Home > Mother Allows Photos Of Soldier’s Coffin To Protest Media Ban
Mother Allows Photos Of Soldier’s Coffin To Protest Media Ban
by Open-Publishing - Friday 2 July 2004Mother Plans To Continue Speaking Out Against War
LOS ANGELES — The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq summoned news outlets to photograph her son’s flag-draped casket arriving at Sacramento International Airport to protest a Pentagon policy banning media coverage of America’s war dead.
Nearly a dozen reporters, photographers and television crews watched as the coffin of Army Sgt. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, was transferred to a hearse outside an airport cargo terminal shortly before midnight Sunday, officials said.
"I don’t care what President Bush wants," his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, told the Los Angeles Times. Patrick "did not die for nothing ... The way he lived needs to be talked about. Patrick was not a fighter, he was a peacemaker."
Patrick McCaffrey was killed June 22 along with 1st Lt. Andre Tyson, both members of the 579th Engineer Battalion, when the two were ambushed by insurgents near Balad, Iraq.
Both were promoted posthumously on Friday, Tech. Sgt. Andrew Hughan of the California National Guard said.
The debate over whether Americans should see the coffins of McCaffrey and other troops flared last April after The Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of caskets in a cargo plane in Kuwait and a First Amendment activist posted on his Web site dozens of like images from Dover, Del., home to the nation’s largest military mortuary.
Sunday night’s brief ceremony, however, did not violate the policy because it applies only to military facilities. The airport and the California National Guard worked Sunday to arrange the event.
The Pentagon’s rules "are specifically for the airlift command, when the caskets are on the military plane," said Lt. Jonathan Shiroma, spokesman for the California National Guard. "This is a commercial jet, so it’s a different jurisdiction, so to speak. We cannot stop the media from filming."
McCaffrey’s casket arrived aboard a commercial flight from Atlanta and was placed in a hearse by fellow members of the 579th Engineer Battalion, Shiroma said. It was driven in a motorcade to a funeral home in his hometown of Tracy, where services were scheduled for Thursday.
McCaffrey was a manager with a collision repair company in the Silicon Valley when he enlisted in the National Guard in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he had grown disillusioned with his mission in Iraq, his family said.
For her part, Nadia McCaffrey said she planned to continue speaking out against the war.
"This is enough," she said. "We have to react."