Vivid reminders that war takes a deadly toll

Sunday, May 02, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist

We used to know them by name.

Maybe you remember. American soldiers were fighting in Afghanistan and every time one died, we learned his name. Not only that. Reporters told us about his life, introduced us to his newly bereft widow and suddenly fatherless children. Made us feel the weight of that singular death.

You had to know it couldn't last. Had to know that, as the casualty count mounted, it would become impossible to know the dead as individual men and women. At some point, they would become "casualties" in much the same way raindrops become a thunderstorm. And death would lose the ability to hurt us in the way it did when we knew their names.

Then one sudden day, you open your paper or your browser and find yourself facing row upon uniform row of coffins, all draped with American flags, the red, white and blue of them so crisp and vivid it is almost painful.

And hurt falls on you like rocks.

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No, the administration's true concern seems transparent. Namely, that casualty photos will galvanize opposition to the war in Iraq.

For all the administration's claims that its photo ban honors the private pain of military families, the truth is that we honor those families more when we share, to whatever small degree we can, the loss they have sustained.