Pentagon Ban on Filming Coffins Defied
Agence France-Presse, Thursday 13 January 2005, 10:08
A US National Guard unit has defied a Pentagon request that sought to stop television news crews filming six flag-draped soldiers’ coffins arriving in Louisiana.
The Pentagon has barred US media from filming the coffins of US service members arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
But the Louisiana National Guard allowed a CBS news crew on Wednesday to film the arrival of six soldiers’ coffins at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse, near New Orleans, Louisiana.
Despite the Pentagon request, Lieutenant-Colonel Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard told CBS: “What we thought was, we’re going to do what the family asked us to do.”
Story, with verse and image, continued below the fold
Spring and Fall, to a Young Child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Story continued
Footage broadcast by CBS showed an honour guard carrying the soldiers’ flag-draped coffins out of an aircraft, watched by grieving families, to six waiting hearses.
The six soldiers, who had served in the Louisiana National Guard, all died last Thursday after their armoured vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Baghdad.
It was the largest number of US troops killed in a single attack since last month’s bombing in a military mess hall at a base near Mosul that killed 14 US soldiers.
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