Propagandizing Even Unto Death

I couldn’t find the AP link for this one yet, but I’ve included most of this story from today’s Bucks County Courier Times:

ARLINGTON, VA. - Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts.

Families of fallen soldiers and Marines are being told they have the option to have the government-furnished headstones engraved with “Operation Enduring Freedom” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom” at no extra charge, whether they are buried in Arlington or elsewhere. A mock-up shown to many families includes the operation names.

The vast majority of military gravestones from other eras are inscribed with just the basic, required information: name, rank, military branch, date of death and, if applicable, the war and foreign country in which the person served.

Families are supposed to have final approval over what goes on the tombstones. That hasn’t always happened.

Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said “Operation Iraqi Freedom” ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, California, without family approval.

“I was a little taken aback,” Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he saw the operation name on Patrick’s tombstone. “They certainly didn’t ask my wife; they didn’t ask me.” He said Patrick’s widow told him she had not been asked either.

“In one way, I feel it’s taking advantage to a small degree,” McCaffrey said. “Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact.”

I truly grieve for the McCaffrey family, and Mr. McCaffrey is showing great understatement, I think. It sickens me almost beyond words to see our young men and women tossed onto the pyre at the altar of Bushco’s unbridled avarice. And to see them continuing to link Iraq with 9/11 – and make no mistake, that is the point of putting these slogans on these markers – makes me just about physically ill.