Phil Klay is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War and the author of the short story collection Redeployment, winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.

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Part of why begins with my chaplain in Iraq, Patrick McLaughlin, who was beloved by all of us at TQ, our forward operating base in Anbar Province. We called him Chaps. He was a tall, affable Lutheran, always ready with a smile or a joke. His most difficult duties involved TQ Surgical, our little combat hospital, which treated Marines, soldiers, Iraqi army, Iraqi insurgents, and civilians. Given the amount of violence in Anbar Province at the time, this meant being witness to some pretty horrific things. The worst, for everybody, was seeing what war did to children.

Military triage is a cold, logical process. If there’s no hope, you make the individual comfortable and move on to some other patient who might survive. But the doctors, who felt every loss keenly, would never just shove a dying person in a corner. They wanted someone to be there, caring for them until they passed. This was especially true when it came to children, and it was this responsibility that Chaps took upon himself. When there was nothing the doctors could do beyond providing morphine, Chaps McLaughlin used to hold kids in his arms and rock them gently as they died.

At first, he did this standing, or on his knees, outside the hospital. The first child was small, maybe six or seven years old, in the throes of agonal breathing, three or four respirations a minute—“ragged,” Chaps described it to me years later in an email, “gasping, tiny chest heaving, lungs expanding as the mouth gulps air as though this breath is the very last and yet it’s not.” Chaps, a father of five, held that boy for an hour as he clung fiercely to life, his brains slowly seeping through his head, no family around to comfort him, the family unknown, perhaps dead. “When my nameless little boy died,” Chaps wrote me, “I kissed his forehead.”

For the second child, a three-year-old girl, her body tattered from an IED blast and half her face missing—a sight so awful that two of the medical staff, men long inured to every kind of injury, left the hospital to vomit outside—Chaps whispered calm words in her ear as a female corpsman, who had a daughter the same age, held her hand. It was after that girl passed that he asked the Seabees, a group of military engineers, to make him rocking chairs, “combat rocking chairs,” the corpsmen called them, with which he could rock the dying children for as long as they held on to life.

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