By Bobbi Bowman
Memorial Day offers a marvelous opportunity to bring some of the special humanity of the war in Iraq home to your readers with relative ease. Just call your local airport and ask if a soldier killed in Iraq will arrive back home Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, the traditional Memorial Day.
Then send a reporter and a photographer to the airport to cover the soldier's arrival at the airport terminal. The story is the reaction of passengers and airport workers as they witness this chance encounter with the soldier's homecoming.
Soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors return home in the cargo hold of commercial airliners. The caskets are placed in small cardboard boxes and covered by an American flag. Airports are alerted because the military escorts the family to planeside. There is an honor guard and often a police escort.
Don't go with the family. You'll talk to them later. You want to watch them from the terminal as they welcome home their father, their mother, their brother, their sister. Watch the reactions of the onlookers as they witness this heart-breaking reunion. The story tells itself.
I witnessed such a homecoming May 1 in Omaha, along with Todd Walvaert, an editor at the Dispatch and Argus of Rock Island, Ill. Sgt. Kenneth Locker, 28, a father of three, and member of the 82nd Airborne, arrived back home in Nebraska on the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech.
“The dozens of strangers paused in solemn silence as the saddest kind of family homecoming unfolded,’ we wrote in a story published for the Omaha World Telegram May 6.
“People gathered at the giant terminal windows near a Northwest Airlines gate. They watched as the soldier’s grief-stricken relatives and friends descended stairs to the tarmac and waited for the casket to be unloaded from Northwest Flight 1736.
“An honor guard stood waiting at the plane with a bier . . . No voice of authority had announced what was happening . . . But a young female TSA agent betrayed that something terrible was going on as she ran off from the security checkpoint, weeping.”
You can also tell the story with photos only. The pictures tell it all. They make a powerful photo gallery on your web site. When combined with obituary information and perhaps family pictures, it makes for a riveting online photo essay.
A chance encounter to witness the return of soldier is as close as the vast majority of readers come to experiencing the war. A story about such an encounter brings special humanity to your pages and web sites.
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