Review: Jim Sheeler's Final Salute—Iraq's Untold, Unrecoverable Costs

The American public doesn't want to be bothered with the discomforts of death tales from the front. In Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, Jim Sheeler aims to make the public very uncomfortable. He succeeds, brutally and beautifully.

Sheeler’s gift, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing in 2006, is in conveying from fleeting details the staggering heartbreaks of grief and rage that families experience when they lose a son, a husband, a brother, a father. The loss is compounded by the government's sterilization policy: It keeps the public from seeing fallen service members come home. The greatest cost of the war is kept hidden from most.

Yes, returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are received with more respect than their predecessors from Vietnam. But that respect is itself part of the sanitizing wall that bears the marks of a nation not so much ungrateful as indifferent: “We’re thankful for what you did,” the marks on the wall say, “but don’t bother us for more than 50-cent ribbons.”

Rare among newspaper reporters in an industry held hostage by the immediate, the fluffy or the seedy, Sheeler, with the backing of the Rocky Mountain News, followed several families through the grimmest process they’re likely to know. It begins with the knock at the door from the “casualty assistance calls officer,” as the Pentagon calls service members responsible for delivering the news. When does it end? It doesn’t. It doesn’t even mend. It evolves, with endless, unexpected, sometimes unintended variations on the same hardship.

Read my full review of Jim Sheeler's Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives.

See Also: In Country: Iraq at Home.