In Country: Iraq at Home

Final Salute: Micayla Seilkop, 10, fixes some of the blown over American flags that represent the more than 4,400 American soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in a monument set up at The Christ Congregational United Church in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

"My mom said not to worry about what happened to Emmett back then, because the war had nothing to do with me. But the way I look at it, it had everything to do with me. My daddy went over there to fight for Mom's sake, and Emmett went over there for Mom's sake and my sake, to get revenge. If you went off to war, I bet you'd say it was for me. But if you're planning on joining the Army, you might ask my opinion first. The ones who don't get killed come back with their lives messed up, and then they make everybody miserable."

That's from In Country, Bobby Ann Mason's 1985 novel about the effects of the Vietnam War on 17-year-old Sam in Kentucky. She lost her father to the war, she's witnessing the war's quiet ravages on her uncle, she wants none of it but can't escape any of it. "You can't get lost in the United States," Sam says. "I wish I could, though. I wish I'd wake up and not know where I was."

Every war has its defining books. In Country was among those that defined the Vietnam War. Ha Jin's War Trash defined the Korean War. Anthony Swofford's Jarhead defined the first Gulf War.

And now the books defining the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are beginning to trickle out. There will be many, unfortunately. Among them, inevitably, will be Jim Sheeler's Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives--what families live through from the moment they hear the knock at their door, the knock from "casualty assistance call officers," as the men responsible for bearing the worst possible news a family can hear are called: the knock that precedes the announcement of the death of a son, a daughter, a father, a spouse:

While each door is different, the scenes inside are almost always the same. "The curtain pulls away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know," Major [Steve] Beck said. "You can almost see the blood run out of their body and their heart hit the floor. It's not the blood as much as their soul. Something sinks. I've never seen that except when someone dies. And I've seen a lot of death."

"They're falling--either literally or figuratively--and you have to catch them. In this business, I can't save his life. All I can do is catch the family while they're falling."

And that's just the beginning. Sheeler, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Iraq war's effects on Colorado, South Dakota and Wyoming families who've lost loved ones, traces the stories of the families' unending mourning and pain in page after page of heartbreaking detail. Besides telling a story too few Americans know or want to hear, Sheeler's art is doing so without once imposing himself stylistically, dramatically or ideologically. The story he tells does it all. There's drama to spare. And it's ongoing on two fronts: the pain continues at home while the war, relentlessly producing more victims and more pain to come, continues in Iraq.

The climax of In Country has Sam and her family of survivors finally making it to the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington, D.C. ("A big black hole in the ground," in Sam's resentful words) for the kind of cathartic experience veterans and their families know well. One day there will be a memorial for the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan. But it says something about those open-ended, vague-purposed conflicts that for the families enduring their life-shattering consequences, they can't yet begin to make the journey rendered in In Country. The longer the conflicts drag, the longer wounds bleed--psychologically for survivors, fatally for the men and women they, and we, keep losing. Multiply that pain about ten fold, and you get an impression of what Iraqis are going through.