Memorial Day (5): Cynthia Tucker on why Pentagon secrecy and lying dishonors the dead

Columnist Cynthia Tucker has a thoughtful Memorial Day column about the ways that Pentagon myth-making and excessive secrecy actually winds up dishonoring soldiers both living and dead: Don't disguise battle horrors Atlanta Journal-Constitution 05/29/05.

She takes the cases of the deliberately fake stories promoted around the capture of Jessica Lynch and the "friendly-fire" death of Pat Tillman:

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, [Tillman's] mother, Mary, revealed her frustration with the web of deceit that initially surrounded her son's death.

"The military let him down," she said. "The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect."

She's right. Tillman served honorably and died bravely. He didn't need the Army's lies.

She makes a connection between the lesson that the officer corps took from Vietnam that "the media" were to blame for loss of public support of that misbegotten war, and the Pentagon's misconduct in the Lynch and Tillman cases.

Tucker apparently felt she needed to put in a ritual denial that she's a pacifist.  That in itself is probably one sign among many others of the extent to which public discussion on war and peace has become corrupted in the United States.  Because there should have been no need at all for assuming that their was anything that implied some kind of general pacifism in the following comment:

But I've studied enough history and heard enough stories from veterans to know there are no "good" wars — only justified wars and unjustified ones. All wars are hideous — full of fratricide (both unintentional and intentional), grievous wounds, thousands of corpses, the screams of the dying and every element of human nature, from heroism and sacrifice to meanness and cowardice.

My father was a veteran of both World War II, where he did non-combat, cleanup duty in the Pacific, and Korea, where he saw combat as a U.S. Army second lieutenant. He was a staunch supporter of a strong defense, but he never tried to paint war as anything other than what it is: hell. ...

Don't try to deny war's horrors. Don't tell us winning will be easy. Tell us the truth: Victory will require great sacrifices, but there is no choice but to fight. (First, make sure that's true.) Here's the lesson from Vietnam: Don't lie.

So let's not use our brave men and women in uniform as props in made-up bedtime stories. And, for heaven's sake, let's not hide our dead and wounded. That dishonors their sacrifice.