On Base, a Plea to Give Each Death Its Due

[kskiska]

Source: NYT

FORT LEWIS, Wash. — Twenty soldiers deployed to Iraq from this Army base 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 after each death, 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 delayed the plan.

{Its commander, Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby, was expected to decide Wednesday 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.”

(snip)

“There is no Army-wide policy to have any memorial services,” a spokeswoman for the Army, Maj. 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.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/us/25funeral.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin