{"id":1286,"date":"2015-09-29T14:00:04","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T14:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/09\/29\/annotation-tuesday-chris-jones-and-the-things-that-carried-him\/"},"modified":"2024-10-19T16:32:14","modified_gmt":"2024-10-19T16:32:14","slug":"annotation-tuesday-chris-jones-and-the-things-that-carried-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/09\/29\/annotation-tuesday-chris-jones-and-the-things-that-carried-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotation Tuesday! Chris Jones and \u201cThe Things That Carried Him\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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This story was published in May 2008, five years into Chris Jones\u2019s career at Esquire. Jones was 35 at the time, and he says it was probably the best time to take on a story as tough as Sergeant Joe Montgomery\u2019s<\/a>, a soldier who died in Iraq. \u201cI had enough under my belt <\/strong>that I felt I could tackle something like this, and I was beyond driven to write stories like this.\u201d He spent eight months reporting and writing the piece, which was published at 17,000 words, the longest piece he had ever written. It won him a National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2009, but, Jones says, he still has mixed emotions about the story. He\u2019s proud of it, but it also also caused trouble in his own life, an aftermath he doesn\u2019t look back on happily. We initially talked about this story in 2008 via e-mail, and then recently, over Skype.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Storyboard: How did the story come about? What was its genesis?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Chris Jones<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Chris Jones:<\/strong>  I\u2019m always looking for ideas, and part of being a magazine writer is constantly looking for stories. And you know, the ideas are often the hardest part. You give a great writer a bad idea, and they\u2019re not going to do anything with it. And you give a good idea to a mediocre writer, and they\u2019re still going to come up with a pretty good story. The idea is so essential. So you\u2019re constantly looking. In this instance, my recollection is that I read a story on CNN.com<\/a> about life at a forward operating base in Baghdad, and part of that story was a scene where a soldier died, and they were carrying him back to the base. And I knew that the bodies came back to the States, but I didn\u2019t know anything beyond that, like I didn\u2019t know how it happened. I had no concept of what that journey was. But I knew it happened, so I just sort of thought to myself, \u201cHuh! I wonder what happens next, like how that soldier actually gets back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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How did you pitch it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I went in to Esquire for some meetings with David Granger, who\u2019s the editor in chief, and Peter Griffin, my editor. [We were planning] the 75th anniversary year of Esquire, so we were talking big ideas. It\u2019s rare for me to be in the office, but, at the end of that meeting, Granger said: \u201cDo you have anything else kicking around in your head?\u201d And I said something like: \u201cYou know, I think we should do a story about how that soldier, that American soldier gets back from Iraq, like what that journey is.\u201d Granger looked at Peter, and Peter looked at Granger, and they said, \u201cYup.\u201d And it was so fast I actually was worried that they didn\u2019t understand what I was proposing.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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So after I got home, I wrote Peter this really long e-mail, like an 1,000-word e-mail, saying, \u201cAre you sure about this? Because I\u2019m thinking this is not a little story. I\u2019m thinking I\u2019m going to go away for a while.\u201d He wrote two lines back, and it was something like: \u201cYep, totally understand. Make it great.\u201d Probably the easiest pitch I\u2019ve ever had.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Were you looking for war stories? Was Esquire particularly interested in anything about the war at that time?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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No, I wouldn\u2019t say I was looking specifically for a war story. I mean, certainly my natural inclination is towards two types of stories. One, I\u2019m sort of drawn towards darker stories. I joked with my editor that if a story doesn\u2019t have at least one corpse in it, I\u2019m not interested. And then, I\u2019m a big fan of process stories \u2013 I like looking at things that I think people are looking at all the time, and then asking: \u201cWell, how does that work?\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I was a pretty big disciple of John McPhee at The New Yorker, and so many of his stories are just taking something really ordinary, and extracting what\u2019s amazing about it. So I would say it was less that I was looking for a war story, and more that I\u2019m sort of drawn to those process stories.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Can you talk a little bit about what you envisioned, or what you told Peter in that e-mail you were going for, and how different that is from what eventually was published?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I just didn\u2019t know what I was getting myself into. I mean it was pure ignorance on my part. I didn\u2019t know anything about that process. I remember thinking it would just be a regular feature, like 6,000 words. It didn\u2019t enter my head that I was about to start eight months of work, and end up writing the longest story in my life. This may be jumping ahead to something else you want to ask, but I wrote this in sections, and when I had the section, the reporting complete for a particular section, I wrote that section. There was so much material I didn\u2019t want to lose track of anything. So if I had it, I wrote it, which meant writing it completely out of order.[The first section I wrote] was a couple thousand words, and I remember thinking \u201cOh, crap!\u201d I didn\u2019t really do an outline, but at that point I knew there would be 10 or 12 sections. And the math is pretty simple: If you write 2,000 words for one section, well, it\u2019s not going to be a 6,000-word story.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I remember talking to Peter and saying, \u201cIs it OK if it\u2019s not 6,000?\u201d And he said, \u201cWell, how long you need?\u201d And I was like, \u201cAah, maybe 10,000?\u201d And he said, \u201cYeah, I think we can do 10,000.\u201d And then I blew past 10,000. And I said to him, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, but this is going way past 10,000.\u201d And he said something like, \u201cWell, just write it and then we\u2019ll figure it out.\u201d I don\u2019t know if he knew at that point what he was getting himself into either. So I ended up writing 22,000 words, which was just stupid. And it ran at 17,000.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What did you need in order to start? What needed to happen?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A huge part of a story like this is the writer knowing that he or she has his editor\u2019s support. And Peter never once expressed doubt about the story, never once expressed concern about how long it was taking, how long I was writing; he was fully, fully supportive and that was so important when you start a project like this, to feel like I\u2019m not jeopardizing my job if I disappear for a while.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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After Peter\u2019s support I wanted two things: the approval of the family of whichever soldier I was going to write about \u2013 I didn\u2019t need that from a technical standpoint, but I needed that to sleep at night \u2013 and then I needed military approval. At the time it was in the news a lot that they had banned photographers from taking pictures of the flag-draped transfer cases at Dover. So I think a lot of reporters thought that meant the whole thing was off limits. Part of me did think that I wasn\u2019t going to get to do the story, because I needed these two very difficult things: I needed a family to say yes and I needed the U.S. military to say yes. But as it turns out, like the pitch, it was an incredibly simple process.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The Things That Carried Him<\/h2>\n\n

The true story of a soldier\u2019s last trip home<\/em><\/h3>\nOriginally published in the May 2008 issue of Esquire<\/a>.<\/em>
