC’s broadcast of the ceremony. Britannia remembered her own.

The decision to ignore the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of America’s policy of preemptive war was made at the highest levels. The Secretary of Defense explains that the conduct of ceremonies would only tend to delay the return of the bodies to their families. The unmentioned benefit is the same one obtained in the 1991 war when Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney declared the return of the dead off limits to the press; the national impact of their common sacrifice is obscured by government imposed anonymity. Thus their homecoming is concealed from their grateful and grieving nation.

America owes these man and women, their mothers and fathers, their wives and children more than efficient handling. We owe them respect for their service and recognition of their sacrifice. It is a national debt of honor, an obligation of the soul that weighs most heavily at the highest levels of government and on those who demanded the sacrifice of life from them.

It was not always so. There was a time, and not so very long ago, when the men who pressed the levers of power remembered their responsibility to respect and recognize the pawns that had been swept from the international chess board on which they had been placed. There was a time, and not so long ago, when the President of the United States understood that while it was his burden to send a generation to fight it was his privilege to honor their sacrifice in the service of the nation as the head of a grieving people.

We ask that each of the young men and women that we send around the world that they be prepared to die to achieve the ends those who sit in the seats of the mighty set for them. It is little enough to ask that when they pay that price for America’s power and prestige, when they give up their very lives in the service of the nation that the nation pause and come together to honor and mark their sacrifice. Death is a family affair but in their death these Americans became part of our common family and we must remember and honor them.