Book Review
The Next of Kin
Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
By Jim Sheeler
The Penguin Press, New York, 2008
ISBN 159420165X
280 pp.
$25.95 (Member $23.35)
Reviewed by Maj Keith F. Kopets
A roadside bomb detonates along a patrol route in western Iraq, and a Marine dies. His battalion holds a memorial service the next day, while his remains are packed in ice and transported to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base. Back home a Marine receives a call from Headquarters Marine Corps in the middle of the night, informing him of the death and his responsibility to notify the next of kin. As the casualty assistance calls officer (CACO) this Marine will fulfill the sacred obligation of the Marine Corps to notify the next of kin of the details surrounding the loss of their loved one and serve as the sole conduit between all government agencies and the family of the deceased.
Assignment as a CACO and funeral duty is tough. “The pain we’re feeling drives us. It drives us for the family because the pride is bigger than the pain,” Maj Steve Beck tells the author. “But the pain—you gotta eat it, you gotta live with it, you gotta take it home and cry in the dark. What else are you going to do?”
Maj Beck, the site commander for the Marine Reserve unit at Buckley Air Force Base, Aurora, CO, is the prism through which author Jim Sheeler tells the story of the next of kin, the families to whom Maj Beck serves as CACO. For a year Sheeler followed Maj Beck on a series of casualty calls and funerals across Colorado, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
Since 2003 author Sheeler has covered the impact at home of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado. His focus has been the sacrifices of military families and servicemembers involved in casualty assistance. The story told in Final Salute first appeared as a feature article in the Rocky Mountain News in November 2005. That article brought Sheeler the Pulitzer Prize.
Final Salute is neither political nor critical. It is an honest and accurate inside look at the casualty notification and assistance process. Jim Sheeler sets out to chronicle the loss and resulting grief of the widows, parents, children, and friends of those killed in action. Sheeler also follows the effects on the people in the support system—the CACOs, the members of the funeral details, and the cemetery workers. The story is penetrating and original. With the consent of the families and Maj Beck, the author takes the reader into the living rooms after the knock on the door and the initial notification.
At the center of the book are 38 color photographs, following the scenes at the funeral homes, the memorial services, and the gravesites. These powerful images will cut close to home for anyone who has lost a loved one on active duty or who has served as part of a funeral detail. The story that accompanies the photographs does not end at burial. The reader feels the aftermath—the unfinished and incomplete lives left behind by those fallen in battle. The writing is powerful and without ornamentation. Vivid in detail, Sheeler’s prose connects the reader to the families. Final Salute will appeal to a mass audience and belongs in the professional library of the serving Marine alongside the Casualty Procedures Manual.
>Maj Kopets is a former CACO. He served as a transition team leader in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM during 2007 and is currently assigned to Headquarters Marine Corps.
