After watching Ellen MacArthur's champagne-soaked homecoming yesterday on BBC, I got to view something I've never seen on American TV. Another homecoming, this time the homecoming of soldiers killed in Iraq.
It was sad and solemn, imminently dignified, and the very least these soldiers deserved. Draped with the Union Jack, their coffins left the huge C17 plane, held aloft by their fellow soldiers-at-arms. I watched and mourned with the rest of the country, including the dignitaries who'd come to honor the dead: Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary; Princess Anne, Honorary Air Commodore of RAF Lyneham; and other military chiefs. (Not that the cameras ever showed them; this ceremony was about fallen heroes, not famous faces.)
What I want to know is, why can't Americans mourn their dead soldiers the same way?
Are our soldiers not as brave? Did they perhaps do something shameful before their deaths, that their homecoming is hidden from the public? Maybe they were gay, and violated the Don't Ask Don't Tell rule. Maybe they were cowards, who ran from the bullets and shrapnel that felled them.
Maybe there's something better, more upbeat to show on American TV--another press conference by our defense secretary, another speech by our president.
Maybe they were just ordinary men and women, not the superheroes of our movies and imaginations, and thus not deserving of the American public's adulation.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad I got to watch these fine British soldiers make their final trip home, serenaded by a military band, their too-short life stories told by a solemn BBC announcer. (The cameras avoided showing the families, out of respect for their privacy.) I thought about our own soldiers' anonymous returns to the country they thought they were defending, the fathers, daughters, brothers, mothers...
The ceremony ended, the hearses slowly drove away, and BBC cut to the studio. The anchors swallowed hard, and went on with the news of the day.
I wiped the tears that had gathered (my upper lip's not quite as stiff as these Brits') and I wondered:
Don't our fallen heroes deserve the same?