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\n<\/a>How did the title come about?<\/span>I was really nervous about the title. I put titles on all of my stories, and they are rarely used. But I put them on as a guidepost. It reminds me of what I\u2019m writing about. In this case it was The 3,431st\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 he was the 3,431st soldier killed in Iraq. My idea was that putting a face with a number, it makes it a lot harder to ignore the number of people killed there. The headline was Peter\u2019s, and, because this was the 75th\u00a0anniversary year, there were a lot of echoes to things we had published, among which was Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s The Things They Carried<\/em>. And I was horrified people would think I was comparing myself to Tim O\u2019Brien. But no one said anything negative about the headline.<\/span><\/span>\n

[Part One]<\/h3>\nIndiana, The End<\/strong>
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\nDon Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things. <\/a>Why open here?<\/span> When I was sitting in the office, with Peter and Granger, the next thing out of Peter\u2019s mouth after they said yes was: \u201cMaybe you should write it backwards.\u201d I\u2019ve asked him since where that came from and he doesn\u2019t really know \u2013 but as I was reporting I kept thinking about the structure, and there are two reasons I think the reverse chronology works. If you reverse it, you don\u2019t know Joey at all when he dies, so I\u2019m not sure the story has the same impact, and the end of the story is the funeral which is probably the most known part of the process. So, from a purely clinical standpoint, I didn\u2019t think the funeral was a very compelling end. And the other thing: I really like the idea that the story brings Joey back to life. For the whole story Joey is a body, and then at the end you see him walking through the grass. I like that aspect of it. He\u2019s alive at the end of the story.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIndiana state law dictates that the lid of the burial vault be two feet below the surface. That meant Collins had to dig down five feet, ultimately lifting out about a hundred cubic feet of earth. He wouldn\u2019t need a tape to measure that, either. Since 1969, his father, Don Sr., has owned the Collins Funeral Home, just up Elm Street, just past the little yellow house with the two yellow ribbons tied to the tree out front. As a boy, Don Jr. had lived upstairs with the spirits and the rest of his family, over the chapel. He and his younger brother, Kevin, would later work with their dad in the back room, embalming the bodies of their neighbors at three o\u2019clock in the morning, and he still assists his father in his capacity as coroner. But Don Jr. has had enough of bodies in back rooms. He likes it better outside, in the sticky air, working with the earth.
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\nNow he pushed a slick of bangs off his low forehead and lifted a square-bladed shovel out of the back of his pickup truck. <\/a>Many had the feeling you followed the story at least from the moment of the funeral. But it\u2019s all reconstructed.<\/span>Certainly the goal is to make the reader feel like they\u2019re standing there. And one of the conversations I had with Peter very early on was that I would be completely absent from the story. It has no voice. It has no politics. Peter said he wanted it to be a \u201cnovel of facts,\u201d and it\u2019s just facts. Every sentence has a fact.\u00a0So that immediacy was our intent from the beginning \u2013 to make you feel like you were watching Joey come home. And then you make up your mind how you feel about it.<\/span>And the slick of bangs.<\/span>Don has a tick where he is constantly pushing his hair out of his eyes. Was I there that day, when he was digging Joey\u2019s grave to say that he pushed the bangs off his forehead right when he was digging that grave? No. But I watched him push his hair out of his eyes a hundred times while digging this other grave, and I felt fairly certain that he would have done it then, too. Then the square-bladed shovel, I was like, \u201cIs that the shovel you were using?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d I could see the grave parallel to the path. And he\u2019s the one who said \u2013 you know, he sort of talked about how he did some different things when he took the earth away from the grave, which he doesn\u2019t normally do. And we just sat there in the cemetery as he was digging this grave talking about when he dug Joey\u2019s grave. You really use everything you can to make that scene as vivid as possible.<\/span><\/span> It was the second to last day of May, but it was already summer hot, and he moved slowly, surveying again his imaginary rectangle. Satisfied that it lay parallel to the path, the hedgerow, and the train tracks beyond it, Collins made his first cut into the grass. <\/a>Did you have video?<\/span>I had a lot of videos and photographs \u2013 that can help construct things. I also watched Don dig a grave. When I was there, man, it was kind of grim. I was just kind of hoping that he would have to bury someone, which sounds awful. And while I was there he said, \u201cYeah, I\u2019ve got to dig a grave tomorrow.\u201d And it was for a toddler. And I had a two-year-old at the time, and I was like \u2013 I can\u2019t do that. And then an elderly woman died. So I watched him dig this grave, and I was like, \u201cIs this how you would dig every grave? Like Joey\u2019s grave?\u201d And he\u2019s like, \u201cYeah, the exact same way.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
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\nHe set aside the sod and then eased a small Kubota backhoe off his trailer and onto a couple of large sheets of plywood he\u2019d laid down to protect the surrounding ground and the vaults beneath it. The plywood creaked when he anchored the machine and pushed the teeth of the scoop into the dirt. Normally he would have left a pile beside the grave and covered it with a tarp, but as he thought about tomorrow, pictured it in his mind, he decided to haul the earth to a far corner of Scottsburg Cemetery. <\/a>I know ideally we report for this kind of detail, but given the process you were going to reconstruct, the moment when you zoom in on this kind of detail, it\u2019ll immediately expand the story. So at the time you talked to Don, did you know you needed this level of detail, or is it something you gathered and figured out later?<\/span> At this point I did know. Scottsburg was the end of my reporting, and I did sort of an idea of what I needed. That was not the case at the very beginning, which was Dover. Detail. Again, this is a tough thing to explain. Some detail bogs down a story. You don\u2019t use detail just for the sake of detail; you use detail to paint a picture, and you have to ask: Does it add to that image? Does it paint a clear picture in the reader\u2019s head? When we were cutting this story that was sort of our test. And you can make an argument \u2013 you know, every single detail, every single fact included or not included is a choice that you\u2019re making. And you can make an argument that you don\u2019t need to know about the shovel that was square-bladed. But it mattered to me.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe next day, Thursday, May 31, 2007, he sat in the heat on a distant tombstone, waiting until he could finish the rest of his work. Just after twelve o\u2019clock, the first people arrived: a vanload of nine honor-guard soldiers up from Fort Knox, dressed in their green Class-A uniforms, with knotted ties and berets. Collins had seen them practicing and pointing at various spots in the grass when he dug the grave. Now seven of them stacked their M16\u2019s in one of those spots. Each gun held three rounds; Sergeant Aaron Huber, a broad-backed thirty-one-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, had taken care to polish his ammunition to a high shine. Six of the soldiers, including Huber, then assembled in two rows between the grave and where they knew the hearse would park. The extra rifleman remained with the weapons, and the noncom in charge, thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Kenneth Dawson, stood at attention nearby. The ninth man, Specialist Robert Leatherbee, a boy-faced twenty-six-year-old from Massachusetts, took his place about forty feet away. With his buzz cut and iron-crisp uniform, he looked like a soldier, but there seemed something smaller or gentler about him, at least compared with the others. Maybe it was just that he was holding a trumpet instead of a gun, his fingers tender on the brass.
