White Lies

News.com reports:

PRIVATE Jake Kovco's in-laws are not satisfied with the official report into the bungled return of his body from Iraq.

Tough.

I'm getting a bit cheesed off with the various family members of Jake Kovko and the way the media is fanning the embers of their constant dissatisfaction. Certainly there are questions to be answered about the odd circumstances of the young soldier's death and the stuff-up in returning his body to Australia.

But nothing about this case is going to please his nearest and dearest and they and the media might do better to back off while they still have some illusions left about their unfortunate boy.

The father of Pte Kovco's wife Shelley, David Small, says the family were given only a cut down version of the report which has left many questions unanswered.

"(We are) not happy with it," Mr Small told the Seven Network last night. "They should have released the whole contents of the report, whatever the contents."

Mr Small misses the point that every gory little detail may further hurt his own daughter. Police, coroners, doctors, nurses, bureaucrats - they all regularly cover things up from the family members of dead people.

I recall an inquest into a man who'd died in a light plane crash. The coroner asked if the bereaved family had any questions of the police who had attended the scene and they asked if their loved one had suffered. "No," replied the cop, "he died instantly." Later, the policeman revealed confidentially to an associate of mine that the man was in fact alive when police reached the scene and lived a further several minutes, fully conscious with the back of his head missing. "The family didn't need to know that," said the cop.

Neither, perhaps, does Shelley Kovko need to know the grotesque details of the botched identification of her husband's body.

Meanwhile, her father doesn't blame the non-coms:

(The) Defence Department inquiry found Pte Kovco's (platoon sergeant) mistook the Australian soldier's body for that of a Bosnian carpenter despite an identity card being on the civilian's corpse...

His failure to notice the cardboard wrist tag, carrying the Bosnian's name and passport number, compounded the mistake of staff at the civilian Kuwait morgue in producing the wrong corpse for identification.

Shelley's family agree the sergeant was the wrong man for the job, and shouldn't be punished.

but would like to see a bureaucrat punished for taking the sergeant's word:

But they believe he wasn't alone and an Australian consular official in Kuwait also confused Jake for a Bosnian contractor.

"I don't want to see anyone lose their job, but there has to be something done ... there has to be some smack on the wrist," Mr Small said.

No doubt family and media are also going to be displeased with the final reports into what exactly led to Pte Kovko's death, especially as it appears he probably shot himself while enthralled by a morbid fantasy. From inquiry transcripts:

Mr President and Members, you will receive evidence that exactly one calendar month before he died, PTE Jacob Kovco had a dream about his own death in almost precisely the same circumstances that I have just described to you.

PTE Kovco maintained a written journal during his deployment in Baghdad in which he recorded his love for his wife, for his children, for his mother and his pride in his job. He also recorded his experiences and his thoughts and, on 21 March 2006, he recorded in some detail the dream concerning his own death by his own hand using his issued 9 mm pistol. You will receive evidence that it was in fact his issued pistol that fired the shot that killed him. The safety mechanism on the weapon has been tested and found to be efficient.

-- Nick