Dover
This undated photo, released by the Department of Defense, depicts coffins aboard a cargo plane at Dover Air Force Base. Since 1991, media coverage of fallen servicemen at Dover has been prohibited. The ban was implemented under President George H.W. Bush, following a controversy sparked by a TV news segment that showed the President laughing alongside a split-screen shot of coffins being unloaded as they returned from a military action Bush had ordered in Panama. While some supported Bush's attempt to safeguard the privacy of grieving families, others criticized the order for whitewashing the brutality of combat. On Feb. 26, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the fam...

Dover
This undated photo, released by the Department of Defense, depicts coffins aboard a cargo plane at Dover Air Force Base. Since 1991, media coverage of fallen servicemen at Dover has been prohibited. The ban was implemented under President George H.W. Bush, following a controversy sparked by a TV news segment that showed the President laughing alongside a split-screen shot of coffins being unloaded as they returned from a military action Bush had ordered in Panama. While some supported Bush's attempt to safeguard the privacy of grieving families, others criticized the order for whitewashing the brutality of combat. On Feb. 26, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the families of the dead will now be entrusted with the decision of whether to permit media coverage of their loved ones. "My conclusion was we should not presume to make the decision for the families," Gates said.

Iraq
On Aug. 21, 2005, 2nd Lt. James Cathey, a 24-year-old Marine, was killed during combat operations by a makeshift bomb that detonated near the Iraqi city of Karmah, leaving behind a pregnant wife and a nine-year-old daughter. This photo, taken at Reno Airport by Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News, was part of a photo essay on the funerals of servicemen, titled "Final Salute," which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.

Afghanistan
At Ramstein air base in Germany, a member of the honor guard adjusts the flag covering the casket of Chief Petty Officer Matthew J. Bourgeois, a 14-year Navy SEAL veteran. Bourgeois, who had been conducting small-unit training at an abandoned al Qaeda base near Kandahar, Afghanistan, was killed when he stepped on a landmine on March 27, 2002. He was the 31st member of the U.S. military to die as part of the war on terror and only the second SEAL. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.

Gulf War I
On Feb. 17, 1991 — less than a month after the coffin-photography ban was implemented — Private Robert Talley became the first U.S. soldier to lose his life in Operation Desert Stor...

Afghanistan
At Ramstein air base in Germany, a member of the honor guard adjusts the flag covering the casket of Chief Petty Officer Matthew J. Bourgeois, a 14-year Navy SEAL veteran. Bourgeois, who had been conducting small-unit training at an abandoned al Qaeda base near Kandahar, Afghanistan, was killed when he stepped on a landmine on March 27, 2002. He was the 31st member of the U.S. military to die as part of the war on terror and only the second SEAL. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.

Gulf War I
On Feb. 17, 1991 — less than a month after the coffin-photography ban was implemented — Private Robert Talley became the first U.S. soldier to lose his life in Operation Desert Storm, killed when his Bradley fighting vehicle came under accidental fire from U.S. Apache helicopters. "Not one drop of drop of oil is worth the blood my grandson shed," his grandmother, LuAnne Monroe, told Newsweek. Here, Army soldiers carry Talley's flag-draped coffin at his funeral in his hometown of Newark, N.J.

Grenada and Beirut
The flag-draped coffins of 22 U.S. servicemen — 15 of whom perished in a Beirut bombing and seven killed in the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada — are arrayed in rows at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base, the site of the Pentagon's largest mortuary and the primary repatriation point for U.S. casualties of war.

Vietnam War
The remains of a soldier killed in Southeast Asia are repatriated in 1995. Since the war in Vietnam ended, searchers have hunted for any remains of MIA's and others whose final fates were not known.

Vietnam War
Seven US Army men killed in a helicopter crash are honored at a memorial service prior to being flown home in 1963.

World War II
The crew of the USS Lexington stand at attention for a burial at sea, while en route near New Guinea in 1944.

Pearl Harbor
Military personnel pay their respects beside the mass grave of 15 officers and others killed in the bombing attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

World War I
On Armistice Day in 1921, pallbearers carry the remains of ...

Vietnam War
The remains of a soldier killed in Southeast Asia are repatriated in 1995. Since the war in Vietnam ended, searchers have hunted for any remains of MIA's and others whose final fates were not known.

Vietnam War
Seven US Army men killed in a helicopter crash are honored at a memorial service prior to being flown home in 1963.

World War II
The crew of the USS Lexington stand at attention for a burial at sea, while en route near New Guinea in 1944.

Pearl Harbor
Military personnel pay their respects beside the mass grave of 15 officers and others killed in the bombing attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

World War I
On Armistice Day in 1921, pallbearers carry the remains of the Unknown Soldier down the steps of the capitol building in Washington DC to a waiting gun carriage, which then bore the body to Arlington National Cemetery.

World War I
A service is held for American soldiers who died on the battlefields of France.

Spanish American War
Coffins await a mass burial at Arlington National Cemetery in 1898. Arlington has honored American war dead since 1864.

Civil War, Fredericksburg
Union soldiers killed during the Chancellorsville Campaign are interred in 1863

The Civil War
The War between the States was one of the first conflicts to be documented in detail by photojournalists. Their work changed the way war was perceived, for it showed in uncompromising detail the horrors of death in war and the unceremonious expediencies of battlefield last rites. In the above photo,a confederate spy is buried with his hat after his execution by Union soldiers.