thedrifter
06-05-08, 08:35 AM
June 5, 2008
Books of The Times
Bearing Witness to the Fallen and the Grieving
By JANET MASLIN
FINAL SALUTE
A Story of Unfinished Lives
By Jim Sheeler
Illustrated. 280 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
“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.
Among the eloquent Rocky Mountain News photographs included here is a shocking image — by Todd Heisler, now of The New York Times — of commercial airline passengers looking out plane windows at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, trying to see what is happening beneath them. Down there, in the cargo hold, a Marine honor guard is preparing to deliver the flag-draped coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to its final resting place.
Since Mr. Sheeler followed the individual stories of several military men and their families (no dead female soldiers are included in the book), “Final Salute” seemingly qualifies as an extended human-interest story. To some extent that’s what it is, if human interest includes the pain and frustration of surviving the death of a loved one (or breadwinner) in battle. But the book is given tighter focus by the man whom Mr. Sheeler treats as a central figure: Maj. Steve Beck, a marine who specializes in helping the bereaved. When Major Beck became a marine, he had never heard the term “casualty assistance calls officer.” Now he knows exactly what it means. And Mr. Sheeler’s readers will too.
“Despite the public’s perception, there is no group of service members whose primary task is death notification,” Mr. Sheeler writes. “Just as every marine is a rifleman, expected to grab a weapon and head to the front if called upon, any midlevel ranking marine could also be called to knock on the door.” And it is an onerous responsibility, to say the very least. The acronyms (“NOK” for next of kin) and instructions (“it is helpful if the NOK is seated prior to delivering the news”) aren’t very helpful. Families can react violently in their grief. The sight of officers arriving in their dress uniforms is enough to set off shivers of dread in any military neighborhood.
Major Beck’s utter dedication to his job is one thing that gives “Final Salute” its strong backbone. This is not a maudlin book, despite the endless opportunities Mr. Sheeler had to make it one. Instead it adopts Major Beck’s quiet decency in his conduct and his empathy for people in dire circumstances. “Maybe that’s what hurts me the most,” he says: “that because I’m standing in front of them, they’re feeling as bad as they’re ever going to feel.”
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.”
This book enters a number of homes and follows their occupants through the grieving process. “Final Salute” is organized through chapters about these individual families. It pays particular attention to that of Lieutenant Cathey, whose pregnant wife refused to leave her husband’s coffin on the night before his burial and slept nearby on an air mattress, protected by a Marine honor guard.
It also follows the family of Army Pfc. Jesse A. Givens, who did his best to express his love to his unborn child. His widow, Melissa, was particularly forthcoming in letting Mr. Sheeler reprint her correspondence with her husband. One love letter she wrote comes back unopened, wrapped in plastic, after Private Givens’s death. It bears a stamp that reads, “Please be advised the contents may contain hazardous material.”
As Mr. Sheeler chronicles the many quiet tasks involved in burying military personnel (“it’s like the names are just floating out there, waiting,” says a man who carves those names into headstones), he does a fine, dignified job of conveying the range of responses to such loss.
There is the anger of Lieutenant Cathey’s mother when anyone tells her she needs closure. (“I politely tell them, ‘How about if I chop off your finger and see if it grows back?’ ”) There is the American Indian ritual that celebrates Cpl. Brett Lee Lundstrom of the Marines as a fallen warrior. There is the Remembering the Brave ceremony, at which the marines who watched Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Burns die in Fallujah, Iraq, on Veterans Day 2004 keep alive the no-frills story of his heroism.
What were his last words? “I’m hit.” His last deed? Ensuring that other marines survived. “Final Salute” shares Major Beck’s conviction that the Kyle Burnses of the Iraq war must be given the honor they deserve.
more pix's
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/04/books/20080605_SALUTE_SLIDESHOW_index.html
Ellie
Books of The Times
Bearing Witness to the Fallen and the Grieving
By JANET MASLIN
FINAL SALUTE
A Story of Unfinished Lives
By Jim Sheeler
Illustrated. 280 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
“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.
Among the eloquent Rocky Mountain News photographs included here is a shocking image — by Todd Heisler, now of The New York Times — of commercial airline passengers looking out plane windows at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, trying to see what is happening beneath them. Down there, in the cargo hold, a Marine honor guard is preparing to deliver the flag-draped coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to its final resting place.
Since Mr. Sheeler followed the individual stories of several military men and their families (no dead female soldiers are included in the book), “Final Salute” seemingly qualifies as an extended human-interest story. To some extent that’s what it is, if human interest includes the pain and frustration of surviving the death of a loved one (or breadwinner) in battle. But the book is given tighter focus by the man whom Mr. Sheeler treats as a central figure: Maj. Steve Beck, a marine who specializes in helping the bereaved. When Major Beck became a marine, he had never heard the term “casualty assistance calls officer.” Now he knows exactly what it means. And Mr. Sheeler’s readers will too.
“Despite the public’s perception, there is no group of service members whose primary task is death notification,” Mr. Sheeler writes. “Just as every marine is a rifleman, expected to grab a weapon and head to the front if called upon, any midlevel ranking marine could also be called to knock on the door.” And it is an onerous responsibility, to say the very least. The acronyms (“NOK” for next of kin) and instructions (“it is helpful if the NOK is seated prior to delivering the news”) aren’t very helpful. Families can react violently in their grief. The sight of officers arriving in their dress uniforms is enough to set off shivers of dread in any military neighborhood.
Major Beck’s utter dedication to his job is one thing that gives “Final Salute” its strong backbone. This is not a maudlin book, despite the endless opportunities Mr. Sheeler had to make it one. Instead it adopts Major Beck’s quiet decency in his conduct and his empathy for people in dire circumstances. “Maybe that’s what hurts me the most,” he says: “that because I’m standing in front of them, they’re feeling as bad as they’re ever going to feel.”
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.”
This book enters a number of homes and follows their occupants through the grieving process. “Final Salute” is organized through chapters about these individual families. It pays particular attention to that of Lieutenant Cathey, whose pregnant wife refused to leave her husband’s coffin on the night before his burial and slept nearby on an air mattress, protected by a Marine honor guard.
It also follows the family of Army Pfc. Jesse A. Givens, who did his best to express his love to his unborn child. His widow, Melissa, was particularly forthcoming in letting Mr. Sheeler reprint her correspondence with her husband. One love letter she wrote comes back unopened, wrapped in plastic, after Private Givens’s death. It bears a stamp that reads, “Please be advised the contents may contain hazardous material.”
As Mr. Sheeler chronicles the many quiet tasks involved in burying military personnel (“it’s like the names are just floating out there, waiting,” says a man who carves those names into headstones), he does a fine, dignified job of conveying the range of responses to such loss.
There is the anger of Lieutenant Cathey’s mother when anyone tells her she needs closure. (“I politely tell them, ‘How about if I chop off your finger and see if it grows back?’ ”) There is the American Indian ritual that celebrates Cpl. Brett Lee Lundstrom of the Marines as a fallen warrior. There is the Remembering the Brave ceremony, at which the marines who watched Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Burns die in Fallujah, Iraq, on Veterans Day 2004 keep alive the no-frills story of his heroism.
What were his last words? “I’m hit.” His last deed? Ensuring that other marines survived. “Final Salute” shares Major Beck’s conviction that the Kyle Burnses of the Iraq war must be given the honor they deserve.
more pix's
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/04/books/20080605_SALUTE_SLIDESHOW_index.html
Ellie