Review: "Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives," by Jim Sheeler

In a few words: 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.

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.

When Melissa Givens got back her husband’s private possessions after he drowned in a tank in Iraq, many of the letters she’d sent him had never been opened. They’d never caught up with him where he was deployed. Now they returned, along with good-bye letters he never got the chance to send, “sealed by the Army in a clear plastic sleeve that Melissa was instructed not to open, since it may have come in contact with dangerous chemicals inside the tank.”

“I will be home,” Jim Cathey had written his pregnant wife shortly after his deployment to Iraq. “I have a wife and a new baby to take care of, and you guys are my world.” He came home in a casket, the casket his wife Katherine now “pressed her pregnant belly to” in a Reno, Nev., funeral home during the city’s “Hot August Nights” festival, “as close to a hug as she could get.” Jim’s father, Jeff, who likes to work alone in his workshop, can’t stop imagining his phone ringing: “’When I was a work, he used to just call up and say, “Hey, Dad.” So sometimes I’ll just pick up the phone at work and say, “Hey, Dad.” It’s his words coming out of my mouth. “Hey, Dad.” But there’s nobody there.’”

Besides the collective force of the dead soldiers’ memories through their survivors’ hearts and eyes — and through Sheeler’s — the moral center of the book is Major Steve Beck, a Marine and a “casualty assistance calls officer” who goes not merely beyond the call of duty to ease the pain of the families in his charge, but beyond what most people are capable of enduring in shepherding death’s consequences.

While each door is different, the scenes inside are almost always the same. “The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know,” Major 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 see 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.”

“We consider these men and women who go forward to fight for us in the lifeblood of our country, national treasures. When we lose something, we lose something important, and we should feel it. If you don’t feel this loss in some way, I’m not so sure you’re an American, frankly,” he said. “When I hand that flag to them and say, ‘On behalf of a grateful nation,’ it’s supposed to mean something. If [the public] is emotionally detached in some way, I don’t know how grateful they really are. Politics aside, is the nation grateful for that loss? If they’re emotionally detached, it’s almost—It’s almost criminal.”