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\nThe funeral motorcade was taking a more circuitous route than the soldiers had from Scottsburg United Methodist Church. After Sergeant Dawson had wheeled the flag-draped casket down the church\u2019s aisle and his men had carried it outside and loaded it into the hearse, they had traveled directly to the cemetery, less than five minutes away. The hearse, however \u2014 driven by seventy-one-year-old Don Collins Sr., dressed in black with a wide-brimmed black hat \u2014 led the long procession through the people-lined streets of Scottsburg, population six thousand.
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\nAround one o\u2019clock, it finally passed through the cemetery gates, which were flanked by dozens of flag-toting members of the Patriot Guard Riders, civilian motorcyclists who have made it their habit to attend military funerals, standing at rigid attention even in the early-afternoon heat.
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\nThe soldiers from Fort Knox removed the casket from the hearse and set it on the lowering device over the openmouthed burial vault. The vault was made by a Chicago company, Wilbert Funeral Services, Inc., designed specifically for soldiers killed in Iraq: The Operation Iraqi Freedom vault is made of precast concrete lined with Trilon, and its lid is adorned with a lithograph depicting scenes from the war in Iraq, including Saddam\u2019s statue falling. Earlier, the lid had been propped up on display for the mourners, who included fifteen or so young men wearing Nine Inch Nails T-shirts. Now the soldiers withdrew and, along with the attending rifleman, picked up their weapons from the stack. The crowd filled in the spaces around the casket and hushed.
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\nThe Reverend Doug Wallace offered a brief prayer, and then a band of kilted bagpipers played \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d (A freight train passed nearby, but the engineer left his finger off the horn at the crossing.) <\/a>How did you get this?<\/span> There were stories about the funeral in the local papers so I had, you know, scenes from that, like the train horn. The fact that the engineer left his finger off the horn was the local reporter\u2019s work.<\/span>Why is that in parentheses?<\/span>Yeah, you can make an argument there that it doesn\u2019t have to be in parentheses. For me, it was kind of an aside. A parenthesis kind of downgrades information, right? Like if you put something between em dashes, it lifts it; you put it in parenthesis, it kind of lowers it. And for me that was a nice detail that wasn\u2019t sort of super essential.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThree recorded songs were played over loudspeakers, including \u201cHurt,\u201d by Nine Inch Nails, before Reverend Wallace said a few more words, and then Dawson gave his men the signal.
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\nThe seven soldiers stood in a stiff line and fired three volleys each. This is a part of the ritual they practice again and again. The seven weapons should sound like one. When the shots are scattered \u2014 \u201cpopcorn,\u201d the soldiers call it \u2014 they\u2019ve failed, and they will be mad at themselves for a long time after. On this day, with news cameras and hundreds of sets of sad eyes trained on them, they were perfect. After the final volley, Huber bent down and picked up his three polished shells from the grass. <\/a>Again on detail, there is a lot of movement in this section.<\/span>Certainly one of the issues with this story was that some scenes were more detailed than others. The funeral was the easiest one to get detail on. There was just a lot there, and then it was also what I did with other sections, which is my usual reporting. With this section I talked to Huber, Chris Bastille and Leatherbee about their experiences.<\/span><\/span>
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\nLeatherbee wet his lips before he raised his trumpet. That was the first indication that he was a genuine bugler. There is such a shortage of buglers now \u2014 ushered in by a confluence of death, including waves of World War II and Korea veterans, the first ranks of aging Vietnam veterans, and the nearly four thousand men and women killed in Iraq \u2014 that the military has been forced to employ bands of make-believe musicians for the graveside playing of taps. They are usually ordinary soldiers who carry an electronic bugle; with the press of a button, a rendition of taps is broadcast out across fields and through trees. Taps is played without valve work, so only the small red light that shines out of the bell gives them away. <\/a>Why add context info like a shortage of buglers in the story?<\/span>Again, it\u2019s about a process. For me it\u2019s a way to ground the whole thing. I wasn\u2019t sure, going into the story, whether Joey had a real bugler or a fake bugler. So that was one of my questions. And I think that\u2019s important \u2013 it says something about how bad things got that they had to employ fake buglers. You know, that bugler shortage I think is one of those things that sort of makes you think, \u201cHoly crap, a lot of people died.\u201d\u00a0 So for me that was an important point: that at this time there were so many veterans and soldiers dying that they didn\u2019t have enough buglers. I think that\u2019s a good example of \u201cshow, don\u2019t tell.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
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\nNow Leatherbee, using his lungs and his lips to control the pitch, played the first of twenty-four notes: G, G, C, G, C, E\u2026. Taps is not fast or technically difficult, and even if it were, most true Army buglers, like Leatherbee, are trained at the university level, possessing what the military calls a \u201ccivilian-acquired skill.\u201d They have each spent an additional six months in Norfolk, Virginia, for advanced work in calls. But there are still subtle differences that survive the efforts at regimentation \u2014 in embouchure, volume, and vibrato, and in how they taper the notes \u2014 and there is always the risk of a cracked note, whether due to cold or heat or the tightness that every bugler feels in his chest.
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\n\u201cYou always run into the question,\u201d Leatherbee said later, \u201cdo I close my eyes, so that emotion won\u2019t be involved, or do I leave them open, so that more emotion will be in the sound? In my opinion, you can\u2019t close your eyes. There\u2019s a person in a casket in front of you. You want to give them as much as you can.\u201d <\/a>This is not from video or other reports.<\/span>I knew that they were using fake buglers at certain funerals, but, you know, him talking about whether you keep your eyes open or closed, those were all from interviews. So even if you have video or you have other stuff, I still think you need to report the way that you report any other scene. You can\u2019t get lazy.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAfter Leatherbee lowered the trumpet from his lips, the six men who carried the casket to the burial vault returned to fold the flag. For some soldiers, that can be the hardest part. \u201cBecause you\u2019re right there,\u201d said one of the riflemen, Sergeant Chris Bastille. \u201cYou\u2019re maybe two feet from the family. And the younger the soldier is, the younger the family is.\u201d
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\n\u201cHe had a few kids,\u201d Huber said.
