Deathwatching

Tonight I listened to an interview with some men who are in the detail which unloads “transfer cases” from planes at Dover airbase and loads them into mortuary trucks. NPR typically not covering the story of renewed access to the returning fallen for the press in a conventional or predictable way. Instead. They ask the men who have to carry the caskets of people they consider their fallen comrades to talk about how that feels.

And so we discover that soldiers have feelings.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102791680

Combining this with listening to Gates and his proposed budget for Pentagon spending. Important juxtaposition of stories. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102804336
Is this going to end war? No I doubt it. But listening to the voices of the ones who send and the ones who receive in the same few minutes was interesting. Listening to all these men talking about honour and integrity.

And yet the enormity of it all is felt and expressed as one man waits to bear the body of another with his legs shaking, feeling empty, feeling “like one big heart, beating”.