DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — Standing in the pre-dawn darkness, President Barack Obama saw the real cost of the war in Afghanistan: The Americans who return in flag-covered cases while much of the nation sleeps in peace.
In a surprise midnight dash to this Delaware base where U.S. forces killed overseas come home, Obama honored the return of 18 fallen Americans today. All were killed in Afghanistan this week, a brutal stretch that turned October into the most deadly month for U.S. troops since the war began.
“It was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day, not only our troops but their families as well,” Obama said later today, hours after his return to the White House. “The burden that both our troops and their families bear in any wartime situation is going to bear on how I see these conflicts, and it is something that I think about each and every day.”
The dramatic image of a president on the tarmac was a portrait not witnessed in years. Former President George W. Bush said the appropriate way to show his respect for war’s cost was to meet with grieving military families in private, as he often did, but he never went to Dover to observe the remains coming off the cargo plane. Obama did so with the weight of knowing he may soon send more troops off to war.
For all the talk of his potential troop increase — maybe 40,000, maybe some other large figure — Obama got a grim reminder of the number that counts: one.
His name was Dale R. Griffin, an Army sergeant from Terre Haute, Ind. He was the last fallen soldier to come before Obama. And his remains were the only ones of the 18 to be honored in full view of the media. An 18-year ban on such coverage, dating to the 1991 Gulf War and strengthened by Bush, was relaxed this year under Obama’s watch, allowing families to decide whether cameras can document the return. Nearly two-thirds have said yes.
In this case, 11 of the 17 families already had reached a decision against coverage before they were notified that Obama would be there, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
The president led a team of officials onto the gray C-17 cargo plane carrying Griffin, and then back off, where they stood for several minutes in a line of honor.
It was not quite 4 a.m. The sky was black, and a yellowish light came from poles flanking the flight. The only sounds were a whirring power unit on the plane and the clicking of cameras. A blue vehicle carrying members of Griffin’s family pulled up.
The president then saluted as six soldiers in camouflage and black berets carried Griffin’s remains down the ramp and into a waiting white van.
Griffin was a top wrestler in high school and in college at Virginia Military Institute, remembered today by friends and a former coach as particularly strong. Vigo County (Ind.) Judge Chris Newton, a family friend, described him as “unbelievably tough and resilient.”
On a clear fall night, the president had traveled to Dover on a 40-minute helicopter ride from the White House. He immediately sat down privately with all the family members in a base chapel.
The solemn process of transferring remains of 15 soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents unfolded in four separate movements. Obama took part in all of them. A chaplain offered prayers for the fallen, the crews that brought them home, the families who lost a loved one, and a nation embroiled in war.
The military calls the process a dignified transfer, not a ceremony, because there is nothing to celebrate. The cases are not labeled coffins, although they come off looking that way, enveloped in flags.
By 4:45 a.m., the president had touched back down on the South Lawn, where a usually active White House was sleepy. He walked inside, alone.
Gibbs said today that Obama remained quiet on the flight back, thanking his team for making the trip possible but saying little else.
“I don’t think you can go out there and not understand what you are seeing,” said Gibbs, clearly moved by the experience as one of the few aides who accompanied Obama on the trip. “It’s hard not to be overwhelmed.”
A president of two inherited wars, Obama is winding down U.S. involvement in Iraq, but the troubled conflict in Afghanistan is only widening. It has become the dominant foreign policy challenge of his early presidency. The stability of Afghanistan remains in doubt while the support of the war by the American people is waning.
Obama already has upped the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan to 68,000 troops and is considering sending a large new addition, although fewer than the 40,000 troops requested by his commander there, U.S. officials tell The Associated Press. The president holds his next war council meeting with the Joints Chiefs of Staff on Friday.
Obama is faced with a crucial moment: How to keep al-Qaida terrorists from taking root again in Afghanistan without sinking more American lives and money into a war that isn’t working. Aides say he still is weeks away from making an announcement.
But that wasn’t the focus during Obama’s trip, that his aides started planning on Tuesday, Gibbs said. They kept quiet about it until a small group of reporters was told just hours before the president left, Gibbs added.
It came at a time of an enormous blow to U.S. forces, with a bad week coming in a bad month where at least 55 U.S. troops have been killed.
On Monday, a U.S. military helicopter crashed returning from the scene of a firefight with suspected Taliban drug traffickers in western Afghanistan, killing 10 Americans including three DEA agents. On Tuesday, eight soldiers were killed when their personnel vehicles were struck by roadside bombs in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. It was those 18 dead that Obama saw home.
Separately, four more U.S. troops died Monday when two helicopters collided over southern Afghanistan.
The ban on media coverage of bodies returning to Dover was criticized for shielding the public from the human cost of war.
Now it is no more. Obama saw it directly, and the press bore witness.
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