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\nFirst, the soldiers folded the flag twice lengthwise, with a slight offset at the top to ensure that the red and white would disappear within the blue. \u201cTheir hands were shaking,\u201d Dawson would remember later. \u201cI could see that they were feeling it.\u201d
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\nThen they made the first of thirteen triangular folds. Before the second fold, Huber took the three gleaming shells out of his pocket and pushed them inside the flag. No one would ever see them again \u2014 a flag well folded takes effort to pull apart \u2014 but he took pride in having polished them.
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\nAfter the final fold, Bastille tucked in the last loose flap and passed the flag to Dawson for inspection. Dawson then passed it to the fifty-two-year-old woman with the general\u2019s star standing next to him.
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\nThe Army\u2019s Chief of Staff has directed that a general officer, randomly assigned, will attend every funeral of every soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Brigadier General Belinda Pinckney had flown in the night before from Washington, D.C., after she received a request via e-mail. \u201cYou\u2019re never not available,\u201d said Pinckney, an African-American with short hair and a kind face, her eyes expressive behind her glasses. She didn\u2019t know how many funerals she had attended \u2014 \u201cI don\u2019t like to keep count\u201d \u2014 but she remembered flashes of each of them, certain faces in the crowd, what the weather was like. Here, she would remember especially the wife, Missie, young and pretty.
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\n\u201cBefore the service, I noticed that she had been keeping her distance. She had this look on her face,\u201d Pinckney recalled. \u201cAnd in my mind, she was not dealing with the death of her husband, so I decided to approach her. I went up to her and said, \u2018How are you doing?\u2019 And with a straight face, she said, \u2018Fine.\u2019 I said, \u2018Missie, look at me. You\u2019re not fine. It\u2019s okay not to be fine.\u2019 That\u2019s when she started crying, when I told her it was okay to cry. And we just pulled into each other. I just hugged her, it\u2019s okay, it\u2019s okay, it\u2019s okay. That was her letting go. And I wanted that. I wanted to connect with her.\u201d
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\nNow Pinckney approached Missie again, this time dropping to her knees in front of her. <\/a>Did you plan the appearances of the family members?<\/span> I\u2019m not a planner. I don\u2019t outline. I knew the chronology was going to be backwards, but I didn\u2019t have an outline \u2013 this is going to happen here and this here. I don\u2019t do that. And I\u2019ve tried to do it, because I know really good writers who do it, and I think: \u201cThat\u2019s how it\u2019s supposed to be done.\u201d You know, Gay Talese does it that way. Robert Caro does it that way. I just can\u2019t do it. It\u2019s all very natural. I just start writing. It might not even be at the start of a section, it might be just a paragraph that I feel like I have, and I can write.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cI was just telling myself, You have to be strong when you\u2019re doing this,\u201d Pinckney said. \u201cBecause it is emotional. I was saying to myself, When I give them this flag, they have to know it\u2019s coming from the heart, that you really mean it, and that you\u2019re there with them. Especially because these funerals are for young men and women, and being a mother, I say to myself, It could have been my son \u2014 Andre, he\u2019s twenty-seven years old \u2014 or I say, It could have been me. I try to imagine what they\u2019re going through. I try to relate to them to say that I know these are hard times. Because no one expects to get that phone call.\u201d
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\nThe meaning behind the flag folding is lost mostly to myth \u2014 the thirteen folds supposedly represent the thirteen colonies, the triangle the lines of George Washington\u2019s cocked hat \u2014 but its architecture makes it ideal for being clutched to a widow\u2019s chest, the points across her shoulders. That\u2019s how Missie held the flag when Pinckney gave it to her and said:
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\n\u201cThis flag is presented on behalf of a grateful nation and the United States Army in appreciation for your loved one\u2019s honorable and faithful service.\u201d
\n
\nNow the service was over, the end of this journey home. As the bagpipes played, the mourners left in groups. The nine honor-guard soldiers returned to their van, exhaled, and pulled onto the highway, bound for Fort Knox. General Pinckney prepared to fly back east. And Don Collins Jr. helped his father lower the casket and seal the lid on the burial vault. They were the last in a long line of men and women who, beginning late one night nine days earlier, had carried this soldier to this place. <\/a>Is this, for better or for worse, the nut graph of the story?<\/span> Because it was backwards, I was always a little bit concerned that people would lose track of things. Not only is it a really heavy story, and not only is it really long, you\u2019re adding the additional requirement of reading in reverse chronology. So there are three reasons to stop reading the story. And you can argue very effectively that adding that third reason for people to put down the story is a really dumb thing to do. I would have no argument in return. But I did try to make it easier \u2013 there are these little things throughout the story to help ground you. This very clearly states this is the beginning of a nine-day process, and hopefully it\u2019ll help the reader not to get lost. One of the first reviews or mentions of this piece was in The Washington Post and it says: \u201cIt\u2019s a very strange article. It\u2019s a very strange article. It\u2019s actually the story of the transportation of a corpse, and Jones makes it even stranger by telling it in reverse chronology.\u201d\u00a0Every story is a million choices, and you can make a very easy argument that this was a really strange idea, and to write it backwards was also really strange. And I would say you are more than entitled to that opinion.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nDon Jr. began hauling back the dirt from the far corner of the cemetery, the first scoopfuls landing on top of the lithograph, burying Saddam along with the soldier. After he had tamped down the last of the earth, he replaced the sod he had cut loose the day before, doing his best to knit the seams. Finally, he placed a temporary metal marker from the Collins Funeral Home at the head of the grave, because there had not been time yet to carve a tombstone. <\/a>You built to this.<\/span>I don\u2019t reveal the name of the soldier until the end of this section. I like the way the soldiers who were there had these little details about Joey, like he had kids, or General Pinckney talking, Missie and her reaction. It sort of builds, I think, towards you finding out Joey\u2019s name.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0It read:
\n
\nSGT. JOE MONTGOMERY
\n
\n1977-2007
\n
\n***
\n
\nA few hours earlier,<\/strong>\u00a0Gail Bond had sat in the front row of Scottsburg United Methodist, her church, and dried her eyes. She was sad and she was angry, even her happiest memories having suddenly gone spoiled. Robert Joe Montgomery Jr. had been among the first group of babies baptized in this church, days after it opened in the fall of 1977. His name is inked in the records book there in careful cursive, top of the first page. Gail could still remember so clearly holding him that day, his little head poking out the top of his blanket. Now Joey was in the flag-draped casket in front of her, new memories stealing away from the old.
