Last May, photographers enjoyed their first full month of access to military coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base.

Learn about the history of the 18-year-long ban on photographing the transfer of fallen soldiers, the controversy the ban stirred up, and the choices surviving families make in this new teaching activity from World Conflicts Today.

In 1989, the day after the United States invaded Panama on President George H.W. Bush's orders, the president was embarrassed by a split-screen news broadcast on the major networks that showed him joking and laughing with reporters at a press conference on one side and American-flag draped coffins from Panama being unloaded onto U.S. soil on the other. The White House asked the networks to alert them of future plans to use split-screen imagery, but the networks would not agree to do so.

Two years later, likely in response to that embarrassment and amid a wider effort to control press coverage of the Persian Gulf War, the Department of Defense (DoD) banned media coverage of coffins containing the remains of fallen service members as they returned to the United States via Dover Air Force Base.

The ban proved controversial. Though the DoD reasoned that it was meant to protect the privacy of deceased soldiers' families, critics alleged that the motives behind the new rule were political. They argued that the ban was designed to keep the coffins of fallen soldiers out of sight and therefore out of the mind of the American public. According to these critics, the images of flag-draped coffins being transported home to be buried would serve as an important visual reminder of the costs to Americans—borne primarily by soldiers and their families—of U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad.

Nevertheless, the ban remained in place for 18 years, during the 2001 Afghanistan war and the subsequent Iraq war and most of the occupation. Then in April 2009, the Pentagon lifted the ban, allowing the news media to photograph coffins as long as the soldiers' families agreed. The Pentagon also started paying the travel costs of families who wanted to be present during the transfer.



This undated handout photo, originally provided by the U.S. Air Force in response to a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request, shows flag-draped coffins of U.S. casualties from Iraq being offloaded by a military honor guard from a cargo plane in Dover, Delaware.

In the year since the policy change, Dover has received the remains of 462 service members (the majority killed in Afghanistan), 55 percent of whose families have allowed media coverage.

As one critic of the former policy told the New York Times, "So many Americans want to have Memorial Day once a year when they go to the beach and cook hot dogs in the backyard. This is a way for Americans to see and honor the sacrifice of our fallen when it occurs. It's something our public should be aware of."

Learning Activity

Supporters of the media coverage ban on coffins at Dover have argued that a soldier's death is a private matter, to be commemorated by his or her family alone. Contrastingly, according to some critics of the policy, members of the military represent the country they serve and it's appropriate for the nation as a whole to mourn when they fall. Families of deceased soldiers seem almost evenly split on this issue, if their decision to allow or prohibit media coverage is an accurate indication.

In the future, the Department of Defense plans on having members of the military decide themselves, before going into combat, whether to allow media coverage of their coffins in the event that they are killed.

In this activity, after considering the issue from a variety of angles, students will decide how they would like their remains treated were they to die in war.

1. To give students a sense of scope, assign them to look up the number of U.S. casualties (both hostile and non-hostile deaths) in Iraq and Afghanistan for their home state in the World Conflicts Today Statistics category. By doing so, they will be able to better judge how many individuals and families were affected by the media ban and the degree to which photographing or not photographing coffin transfers might affect national opinion about ongoing wars.
   
   
2. Next, have students consider the ways in which media coverage could affect the memories of the fallen soldiers from their home state. Do this by explaining that a caption can change the meaning of a photograph. Assign them to download the photo entitled "The Return of a Fallen British Soldier" in Iraq's Classroom Activities section and write four types of captions underneath it: a descriptive caption, an anti-Iraq war caption, a caption justifying the war in Iraq, and a caption honoring the sacrifices of the military. Does the fact that different meanings can be attached to a single photograph strengthen or weaken the argument against the media ban on returning coffins?
   
   
3. To give students a more personalized perspective on the issue, assign them to interview a veteran of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars (or, if that's not possible, a former war) about media coverage of fallen soldiers' coffins and how they would have wanted their own coffin treated if they had been killed during war.
   
   
4. Finally, have students write a brief essay in which they weigh the information they've gathered and opinions they've formed on the topic. They should include a decision of whether, as a military member, they would want their own coffin photographed.