Move to limit memorials angers families of Iraq troops

FORT LEWIS, Washington:

 

Twenty soldiers deployed to
Iraq from the army base here were killed in May, a monthly high. That
same month, the base announced a change in how it would honor its dead:
instead of units holding services as casualties occurred, they would be
held collectively once a month.

The anger and hurt were immediate. Soldiers’ families and veterans
protested the change as cold and logistics-driven. Critics online said
the military was trying to repress bad news about deaths. By mid-June,
the base had put the plan on hold, and its commander, Lieutenant
General Charles Jacoby, was expected to decide this week whether to go
through with it.

“If I lost my husband at the beginning of the month, what do you do,
wait until the end of the month?” asked Toni Shanyfelt, who said her
husband was serving one of multiple tours in Iraq. “I don’t know if
it’s more convenient for them, or what, but that’s insane.”

Military historians and scholars say the proposal and its fallout
highlight the tender questions facing the armed forces as casualties in
Iraq and Afghanistan mount, and some soldiers and their families come
to expect more from military bases than in past conflicts.

In Vietnam and Korea, the historians say, many bases were places for
training soldiers and shipping them out, rarely to see them return,
with memorial services uncommon. Now, in the age of the all-volunteer
force, the base has become the center of community. The army and other
branches have fostered the idea that military service is as much about
education, job training and belonging to a community as national
defense.

“It wasn’t considered the army’s business in any of the other wars
to conduct these services,” said Alan Archambault, director of the Fort
Lewis Military Museum, which is supported by the army. “It was the
home- towns of the soldiers that died that had these. Now I think the
army bases are trying to be the hometowns.”

Army officials said the idea to hold monthly services reflected a
need to find balance between honoring the dead and the practical
reality that the services take time to plan, including things like
coordinating rifle salutes and arranging receptions for family members
who attend.

“As much as we would like to think otherwise, I am afraid that with
the number of soldiers we now have in harm’s way, our losses will
preclude us from continuing to do individual memorial ceremonies,”
Brigadier General William Troy, who was the interim commander at Fort
Lewis at the time, wrote in an e-mail message announcing the policy in
May.

The army also emphasizes that the ceremonies held on bases are in
addition to those held by the soldier’s unit overseas as well as
private family services, which usually include a military honor guard.
Those services would not be affected if Fort Lewis moved to a monthly
schedule.

Fort Lewis, the third-largest army base in the nation, has about
10,000 of its 28,000 soldiers deployed overseas, the majority of them
in Stryker brigades trained specially for urban combat. Several other
major bases, including Fort Hood in Texas, the largest, already hold
services monthly. Some hold them even less frequently.

“There is no armywide policy to have any memorial services,” a
spokeswoman for the army, Major Cheryl Phillips, said in an e-mail
message. “Commanders make the call. Several installations have
conducted services for each individual soldier and now have begun to
roll them into a quarterly service because, alas, the casualty numbers
are rising.”

At many bases, local elected officials attend the services. At Fort
Hood, whose 1st Cavalry Division has 19,000 soldiers overseas, many of
these officials are veterans with ties to the base or the army.

“It really is important that we keep it scheduled and that these
people all have it on their calendars,” said a spokeswoman for Fort
Hood, Diane Battaglia.

Battaglia said the monthly services helped bring families together, a point also made by Troy at Fort Lewis.

“I see this as a way of sharing the heavy burdens our spouses and
rear detachments bear, while giving our fallen warriors the respect
they deserve,” Troy wrote in the e-mail message. “It will also give the
families of the fallen the opportunity to bond with one another, as
they see others who share their grief.”

Battaglia said the Fort Hood soldiers received individual eulogies
at the monthly services. “It has worked phenomenally well,” she said.

At Fort Lewis, however, tension has been evident; changing a ritual,
especially as the death toll is rising, strikes some as disrespectful.

“By reducing it to once a month, I think they’re taking away from
us,” said Staff Sergeant Jason Angelle. “Soldiers deserve individual
honors.”

Sue Rothwell, who runs a diner popular among soldiers that is just
outside the main gate, said she had long opposed the war in Iraq but
had recently made a public point of honoring those who serve in it.

Several weeks ago she started putting the last names of soldiers who
had died on the reader board outside the restaurant, called Galloping
Gertie’s, under the heading, “The numbers have names.”

Rothwell said she opposed monthly services. “Individuals gave their
lives,” she said. “But if you have services just once a month, the
other 29 days you don’t have to think about it. Well, isn’t that
convenient.”

For now, at least, those who die are eulogized as hometown heroes, either individually or by division.

“We owe them the highest gratitude a nation can give,” Lieutenant
Colonel John Pettit, a chaplain, said at a memorial service this month
for two soldiers. Sergeant Joel Dahl and Corporal Victor Garcia were
killed by small arms fire in Iraq.

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