\n
\nOver the following hours, Gail would need a lot of things that she wouldn\u2019t get, but she would get a cigarette. <\/a>What were you trying to do here?<\/span>I\u2019m trying to show who Gail is a bit. I\u2019m using her cigarettes to show how hard this was. I was really touched by the tiny bag she had. When she pulled it out, I remember thinking that it was really ladylike, this little leather bag and this chain. It was sort of like her way of making smoking less bad, I think. Maybe it\u2019s reading too much into such a small detail, but for me it said something about Gail\u2019s approach to life, how strong she is and how she\u2019s able to survive so much sadness. I\u2019ve written about people for a long time. If you ask me who is the strongest person I\u2019ve ever met, I would say Gail Bond. The shit that she has gone through. That is just a terrible accumulation of loss and she was still there. She was still going. I say everything is just facts to this story, and it is, but I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s obvious or not, but I love Gail Bond. I think the world of her.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nShe had smoked a lot over the last nine days, and she had already smoked plenty in her sixty-eight years. She has a kit \u2014 a little black leather bag to hide the ugly warnings on the cardboard pack, linked by a brass chain to another little black leather bag that holds her lighter. There was something touchingly ladylike about the kit, and there was something touchingly ladylike about her whenever she pulled it out, sparking up another brandless smoke at her round kitchen table, between bouts of tears and cans of Bud Light. She had thought a lot about quitting, but whenever she had built up enough nerve, something happened that made it impossible for her to put the kit in a drawer and close it.
\n
\nWhen she was sixteen, Gail\u2019s nine-year-old brother, Frederick, had died of rheumatic fever. Her first husband, Joey\u2019s father, Robert Joe Montgomery Sr., had been killed in a car wreck during their seventeenth year of marriage. She had taken to calling Joey \u201cmy miracle baby,\u201d because she had learned she was pregnant with him the day after his father\u2019s funeral. Her parents died on consecutive days in 1999. Five years later, her second husband, Joey\u2019s substitute father, Don Bond, to whom she was married for twenty-three years, drowned after his pickup truck slid on a patch of black ice and into a swollen river. Somehow, Gail had weathered all of it, even when people\u2019s eyes followed her down the street \u2014 she hated their pity \u2014 but now she had lost Joey, and that was enough to make her scream at God in the night.
\n
\nShe looked across the front of the church at those who had survived her love. <\/a>That\u2019s one of the few places here where this does not read like someone just putting together a \u201cnovel of facts.\u201d You\u2019re kind of writing here.<\/span>Yeah. I can see what you\u2019re saying there. One of the things Peter said when we were doing all those cuts was that we would cut everything that\u2019s like writing. I was OK, on board with the plan. This one we kind of left it.<\/span> Was there a lot of writing that was cut out?<\/span> I tell young writers all the time, you deliver on time and you deliver at length. If your editor asks for 4,000 words, you deliver 3,999. You don’t fuck with him; that\u2019s like a really important thing I preach. And here I submitted almost four times. I blew past the length in a way that is kind of mind boggling. I can\u2019t believe that I actually did it, and that Peter didn\u2019t blow his top. What made me feel better in that first phone call with Peter was when he was like, \u201cThis is a pretty tight 22.,000 words,\u201d you know? But that sentence \u2013 you\u2019re right. I don\u2019t even know where that line came from.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Her oldest son, Micah, forty, a master sergeant and an Army lifer, who had come home from his own deployment in Iraq to attend his little brother\u2019s funeral. Her daughter, Mindy, who has red hair and freckles like Joey did. Her brother, Bill Graham, the mayor of Scottsburg for twenty years. Her baby sister, Vicki Wells, Aunt Vicki, A.V., the two of them identical in their sad, tired eyes. Missie, Joey\u2019s wife, twenty-nine, too young to know what Gail knew, and Missie\u2019s children, Gail\u2019s grandchildren, nine-year-old Skyla, seven-year-old Robert Joe, and two-year-old Ella. There they sat, huddled in a row, and behind them hundreds of mourners, with them but without. There were so many that the church had opened an overflow room downstairs, and more people were standing in the parking lot outside.
\n
\nA lot of them had come because they knew the mayor and were sorry that he\u2019d lost a nephew. More came because they knew Gail, because she had helped them plan for their retirements at Edward Jones, and they were sorry for her, too. And many had come because Joey was the first of them \u2014 the first man or woman from Scott County \u2014 to die in Iraq. The truth is, not many of them knew Joey, and hardly any of them knew Sergeant Joe Montgomery, and they would learn only a little about him that morning in the church. There was no eulogy to tell them what they should think of him, as though the family had grown tired of sharing their grief and wanted to keep something of Joey for themselves. The strangers would be left to fill in the blanks on their own.
\n
\nLooking at the faces of Joey\u2019s family, they could know that he was loved. Looking at his friends in their black concert T-shirts, they could guess that he really liked Nine Inch Nails. <\/a>Did it help that you saw video? Did it help in the way you sort of panned around the scene?<\/span> Absolutely. The next best thing, in some ways, the next best thing to being there is the video. Because it shows you things you might not think to ask about. Like, like the train. I wouldn\u2019t have said \u201cOh, did the train pass?\u201d I wouldn\u2019t have known to ask that question. One, it helps you with the fact checking. But it also sort of exposes things to you that you wouldn\u2019t think to ask about. I wouldn\u2019t have said, \u201cWere a bunch of the mourners wearing Nine Inch Nails T-shirts?\u201d That\u2019s just not the question you would ask. I would have assumed they were all wearing suits.\u00a0But you could see in the pictures and in the videos that\u2019s what they were wearing. And that makes you ask, why is everyone wearing Nine Inch Nails T-shirts? And that gets you Joey\u2019s love for Nine Inch Nails.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Looking at his Aunt Vicki, standing behind the pulpit and holding it together just long enough to read one of Joey\u2019s poems, they could learn that he liked to write. Looking at his flag-draped casket, they could be certain that he was a soldier. Looking at General Pinckney, giving Missie both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and promoting Sergeant Montgomery posthumously to staff sergeant, they could deduce that he was a brave one. They may have believed that he became a soldier because he had loved his country, but they could not have known that before he was a soldier he had been ashamed that his jobs in the steel forge and running cable for security systems had left his young family living in a bad part of town in a rented house with holes in the floor. They couldn\u2019t have known that he became a soldier because he wanted to make his older brother proud, and that he wanted even more to make a better life for his wife and his kids, this second generation of fatherless Montgomerys. <\/a>How did you find the family?