The Department of Defense says its prohibition on media photographs of U.S. troop caskets returning from Iraq is designed to show respect to the men and women who have given their lives in battle.

There have been many rationales and justifications offered up to defend the Bush administration's policies during the war in Iraq, but this one is particularly shallow.

Among the Pentagon's biggest missions is preserving the public view that combat is a fairly antiseptic, precise and non-fatal game. Of course, everyone knows that war is dangerous, but if the public ever sees behind the curtain and realizes that thousands of civilians are killed by our so-called precision weapons or that U.S. troops are dying, support for the war might diminish.

Mothers and fathers would talk their kids out of joining the service; people might flinch when they read that this week the Senate approved a $447 billion military budget, plus another $25 billion in supplemental money after the election.

Most people aren't war-mongers. Most people want to re-evaluate whenever a situation becomes too deadly.

But how can we plainly see something if it has been so sanitized and stylized by commercial interests? Our movies, television shows, books, music and media coverage all tend to portray war in the same way: Our guys are elite forces, the best-trained in the world, always fighting for the right causes, rarely suffering too many casualties, rarely displaying fear in the face of great danger and almost always winning.

Chris Hedges, author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (Anchor Books, June 2003) is a veteran correspondent who, according to his author profile, has "survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan and a beating by Saudi military police."

He argues that the media tend to report "mythic reality" during wartime - everything an insulated society believes about the conflict - rather than "sensory reality" - the blood, guts and gore that real soldiers experience on the battlefield.

"The lie in war is almost always the lie of omission," he writes. "The blunders and senseless slaughter by our generals, the execution of prisoners and innocents, and the horror of wounds are rarely disclosed, at least during a mythic war to the public. Only when the myth is punctured, as it eventually was in Vietnam, does the press begin to report in a sensory rather than mythic manner."

The Pentagon understands the importance of this lie of omission. Winning the hearts and minds of Americans means that we must be sheltered from graphic images. Support for the war is already waning after revelations that weapons of mass destruction may have still existed, a lack of evidence for a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the torture and killing of Iraqi POWs, continued U.S. troop deaths, and a mission that lumbers on despite being supposedly "accomplished" more than a year ago.

Photographs of dead soldiers returning to the United States in flag- draped caskets are a lot for the public to stomach. So the Pentagon presents a rationalization about protecting the privacy of fallen troops.

"Quite frankly, we don't want the remains of our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice to be the subject of any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified," said John Molino, a deputy undersecretary of defense.

Ronald Reagan's flag-draped coffin was on television non-stop for a full week. That certainly wasn't unwarranted or undignified.

What's undignified is sending young men and women into battle with great fanfare, while bringing the dead home anonymously and secretly with no public tribute.

Former Denver Bronco Reggie Rivers is the host of "Drawing the Line" Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on KBDI Channel 12. He writes Fridays on the op-ed page.

Copyright 2004 The Denver Post

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