Baggage

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6811719312494990925.post-37464196762511322172007-04-16T11:28:00.000-07:002007-04-16T21:24:01.710-07:00Baggage I am taking the discussion up again immediately where it last left off: <div style="text-align: center;">When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. </div> What happens after the speaker’s body is washed out of the turret? What happens, I mean to say, to those of our dead, the ones returning every day from our own country’s war machine? My attention was recently focused on just this subject by a segment I heard on NPR. This segment dealt with the precise details of bringing home the body of a soldier who was killed in Iraq. Should you want to hear it, go here: <a href="http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/04/20070410.asp">http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/04/20070410.asp</a> To summarize, John Holley’s son, Matthew, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2005. In his attempts to prepare for Matthew’s body’s arrival, Holley discovered that it was to be transported in the cargo hold of a commercial jet and unloaded with a forklift by members of the airport ground crew. Holley found, also, that he would be "picking his son up" at a warehouse in a cargo area. Though it’s been quoted in every interview I have since read about the situation, I can’t help but repeat the words of an airline executive who told Holley that commercial jet liners were the "most expeditious way" to bring the dead back to America. Without ceremony, I would add, without an honor guard, without any real acknowledgment of loss. As if a body were a piece of baggage. Now a body, we all feel instinctively, is decidedly not a piece of baggage. The need to bury one’s dead, and not just to bury them but to have some kind of funeral rites, is something of a constant among otherwise disparate cultures. It was this need that brought Antigone to her eventual demise and that forced Priam to beg his son’s body of Achilles. The body is the ultimate confirmation of death; it is, in fact, an obligation to acceptance. Seeing is believing. And it was my instinctive feeling of recoil upon hearing this story that brought me back to the idea that war and the state turn agents into instruments. I would only add that instruments, once defunct, have now become baggage, something burdensome to those responsible for its transport, something to be disposed of expeditiously. As it turns out, Holley is a veteran of the Vietnam War and was dismayed at the way in which his son’s remains were to be brought home. He contacted his representatives and fought to have an honor guard escort the body at the airport. Following his own son’s funeral he turned his attention to other returning soldiers and eventually congress passed a law requiring that remains be flown on a military contracted aircraft with an escort and an honor guard. Only now, years into the war is this coming to our attention. Since I heard John Holley speaking on NPR, I have read that not all military remains were treated in this manner and that the story misrepresents the truth. The problem is this: it doesn’t matter how many individuals have been transported as baggage. This kind of response is irrelevant and inappropriate. What is there to say of a nation that brought home any of its fallen soldiers without ceremony, without honor. And I’m not talking here about honoring the dead in words because I think there has been plenty of that; there has been plenty of talk of heroism, there have been plenty of public statements about our losses, many public expressions of sorrow. I am talking here about dead bodies. The actual, physical, grotesque detail of their transport. When it came to the rites and acknowledgment bereaved families needed to make sense of their first confrontation with the truth of a dead body, where were they symbolic gestures then? Ismene: At least do not speak of this act to anyone else; bury him in secret; I will be silent, too. Antigone: Oh, oh, no! Shout it out. I will hate you still worse for silence– should you not proclaim it, to everyone.m.http://www.blogger.com/profile/00152735154745182717noreply@blogger.com