When Marine Lieutenant Colonel Billy Hall was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on April 23, the Pentagon did everything in its power to limit media coverage of the funeral—despite the fact that the media was directly invited by Hall’s family.
Reporters were kept 50 yards away and penned in by ropes, making it impossible to adequately cover the event. It has become standard practice for the Pentagon to stage-manage military deaths.
Since the overwhelmingly unpopular Vietnam War, the Pentagon has taken great measures to conceal the human cost of war. When possible, proxy forces and private militias are used in place of U.S. troops; the tens of thousands of horribly wounded soldiers go largely unreported; and death tolls include only U.S. soldiers while excluding the victims of U.S. aggression.
Hall leaves behind a wife and four young children. He was the 4,011th U.S. service member to die in Iraq.
