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- Nearly seven thousand Americans have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more than fifty thousand have been wounded. This loss has received only faint and fleeting official recognition. Mourning is treated as a private matter, as if these dead belonged only to their comrades and kin, and not to us all. For many years, the government, fearful of a negative effect on fragile public opinion, forbade the publication not only of images of combat casualties, but even of flag-draped caskets coming home. But isn’t it a dishonor to the dead to try to hide them from the nation they served?