1/20/2004: A soldier's funeral

[Undertoad]

Some say it's for political reasons that the media is not permitted to shoot the caskets coming home from Iraq to Dover AFB; some say the administration doesn't want to acknowledge the deaths involved. Others say it's just the continuation of a policy that's been around for a while.

I don't know about that, but I do know that we could stand a bit more acknowledgement of those who paid the ultimate price. And I've never been one for sappy patriotism, but this item blew me away. So I include it even though it's been around a while.

http://webelegant.50megs.com/james/

When we turned off the highway suddenly there were teenage boys along both sides of the street about every 20 feet or so, all holding large American flags on long flag poles, and again with their hands on their hearts. We thought at first it was the Boy Scouts or 4H club or something, but it continued .... for two and a half miles.

The reason the above shot is blurry is because it came from the still mode of a video camera, held by the 17-year-old sister (or so the text implies) in the funeral procession of the fallen soldier James M. Kiehl.

The images are so pure Americana. And when you stop to think about it, they show us an image that is so wrong and so right at the same time.

So wrong, because it is a funeral. James M. Kiehl met his wife at an Army training center at Fort Gordon, GA. They married in July 2001. She was pregnant with their first child when he was shipped overseas. James was killed on March 23, 2003. He was 22. Nathaniel Ethan Kiehl was born on May 12.

So wrong. And yet so right; somehow everything RIGHT with the situation is two and a half miles of children with flags solemnly acknowledging the casket.



James was a member of Pfc. Jessica Lynch's unit, the Fort Bliss, Texas-based 507th Maintenance Company, which was ambushed near Nasiriyah. The unit was on a supply mission.

James Kiehl, thank you.