WASHINGTON — Hours after a personal encounter with the grim cost of war, President Barack Obama said Thursday that the sight of 18 flag-covered cases holding the remains of Americans killed this week in Afghanistan can’t help but influence his thinking about sending more troops overseas.
“It was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day — not only our troops, but their families as well,” Obama said from the White House, reflecting briefly on his surprise middle-of-the-night trip to Dover Air Force Base to observe the return of the fallen Americans.
Speaking softly and somewhat haltingly, Obama said losses such as these are “something that I think about each and every day.”
Asked whether the somber, late- night experience — watching the remains come off a giant cargo plane one by one in the darkness and meeting privately with families fresh in their grief — would affect his overhaul of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, the president didn’t hesitate to say it would. But he did not elaborate.
“The burden that both our troops and their families bear in any wartime situation is going to bear on how I see these conflicts,” he said, adding nothing more.
By many accounts, it was a difficult night. After a 40-minute helicopter ride at about midnight to the Delaware base where U.S. forces who are killed overseas come home, Obama went to a chapel to speak with relatives of the fallen. Their loved ones had died just two or three days before.
Of the 18 fallen Americans on the C-17, 10 of them — including three Drug Enforcement Administration agents — died Monday when a U.S. military helicopter crashed returning from a firefight with suspected Taliban drug traffickers in western Afghanistan. The other eight soldiers died Tuesday when their vehicles were struck by roadside bombs in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province.
The military does not call the process of removing remains from the plane a ceremony because there is nothing to celebrate. The cases aren’t labeled coffins, although they look that way, enveloped in flags.
An 18-year ban on coverage of Dover homecomings was relaxed this year under Obama’s watch. Now, families get to decide whether cameras can document the return. Nearly two-thirds have said yes to the media and even more to Pentagon coverage.
In this case, the return of only one of the 18 was open to the media.
His name was Dale R. Griffin, an Army sergeant from Terre Haute, Ind., and a top wrestler in high school and in college at Virginia Military Institute. He was remembered Thursday by friends and a former coach as particularly tenacious.
It is unclear why the other families declined coverage.
By 4:45 a.m., five hours after leaving the White House, Obama touched back down on the South Lawn. He walked inside alone, after saying thanks to his team but little else.
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