The Politics of Grief and the Forever War: Who Speaks for the Fallen?

Dead American soldiers became the objects of highly visible contest this week. This is an ongoing contest over the ways and means of grieving America’s fallen and it marks the latest phase and an escalation in tensions between dominant and challenging bodies, over the (in)visibility of suffering and dead American soldiers, that has featured throughout the Global War on Terror (GWoT). In doing so, these latest spats demonstrate not only the competing logics and agendas leading to the blacking out of American repatriations via the 2003 Dover Ban (a DoD Directive prohibiting the publication and broadcast of images and videos capturing any part of the repatriation process) but the value of soldier grief claims and speaking for the dead.