Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives

From Amazon.com

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Andrew Carroll

War's brutality is the secret that civilized societies keep from themselves. Along with the raw, blood-and-guts physical carnage of battle, what often gets minimized is the emotional devastation suffered by military families, whose loved ones have been torn violently from this world.

Home-front anguish is especially hard to capture; while the ferocity of combat can be conveyed in dramatic images of screaming grunts kneeling over wounded buddies, the grief experienced by those back in the States tends to be more private and subtle. It is recorded in still photographs of freshly cut flowers under white headstones or the reaction of a mother who comes home to find Marine Corps officers in their dress blues waiting for her. "Please don't let it be," she pleads. "Please tell me it's not Jimmy. Please tell me it's not my son."

James "Jimmy" Cathey was killed in Iraq on Aug. 21, 2005, leaving behind a wife, Katherine, who was pregnant with their first child. He is one of five young servicemen profiled by Jim Sheeler in Final Salute, which evolved out of a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature story he wrote for the Rocky Mountain News in 2005. Like Cathey, Christopher "Doc" Anderson was 24 years old when he was killed in Iraq on Dec. 4, 2006. Brett Lee Lundstrom, a Lakota Sioux Indian killed on Jan. 7, 2006, was 22. Kyle Burns, who died on Veterans Day 2004, is the youngest of the five. He was only 20. The oldest, Jesse Givens, was killed on May 1, 2003, the day President Bush gave his "Mission Accomplished" speech. If the date isn't ironic enough, Givens died when his tank plunged into the Euphrates River. "Pfc. Jesse A. Givens," Sheeler writes, "drowned in the desert."

But this book isn't about how these men died. Final Salute is about what happens next -- the knock on the door, the transfer of the body, the public ceremonies and the private attempts to mourn, cope and remember. Mostly, it concerns the traumatized souls left behind who represent the invisible casualties of every war.

Its on my list to get. I had to knock on that door about five times and it ain't fun, however the deaths of servicemembers I was informing family members of did not involve combat. That duty still sucks; almost as bad as giving a folded flag to a crying mother at her son's funeral.

Passengers aboard the commercial flight bringing home the body of 2nd Lt. Jim Cathey watch as his casket is unloaded by a Marine honor guard at Reno-Tahoe International Airport. Maj. Steve Beck described a similar scene last year at Denver International Airport on the arrival of another fallen Marine: "See the people in the windows? They'll sit right there in the plane, watching those Marines. You gotta wonder what's going through their minds, knowing that they're on the plane that brought him home. They're going to remember being on that plane for the rest of their lives. They're going to remember bringing that Marine home. And they should."

When the plane landed in Nevada, the pilot asked the passengers to remain seated while Conley disembarked alone. Then the pilot told them why.

The passengers pressed their faces against the windows. Outside, a procession walked toward the plane. Passengers in window seats leaned back to give others a better view. One held a child up to watch.

From their seats in the plane, they saw a hearse and a Marine extending a white-gloved hand into a limousine, helping a pregnant woman out of the car.

On the tarmac, Katherine Cathey wrapped her arm around the major's, steadying herself. Then her eyes locked on the cargo hold and the flag-draped casket.

Inside the plane, they couldn't hear the screams.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2005/nov/11/final-salute/

“The scenes in this book are true,” Jim Sheeler writes of “Final Salute,” his book about fallen military personnel. “I witnessed most of them firsthand, and have the tear-smeared notebook to prove it.” Nobody who reads Mr. Sheeler’s account of just how the families of the dead are notified, the lost loved ones enshrined and their memories preserved and honored will have any question about where those tears came from.

At The Rocky Mountain News, where Mr. Sheeler won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for the feature writing on which “Final Salute” is based, he says that the publisher asked the staff to treat this story as carefully as the marines fold their dead comrades’ flags before burial. If this material received unusually reverential treatment, that too is understandable. Mr. Sheeler took one of the great underreported stories of the Iraq war and brought it to light.

While “Final Salute” is not a muckraking book, it is still quietly horrifying. It bears witness to the ways in which casualties from Iraq are shielded from sight. Mr. Sheeler’s readers may not have realized, for instance, that dead soldiers’ coffins have been hidden in cardboard boxes (ostensibly to protect the coffins), toted by forklifts and stowed in the cargo holds of passenger planes.

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Among the most difficult aspects of Major Beck’s job is to deal with its political implications. “If you don’t feel this loss in some way, I’m not so sure you’re an American, frankly,” he says. “When I hand that flag to them and say ‘On behalf of a grateful nation,’ it’s supposed to mean something.”

But when a chaplain once tried to silence a mother who cursed the president, Major Beck corrected the clergyman. “The best way to handle that situation,” he says, “is not to tell someone what they can or cannot do in their own home.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/books/05maslin.html