Why must Diggers pay if their life insurance isn’t enough?

AUSSIE Diggers being deployed to Afghanistan are being warned by the Defence Department topay for extra life insurance because existing compensation has been deemed “inadequate”.

A day after 600 troops from Townsville left for the warzone, The Courier-Mail can reveal hundreds of soldiers have been issued with letters from the department advising of the need for “appropriate insurance”.

“The additional accident insurance cost for basic cover is less than a night out on the town for a few beers with your mates each month,” the letter reads.

If it’s that cheap, why does the Government pay it? It has billions for pink batts, so why not a few millions for soldiers risking death in the line of duty?

The Sun-Herald‘s Conrad Walters on Joe Rosenthal’s celebrated photograph of the landing at Iwo Jima: 

The original photo, which was later revealed as having been staged, inspired a memorial statue in Washington and was central to the 2006 Clint Eastwood films Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. 

 

Rosenthal, who died three years ago, spent more than half a century defending that image. It wasn’t staged, as this 1995 Associated Press piece tried to make clear: 

The man responsible for spreading the story that the picture was staged, the late Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod, long ago admitted he was wrong. But still the rumor persists.

In 1991, a New York Times book reviewer, misquoting a murky treatise on the flag-raising called “Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories and the American Hero,” went so far as to suggest that the Pulitzer Prize committee consider revoking Rosenthal’s 1945 award for photography.

And just a year ago [in 1994], columnist Jack Anderson promised readers “the real story” of the Iwo Jima photo: that Rosenthal had “accompanied a handpicked group of men for a staged flag raising hours after the original event.”

Anderson later retracted his story. But the damage, once again, had been done. 

Evidently.

(Via Alan R.M. Jones)

UPDATE. The Sun-Herald knows all about staged shots. So do the experts at sister publication the Sydney Morning Herald.

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