ABSTRACT
Introduction December 19, 2011, the day after the “official” completion of US troop withdrawal from Iraq, the international press published numerous articles naming David Emanuel Hickman as the last US soldier killed in the war. A press release from the US Department of Defense (DOD) reported Hickman, 23, from Greensboro, North Carolina, “died of injuries suffered after encountering an improvised explosive device,” a sanitized and despicable way of saying the young man had been ripped to pieces by a bomb-improvised or otherwise. Along with Hickman, the Associated Press (AP) named Jonathan Lee Gifford, as the first US soldier killed in action in the war, on March 23, 2003. Piecing together a macabre sort of timeline, publications of this sort intend to mark time, the “passing” of war and thus geopolitical triumph, with the faces and names of the dead.