<\/span>\u00a0This will sound ghoulish; I hope it doesn\u2019t. Joey was the soldier in the CNN story. I\u2019m 99 per cent sure it was CNN \u2013 I\u2019ve tried to find that story ever since and haven\u2019t been able to. But it was a sort of standard news story. I went through stories of soldiers who\u2019d been killed and I had five or six soldiers who were possible subjects. For reasons I\u2019ve really never been able to explain, I kept being pulled back to Joey, and decided that Joey would be the one. So before I talked to the military, the very first phone call I made for the story was to Gail, Joey\u2019s mom. It went brutally; it was not good. It was really important and she couldn\u2019t have been better with me, but it was a really sad phone call.<\/span> Why was it sad?<\/span><\/span> I kind of screwed up. Joey\u2019s uncle was the mayor at the time, and I\u2019m pretty sure I got Gail\u2019s number from the mayor\u2019s office. And I thought I had her home number. My plan was to call her at home in the middle of the day when I knew that she would be at work. I would leave a message on her machine, and then if she wanted to, she could call me back. It was a way of softening things. This was probably July or August. Joey had died in May, so it was a few\u00a0months after. I think I wanted to give her an out. But I had her work number, and I called her at work, she answered, so instead of leaving this message in the privacy of her home, I\u2019m on the phone with her at her job, at Edward Jones. When she answered I think I froze, I was like, “Oh, crap.” I\u2019ve talked a lot about this story with students, and that\u2019s such a hard thing to teach: that initial phone call. I introduced myself, and very delicately I explained what I wanted to do, and Gail immediately burst into tears. I felt terrible, I felt like I\u2019d just torn open a wound. She\u2019s crying, and I start crying. It was just a very tough conversation. And again, not because Gail was mean, not because she was unreceptive, but because I felt like an invader. But at the end of that conversation, she asked more about what I had in the mind for the story, and I believe you always have to be 100 percent honest with your subjects about your intentions, and I said I wanted to follow Joey\u2019s journey back from Iraq all the way home, I would talk to everybody who had a role in bringing him home. And she agreed, but her proviso was that I would see that the story was possible first. She didn\u2019t want to talk to me for nothing. So I remember her asking that the family would be last in the process. I had to make sure I had the story before she had to endure reliving that time.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
\n
\n***
\n
\nJoey had lain<\/strong>\u00a0at the Collins Funeral Home since Tuesday evening, when the brothers David and Tim Barclay, state troopers on black motorcycles, had led the procession from the airport, Freeman Field in Seymour, Indiana. They had worked traffic all day and then got a call late that afternoon, May 29, that the body of a dead soldier would need an escort down the I-65 to Scottsburg. They didn\u2019t know Joe Montgomery or his family, but they knew his hometown, and they knew Seymour, and they knew best of all the stretch of highway in between. It was about twenty-three miles, a straight shot, north to south, four lanes, divided.
\n
\nWhen they arrived at the airfield, sweat-soaked, the brothers were taken aback by the number of cars waiting in a line. There were scores, maybe hundreds, as well as about sixty members of the Patriot Guard Riders and their motorcycles, decorated with American flags flapping in the early-summer breeze. The procession would be three miles long. <\/a>How did you tell other characters in the story what you were doing? Did they usually get it?<\/span> People always got it. No matter what story I\u2019ve done, but in this story in particular, I made my intentions very clear . I explained who I was. Sometimes they had questions about other parts of the process, because the process was unfamiliar to most people. They knew their part of it, they knew where Joey had come from, and they knew where they passed Joey onto, but that might be all they know. So I said, if you have questions, we can talk about this. It was always a conversation. You treat people with respect, and you treat them with empathy and you listen. Just be the listener. A lot of these people really needed to talk about what they had done, partly out of pride, partly because it helped get things off their chest.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cWe\u2019ve done a few of these, and it was by far the biggest we\u2019ve seen,\u201d Tim Barclay said. They decided to shut down the highway, the main route between Indianapolis and Louisville, for as long as it took to cover the ground to Scottsburg. They would speed forward to block the on-ramps, and they told the ride captain of the Patriot Guard, Tim Chapman \u2014 they knew him from way back \u2014 to bring up the rear and not let anyone pass.
\n
\nThe Patriot Guard was formed a few years ago in response to the threat of protesters from the extreme-fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, who sometimes disrupted the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. There were rumors the church intended to hold up signs along the highway like, \u201cGod Hates Your Tears\u201d and \u201cThank God for Dead Soldiers.\u201d Gail Bond stayed up the night before for a lot of reasons, but partly because she was worried about how her family and friends might react, how she might react, to such taunts. But now she saw the men on their Harley-Davidsons, with their long hair coming out the backs of their helmets, and she didn\u2019t worry anymore.
\n
\nThe Barclay brothers moved out, lights flashing, with Don Collins Sr. right behind them, piloting his black hearse. In the seat beside him was Sergeant Charles Dunaway, a twenty-nine-year-old paratrooper from Alabama. He had become friends with Micah Montgomery in jump school and had volunteered to come down from Fort Richardson, Alaska \u2014 where Joey had been based before he was deployed to Iraq \u2014 to be Joey\u2019s official escort on these last legs home. On his lap was the paperwork that confirmed the details of Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s death, as well as the medals that would be presented to Missie at the church. Dunaway isn\u2019t much of a talker, and sometimes he struggles to find the words. \u201cI consider it an honor,\u201d he said of what it felt like to sit in a hearse with a flag-draped casket in the back and a dead soldier\u2019s medals in his hands. \u201cIt kind of hits home for you.\u201d
\n
\nBehind the hearse, Gail sat in the car with her brother, Bill, the mayor, who was at the wheel. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to drive and cry,\u201d he said. The tears began flowing as soon as they pulled out of the airport and onto the main road in Seymour, bound for the I-65. Traffic had stopped. Townspeople lined the sidewalks, holding their hands over their hearts, waving flags, whispering to their children.
\n
\n\u201cIt breaks your heart when you drive through and you see people and they\u2019re crying for you,\u201d Vicki said later. She was especially struck by the nameless mechanic in his coveralls, black with oil. He had crawled out from under a car, out of the pit, and he stood in front of the garage, perfectly straight, perfectly still, saluting the hearse, and lines formed under his eyes in the oil on his face.
\n
\nWhen Joey worked at the steel forge, he would come home to the trailer that he and Missie shared, and he would be black like that mechanic. He worked the hammer in the forge, using tongs to hold strings of molten metal, and the hammer would clang down loud enough that you could hear it from the parking lot. Once, Joey had nearly done his thumb in \u2014 it got crushed between the handles of the tongs when the hammer came down \u2014 and it was scarred enough years later to look almost transparent.
