The Wisconsin National Guard suspended a female member Tuesday for posting online a group photo of soldiers taken around an empty casket covered with the national flag.
Spc Terry Harrison, a Madison-based Guards member, posted a selfie and the group photo on Instagram joking about military burials. The selfie shows Harrison in a car with the American flag behind her. "It's so damn cold out..... WHY have a funeral outside!? Somebody's getting a jacked up flag," she captioned the photo.
In the group photo, 14 soldiers are seen playfully hugging, showing the peace sign with one of them pointing at a distance with his back turned. "We put the FUN in funeral -- your fearless honor guard from various states," Harrison wrote along with the photo.
The photo sparked an outrage on social media as well as in the military. The Wisconsin National Guard suspended Harrison from the honor's guard and she was assigned to other duties till the investigation is completed. "A military funeral is the final show of respect for our veterans and their families, and we take that solemn duty very seriously," Maj. Paul Rickert, a Wisconsin National Guards director of public affairs, said in a statement. "The very name 'military funeral honors' underscores the importance we ascribe - both as the military and society - at large to such solemn occasions. These photos and comments do not appear to align with those values."
Officials informed the National Guard Bureau about the incident as the other soldiers in the photo belonged to different units, Rickert said.
Judy Vincent, whose son Marine Cpl. Scott Vincent, died in Iraq in 2004, said she saw the photo on her friend's Facebook. "It was like somebody slapped me in the face. I've never in my life seen such disrespect for the fallen or the families," she told the Associated Press. "It raises questions in your mind," Judy Vincent said. "What did they think of me and was my loved one treated with disrespect?"
Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin also reacted to the incident saying that the photos were "an outrage." "It's unfathomable to me that people who are not just service members, but who were picked to be in this highly specialized area, wouldn't be sensitive enough to realize just how awful that is," Walker told WISN-TV.
