PR Slogans on Soldiers' Gravestones
by TChris
The Bush administration's Pentagon has taken to branding gravestones with one of the PR slogans developed to induce support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq: "Operation Enduring Freedom" or "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The Pentagon claims to give families of the fallen approval over the contents of the gravestones, but that hasn't always happened.
Nadia and Robert McCaffrey, whose son Patrick was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" ended up on his government-supplied headstone in Oceanside, Calif., without family approval.
"I was a little taken aback," Robert McCaffrey said, describing his reaction when he first saw the operation name on Patrick's tombstone. "They certainly didn't ask my wife; they didn't ask me." He said Patrick's widow told him she had not been asked either.
"In one way, I feel it's taking advantage to a small degree," McCaffrey said. "Patrick did not want to be there, that is a definite fact."
The owner of the company that manufactures gravestones for the cemetary at Arlington recognizes how offensive it is for the administration to turn grave markers into a PR ploy.
"It just seems a little brazen that that's put on stones," said Jeff Martell, owner of Granite Industries of Vermont. "It seems like it might be connected to politics."
Also concerned is Max Cleland, who accuses the administration of engaging in "a little bit of glorified advertising."
"Most of the headstones out there at Arlington and around the nation just say World War II or Korea or Vietnam, one simple statement," he said. "It's not, shall we say, a designated theme or a designated operation by somebody in the Pentagon. It is what it is. And I think there's power in simplicity."
There's also power in propoganda, and that's what the administration's slogans are all about.
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