By Donald R. Winslow
© 2009 News Photographer magazine
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE (October 29, 2009) – The president who just this April lifted an 18-year-ban on photographing the dignified return of the flag-draped remains of soldiers killed in battle overseas himself stood this morning, before dawn on a dark and cold tarmac, at Dover Air Force Base and was photographed saluting the body of U.S. Army Sgt. Dale R. Griffin, 29, as it was carried off an Air Force C-17.
Early Thursday morning, around 4:45 a.m., President Barack Obama and a small traveling press pool returned to the White House, ending an overnight journey to Dover where the president met with family members and paid his respects as the bodies of 18 Americans killed this week in Afghanistan returned to Dover.
Traveling with Obama to Dover where photographers Doug Mills of The New York Times; Pablo Martinez Monsivais of the Associated Press; Saul Loeb of Agence France-Presse; Jim Young of Reuters; Brooks Kraft, shooting for TIME magazine; and White House official photographer Pete Souza.
Loeb told News Photographer magazine today that the traveling photographers were notified about two hours before White House departure but word of the trip was embargoed until after Obama left on Marine One.
In raw video footage from the Associated Press, the president appears somber if not somewhat distressed as Griffin's flag-draped case was carried past him by white-gloved Air Force airmen.
Under the new policy at Dover, if a family gives permission the media may photograph the return of a fallen soldier. Last night at Dover, Griffin's family was the only one to grant permission. Of the 18 bodies that returned last night, 10 on the same plane, the media could photograph only the unloading of the one.
The White House pool reports says that before the bodies were removed from aircraft, the president met with the fallen soldiers' families for two hours in a chapel at the base.
At 3:40 a.m. the president walked up the rear cargo ramp of a C-17 that held the flag-draped cases holding the remains of 15 soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents who died in Afghanistan this week. Accompanied by U.S. Air Force Chaplain Maj. Richard S. Bach, the president bowed his head in prayer before they returned to the tarmac and stood at attention while the cases were carried off the plane and loaded into a mortuary van.
As Griffin's body was carried by the president, the saluting president was photographed by the photographers who accompanied the Commander in Chief to Dover.
"The transfer was completed very respectfully, and very solemnly," AFP's Loeb said.
Sgt. Griffin was killed by a roadside bomb Tuesday in southern Afghanistan. He was a 1999 graduate of Terre Haute (IN) South Vigo High School and he joined the Army immediately after 9/11. As a high school senior, he was the Indiana state runner-up in wrestling in the 189-pound class.
The president's unannounced Dover trip began last night just before midnight when the president left the White House south lawn in the Marine One helicopter. Wearing a dark suit and long overcoat, Obama made the trip at a time when he's facing a major policy decision about whether he'll send more American troops into the war in Afghanistan.
October has been America's deadliest month in Afghanistan, with at least 55 troops killed in action. In the past week, more than 24 soldiers have died in attacks and accidents.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs has repeatedly told reporters that the most difficult task the president faces each week in office is writing and signing the letters that go to the families of American soldiers killed in the war, and that the recent escalation in troop deaths has weighed on Obama's mind as the decision about troop deployments grows near.
Obama was joined at Dover by Attorney General Eric Holder, DEA Acting Administrative Chief Michele Leonhart, and U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz.
On Friday, Obama is scheduled to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review the military's Afghanistan strategy, Gibbs said.
NPPA was one of several media organizations who urged the new Obama administration at the beginning of this year to lift the Dover photo ban. During Obama's first live televised press conference a question about the ban from CNN's Ed Henry led Obama to reveal that he had already asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to review the policy, and that as president he would act upon Gate's recommendation at the end of his review. Gates recommended lifting the ban, with the proviso that each fallen soldier's return could be covered only if the family gave permission, and in April the media witnessed the return of an Air Force airman to Dover, the first return covered in nearly two decades.
The most recent controversy about whether or not embedded photographers would be allowed to document soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan also involved Secretary Gates. The Defense Secretary publicly criticized Associated Press president and CEO Tom Curley for AP's distribution of the Julie Jacobson photograph of U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, as he was tended to by fellow Marines moments after he was mortally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade during a battle in Afghanistan. In the following weeks, commanders in Afghanistan's eastern region modified the embed agreement to ban photographing soldiers killed in action. After a flurry of news stories and Pentagon reviews, commanders in theater were told by Washington to return the embed agreements to the original conditions. Embedded photographers can once again photograph soldiers killed in action, but the images cannot be published or distributed until after the next of kin have been notified, and the agreement spells out conditions about whether identifying items in the image, such as name tags or faces, are clearly visible.
Bruce Young contributed to reporting this story