\n
\nIn the last car of the procession, Ryan Heacock, Joey\u2019s best friend, was having trouble seeing, he was crying so hard. <\/a>Did you map out the procession? Did you sketch out who\u2019s in car number one and how they all followed?<\/span> Yeah, so you have two principal instruments: I have my recorder, and I also have my notepad, sketching stuff out. Throughout the process, one thing I was really mindful of was that some poor bastard was going to have to fact check this. I mean, talk about a nightmare! So I was really mindful of keeping track of everybody, taking pictures of everybody who I talked to. I had phone numbers and e-mails of everybody I talked to. The document I delivered to the fact checkers looked like the Yellow Pages.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0His fianc\u00e9e, Kayla, sat beside him; he tried to focus on the car in front of him, scared that he would drive into it through his fog; his rearview was filled with motorcycles and flags. Ryan had recently e-mailed Joey in Iraq and asked him to be the best man at his wedding the July after next. \u201cOf course,\u201d Joey had written back, and Ryan had hoped the commitment would bring Joey back home to stay. \u201cTo say that he was my brother doesn\u2019t do it justice,\u201d Ryan said one evening, sitting at Gail\u2019s kitchen table, where he sat often, a can of beer in one hand and a smoke in the other.
\n
\nThey became friends in high school. \u201cWe were kind of the outcasts,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t quite fit in. We weren\u2019t hard enough to ride with the tough crowd, and, you know, we were a little bit rough around the edges for the squeaky-clean crowd. So we were something in the middle.\u201d
\n
\nTogether Ryan and Joey rode their skateboards on the street, and they grew their hair long \u2014 except around the back and sides, which they shaved with dog clippers \u2014 and they talked about what they wanted for themselves. Joey wanted to meet Missie, who was in Ryan\u2019s freshman math class, and Ryan helped her with her homework to set them up. Ryan wanted to go to college to study art, and he did, at Indiana University Southeast. Joey helped Ryan along, the way Ryan had helped Joey.
\n
\n\u201cEvery once in a while I\u2019d be hard up and I\u2019d sell my painting to him for twenty bucks or whatever. I think, of anybody, Missie\u2019s probably got the biggest collection of my stuff.\u201d
\n
\nRyan eventually found work at Fewell Monument in downtown Scottsburg. Out front, there are rows of tombstones for sale. And inside, at his desk, Ryan is designing Joey\u2019s. <\/a>How much time did you spend with family and friends?<\/span> I was in Scottsburg for probably a week. There wasn\u2019t only one session. I never talked to Micah, the brother. He couldn\u2019t. And Missie was not in a good place when I\u00a0was in Scottsburg. So I respected that decision.<\/span> In terms of getting \u201ctoo close,” can you speak about that and how you approached the people and how you approach your reporting in general? I think you told me that you interviewed everybody in Scottsburg over food. This sort of makes the interaction more personal to begin with, so maybe you\u2019re setting yourself up for getting too close.<\/span> Yeah. Again, when I was younger I would get really\u00a0obstinate about this stuff, and tell you you\u2019re being an idiot for making that case,\u00a0but now I\u2019d say there\u2019s more than one approach to this kind of work. My approach is that I wouldn’t tell anybody shit about anything if\u00a0I felt that they were being creepy or\u00a0removed; I wouldn\u2019t respond well to that, especially about a\u00a0subject so personal as this. I would die 1,000 deaths if someone like Gail felt like I had invaded her home or felt like I was\u00a0sinister,\u00a0or felt like I had acted\u00a0improperly. I wouldn\u2019t be able to live with that. So, for me, the way I approached it is that I treat people\u00a0like people. Over food \u2013 you can say it\u2019s a strategy to get people to relax, but for me it\u2019s just a reasonable way to talk to people. It\u2019s how you have a conversation. I\u2019m not showing up and sticking a microphone in someone\u2019s face and yelling questions from a crowd. I\u2019m in Gail\u2019s kitchen. I\u2019m not going to behave like some kind of weirdo. But the flip side of that is that invariably you form connections. I think that\u2019s helpful in some ways, I think you get material in that way that you might not otherwise get. But the argument that people can make is that you get too close and it makes you\u00a0biased\u00a0and it changes how you write.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nNow they pulled onto the I-65, this great long string of mourners and their memories. They were surprised to see every overpass \u2014 U.S. 31, Commiskey Pike, the 250 to Uniontown, 600 South \u2014 lined with flags and signs welcoming Joey home. Volunteer fire departments, dressed in full uniform, stood at attention in front of their shining trucks. Farmers drove across their fields of baby corn and soy to reach the shoulder and stood in the beds of their old pickup trucks. As reports of the procession spread \u2014 traffic helicopters joined in, flying overhead \u2014 and long-haul truckers shared the news over their radios, they pulled over and climbed out of their rigs, and cars filled with families did, too, all of them standing and saluting from across the grassy median, the northbound lanes stopped nearly as completely as the southbound.
\n
\n\u201cI can\u2019t even tell you what that meant to our family,\u201d Bill Graham said.
\n
\nThere had been hard times for Joey after he finally finished high school in his fifth year. He got a tattoo on his arm of an eye with an anarchy symbol for a pupil. He broke up with Missie. And then Gail and Don kicked him out of the house. \u201cHe would sleep all day and play all night,\u201d Gail said. \u201cAnd I knew something was wrong \u2014 you don\u2019t do that. I put up with it and put up with it and put up with it, and tried to talk to him and, didn\u2019t work. So, tough love. Find another place to live, you get a job, you get a job and obey the rules, and you can stay here. And if not\u2026 So for probably a year, Joe was what he considered homeless. A lot of it was right around here, and I know my mother helped him out a lot. But you could see him walking up and down the road.\u201d
\n
\nEventually, Joey went down to Jacksonville, Florida, where his sister, Mindy, was living with her husband. \u201cHe was the sweetest boy,\u201d Mindy said. \u201cI loved Joey to death. He was very sensitive, very creative. He had some troubles, but it made him turn out to be a better person in the end.\u201d
\n
\nMindy struggled to right Joey, until Ryan came to Jacksonville to visit. Maybe that was enough for him to be pulled back to Scottsburg.
\n
\n\u201cI\u2019ll never forget when he called me and asked me to bring him home,\u201d Gail said. \u201cHe wanted chicken and noodles. And I said: Joey, Dad and I aren\u2019t over this yet. So I think you need some time to think about it. Because when you get home, you gotta work, you gotta obey the rules if you\u2019re going to live with us, that\u2019s just the way it is.\u201d
\n
\nJoey did come home, he obeyed the rules, and he went to work, turned black at the steel mill. He also became a father. While he was in Florida, Missie had found herself another boyfriend, and now she was pregnant. She and Joey got back together, and Ryan remembers riding with Joey back from the hospital in 1998 with the baby, Skyla, and she was his from that moment on.
