Three American flags draped the coffins lying on the cargo floor of my C-17. It was only three hours earlier that I had received a phone call informing me that my crew was to fly from Europe to America; no word was spoken about the cargo that would be on-board. I had just bounded up the stairs into the airplane, coffee still in hand, to begin the pre-flight inspections when I was confronted by the coffins. I stopped short. All that separated me from the dead bodies of the American soldiers was the fabric of a flag and the steel wall of the coffin. I was practically in the presence of death and felt a cold shudder work itself through my body as my mind futilely evaded the urgent images of the lifeless bodies hidden behind the flag of our country. The fabric of a flag and the steel of a coffin are miserable talismans in the presence of death and only barely serve to keep the horror and terror of the future of all men from rising to the surface of the mind and incapacitating the living. Yet they did their office and enabled me to pass by the coffins and climb the steps to the cockpit to accomplish my pre-flight duties, pushing questions about the histories of the deceased to the corners of my consciousness until they would rise unbidden, no longer enchanted by the magic of the flag and coffin.
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