A private tribute to the fallen

For reporters hitching rides on military aircraft in Afghanistan, the ceremonies are an unavoidable feature of airfield landscapes. In addition to the Marine and the Afghan interpreter, four U.S. troops and a Polish soldier were killed on Friday and Saturday alone. The ramp ceremony at Bastion, in Helmand province, was the second there in two days, after the deaths of two Navy corpsmen in an insurgent attack Wednesday.

The Pentagon ban on is haphazardly enforced and poorly understood, even by many public affairs officers.

On Saturday, one such officer escorted Times journalists to cover and photograph the ramp ceremony in Kandahar for five U.S. service members. On the way, she announced that no photographs could be taken of the flag-draped coffins. Then, after conferring with another public affairs officer who had just read the regulations, she said no journalists would be allowed at all.

The reporters watched the ceremony from behind a fence. Later, the officer apologized and said the journalists should have been allowed to attend the ceremony, as long as they agreed to not write about it or take photographs.

The ceremonies are emotional, all the more so this spring as casualty rates have soared amid a Taliban resurgence in southern Afghanistan. At least 55 U.S. service members have died in Afghanistan this year, according to icasualites.org, an independent website that tracks casualties in the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts. At the current pace, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan in 2008 will approach last year's total of 117, by far the deadliest year since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

In May, for the first time, the number of U.S. dead in Afghanistan exceeded the monthly total in Iraq. Before June, no more than two coalition soldiers had been killed this year in any single attack. In a three-day period last week, four Marines and four British soldiers were killed in separate roadside bombings.

Like insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban relies on roadside bombings and hit-and-run attacks to inflict slow, steady casualties on coalition forces. In rare instances where the militants fight head-on, they are crushed.

For four weeks in May, for instance, U.S. Marines lost one man in fighting that killed scores of Taliban and drove insurgents from their strongholds in the southern province of Helmand, the world's leading opium-producing region. Yet in a three-day period early last week, the Marines lost four men to roadside attacks.