Dealing With War’s Saddest Statistic : Media: Coverage of the first deaths in Persian Gulf reopens debate over the impact of showing grieving families, draped caskets.

Military officials agonized about this moment.

Now it is here.

The news media have begun covering the first casualties of the Persian Gulf War.

They were on the nightly news Thursday, and on the front page Friday: a flag-draped coffin at a funeral in New York, a lonely bagpipe playing “Amazing Grace,” interviews and pictures of tearful wives, parents and friends, mourning war’s incalculable cost, its ultimate loss.

A funeral in New York for Manuel Rivera, one of the war’s first casualties, coincided with the release of the names of 11 Marines who died in the first major ground battle in the Gulf.

“There is no sadder statistic in the melancholy roll call of war than the ages of the warriors who die,” Dan Rather told 10 million viewers. “They are almost always young men. Today, American families began receiving word about the young men they will never see again.”

“Marine Lance Cpl. Dion James Stephenson, who thought he might become an actor, instead is being escorted home to Bountiful, Utah,” began the Washington Post story on Page 1. The Los Angeles Times also put a casualty story on Page 1. The New York Times ran a story inside. NBC News did not interview families, but photographed from the sidewalk as the Marine officer walked up the front steps to give a family the grim news.

Saddam Hussein has said he believes the United States cannot abide casualties. And some military officials privately say they believe that the images of body bags and grieving families helped turn Americans against the war in Vietnam.

In truth, say historians, stories of grieving families and images of dead were not staples of Vietnam-era coverage. And the most famous cases of such coverage actually came late in the war, when public opinion had largely already turned.

Publicly, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams has sounded unworried about coverage of casualties. “I don’t think public opinion is so fragile that if casualties come back, it’s (support for the war) instantly going to dissolve,” he said Thursday. “I think people understand that there may be some casualties involved.”

Nonetheless, the imagery of casualties has worried the Bush Administration. The President personally criticized the TV networks during the invasion of Panama for splitting the screen at one of his press conferences so that it also showed coffins of American Marines arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

In preparing for this war, military public affairs officials struggled over how to handle casualties. They feared, military officials said privately, that the media would turn each death into a major event. Yet to counter such images, military officials did not want to be insensitive to the families by appearing as if they were minimizing or pulling a veil over their losses.

“What happens when the first woman is killed?” responded one senior Pentagon aide, when asked before the war about the biggest public relations concerns. “What happens when all the men (in one National Guard or Marine unit) from one some small town in Georgia are wiped out in an ambush?”

Now, a woman is missing, perhaps a prisoner of war.

What happened Thursday was somewhat like the loss of men from a single town, and to a degree made into a major event. Most of the first 11 Marine casualties came from Camp Pendleton. “One Town’s Fallen Sons,” was how the New York Times referred to its story in a Page 1 index.

Especially powerful was Bruce Morton’s piece on CBS. During its few minutes, it showed film of the funeral for Rivera and of mothers talking about sons who would never raise families. A sister described the last letter from her dead brother. And a father, head tilted in pain, eyes clenched, tears streaming down a reddened face, talked to his lost stepson: “And God be with you. That’s all I have to say. I’ll miss you.”

Morton concluded: “There has been a lot of talk about how much the war will cost. We are beginning to learn how much. The war has cost Manuel Rivera, and Steven Bentzlin, cost Scott Schroeder and David Snyder and Thomas Jenkins, cost Dion Stephenson and Michael Linderman and Daniel Walker. Cost still others whose names are not yet known. High costs.”

To a large degree, however, history suggests that military concern about the media’s portrayal of losses is based on misperception.

In the Vietnam War, the casualty total crept up rather slowly and without any immediate hue and cry. Public support for the war lasted longer in Vietnam than it did in Korea, according to a study by Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

What’s more, stories about casualties, families back home, or even pictures of coffins were seldom seen on television or in newspapers, said Peter Braestrup, former Saigon bureau chief of the Washington Post, and author of “The Big Story,” a history of the media and Vietnam.

Perhaps the most famous case of coverage of casualties in Vietnam was a 1969 Life magazine issue that was devoted to all the soldiers killed the previous week. The other prominent example, a review of television coverage of the war reveals, came during the Tet offensive in 1968.

But by then, Lichter’s study shows, the majority of Americans were already opposed to the war.

“It is just one more myth that we saw lots of body bags on TV and that turned people against the war,” Braestrup said.

Journalists said their thinking Thursday was not to make a case about the cost of a ground war.

“I think the reason we did the piece . . . was because these were the first casualties,” said CBS correspondent Morton. “It is also true, although it was not why we did the piece, that the ground war will involve more casualties. . . . But I don’t think we are going to do (such stories) very often. I certainly hope we are not.”