Picture of the Year

Normally, I don't go in for these year-in-review packages - the biggest stories, the hottest starlets, the usual phony summing up based solely on the flipping of a single calendar page. Makes us feel important, I suppose. Then too, they fill space when much of the news staff is whooping it up in holiday reverie. Then I saw the photograph of the year on CNN.com, just a thumbnail really. Followed the link to Time's Best Photos of the Year - and there it was: the brilliant wrenching phtograph of passengers on an American Airlines flight looking on as the flag-draped coffin of U.S. Marine Lt. Jim Cathey is unloaded from the belly of the jet plane on the tarmac in Remo.

The image brings the war home. We fly around the country, generally safe and in comfort, on business or on vacation. We snarl at TSA screeners, take off our shoes, remove the laptops from the carry-on bags. Then we settle in with our iPods and a book, order up a Heineken, and watch the the United States of America slip by peacefully in the jetstream. And we don't realize that a Marine rides in the cargo hold.

The photograph was taken by Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News, part of a large portfolio of images that is among the best of Stateside photojournalism of this long, discouraging war. The photographs accompanied a wonderfully-written series by Jim Sheeler; the two journalists spent the past year with the Marines stationed at Aurora's Buckley Air Force Base who have found themselves called upon to notify families of the deaths of their sons in Iraq.

Read the full package - nothing captures the year that was, the sadness and waste of 2005, better than this Pulitzer-worthy wonder of sacrifice and grit ... and faithful service.

Comments

[Kat]

I read the "full package". Steve Beck will be in my prayers tonight.

[Tom K]

I have one question, Tom, and I wonder why you haven't addressed it: Why don't we mourn?

[Tom W.]

Good one Tom - clearly that's changing now, starting with a little roadside protest this past summer in Crawford and the fast growth of The Number. More people do care, the war is ever more present.

But I will say this, the national Administration still seems not to give a damn.

[blue girl]

That's an incredible photo. Such a powerful image. Thanks for the post.

[Tony Alva]

Oh, the activities at the ranch in Crawford was a mass act of mourning? I must have missed that part. All I saw was an anti-war demonstration. Nothing resembling your earlier posts regarding actual mourning (which I enjoyed BTW).

[Tom W.]

Tony, you missed all the tombstones erected along the road, the prayer services, the hymns?

[paulsen]

Heart wrenching.

[tijned]

I also read the full package, a bit late I guess, but glad to hear you like Heineken