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.