\n
\nTwo years later came Robert Joe, and Joey\u2019s work at the mill wasn\u2019t making ends meet. He began work running cable, first for other security companies, and then on his own. A lot of people didn\u2019t pay their bills, and then Missie was pregnant again, and Joey decided that he wasn\u2019t going to scratch through the rest of his life. In January 2005, he joined the Army.
\n
\n\u201cHe always thought a whole lot of Micah,\u201d Ryan said.
\n
\nIt fit Joey nearly as well. He liked the Army, and he liked Alaska. It was a fresh start, a break from their old life, looking ahead to something new, out over the mountains. He rose through the ranks, and they lived in a townhouse on base \u2014 516A Beluga Avenue \u2014 and Joey built a swing set for the yard, and they put some money away, and they finally felt as though the constant wobble in their lives was smoothed out, like they had been properly aligned for the first time.
\n
\nGail last saw her son at Christmastime, 2006. He had been in Iraq for only a few weeks, and it would be the only midtour leave he would receive \u2014 he would have to spend more than a year straight at war \u2014 but he wanted to see his kids. Ryan took a picture of the entire family then, Joey smiling his crooked smile, his hands on Robert\u2019s shoulders, Missie smiling and holding Ella on her hip, Skyla in front of them both, shining. Gail would put that picture on the front of the thank-you cards she would send out, after. At the end of Joey\u2019s leave, she took him to the airport in Louisville, hugged him tight, and said goodbye.
\n
\n\u201cWhen he got ready to go on the plane, I thought, You\u2019re standing so tall, you like yourself, you\u2019re proud of yourself,\u201d she said.
\n
\nAnd now Joey was coming home, over the Muscatatuck River, the procession pulling off the highway and into Scottsburg, the streets lined there, too, shoulder-to-shoulder, the storefronts decorated, the fire trucks out, their ladders raised and making a triangle over the road. Between them, an enormous flag had been strung. The family drove underneath it on their way to the Collins Funeral Home. There, the local police chief, Delbert Meeks, and his men met the hearse, and they carried Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s casket inside \u2014 \u201cI\u2019d known Joey all his life,\u201d Chief Meeks said \u2014 and placed it on a pedestal in a corner of the chapel. <\/a>How many people did you interview? Do you remember?<\/span>It was 101.<\/span>101 people, but more interviews.<\/span>\u00a0Some would have been once. Some five times. I couldn\u2019t tell you how many specific interviews I did. It was the only time I\u2019ve used the Esquire interns to help me transcribe. Just transcribing would have taken me too long. It was a lot. It was a lot. I mean, I went crazy with this story.<\/span> Over how many weeks?<\/span>\u00a0The whole story was about eight months. The reporting was probably over six months I would guess. Most of them were in person. I travelled around a lot \u2013 12 states sounds about right to me. I was going to go to Iraq, but Joey\u2019s unit got called back so I ended up going to Alaska instead.<\/span> You said that you didn\u2019t meet your contract for that year and you got into the story without really knowing what was going to happen. But did you say when you started, well this is probably going to take me two to three months, then I\u2019ll move on to this other story, or did you leave it open ended?<\/span> I sort of left it open ended. I specifically remember asking Peter if I could go for a while. I remember thinking I was going to disappear. I sort of fantasize about vanishing for a while, and then materializing with the story of Peter\u2019s dreams. Just coming out of the swamp with this thing. I can\u2019t remember now if we kind of planned we were going to run it for the one-year anniversary of Joey\u2019s death, or if that just how it worked out.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAlone, Don Collins Sr. and Sergeant Dunaway peeled back the flag like a bedsheet and opened the casket. There was Joey, carefully dressed in his Class-A uniform with white gloves and polished boots, his badges and cords in place, and his face serene. It was mostly unmarked, and the two men agreed that even though the Port Mortuary in Dover, Delaware \u2014 where every soldier killed in action is prepared for burial \u2014 had advised against a family viewing, Joey looked good enough for the Montgomerys to see him if they would like.
\n
\n\u201cI needed to do that to believe it was him,\u201d Gail said. She, Missie, and Micah stood over Joey for a long time that Tuesday evening. They touched him and spoke to him gently. Gail and Missie hadn\u2019t seen him in months, and war had changed him, or maybe it was their memories of him that had changed, and now their eyes took him in, every inch of him, as though he\u2019d been long lost.
\n
\nIt was Micah who noticed that his ring was missing. <\/a>I want to ask you about the two, very close to one another, strongest details in the story and how you got them. The first one is the paragraph with the ring. How did you get that scene?<\/span> In my first interview with you [an e-mail exchange in 2008], I said I got that from Gail. But now I feel like my memory might be playing tricks, and now I feel that aunt Vicki told me that, and then I went and asked Gail about it. I think that that\u2019s how it happened. There are moments when you\u2019re reporting a story like this when you absolutely know that\u2019s important. Because so much of reporting is sort of sifting for gold.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Joey was a Mason, and the ring was a chunk of steel that he wore on the middle finger of his right hand, a gift from Gail that last Christmas to replace the one that had been cut off him before he deployed, his finger swollen with infection. <\/a>I\u2019m looking at that graph now, and I might take out the one that was it was a replacement. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s necessary. I\u2019m not sure that you\u00a0need to know that. I can\u2019t remember who first said this \u2013 it\u2019s a cliche \u2013 that publishing is writing and editing interrupted. The horrible thing about going back to look at this stuff\u00a0 is realizing how much you would change.<\/span><\/span> Now Micah took off his own Mason\u2019s ring, and he leaned down to slip it onto Joey\u2019s right middle finger, over his white glove. That\u2019s when Gail began to shake; the gloved finger folded in on itself, empty but for cotton and carefully rolled strips of gauze. <\/a>Did you know this was going to be the end of the section? Did you plan it this way?<\/span> The one thing I did plan was that each section begins with a person \u2013 that was intentional \u2013 and then I tried to end each section with something that would make you keep going. I treated this as a story with 12 or 13 endings. In\u00a0a way each of these individual sections is a little story. So while I can\u2019t say for sure if I knew that this was going to be the ending of this section, I really like that it is the ending; it\u2019s a really powerful scene. It\u2019s a naturally powerful scene. I\u2019ve talked about this before, and people think it\u2019s like false modesty, but I believe it sincerely. Anybody could have written this story. It is just work. It\u2019s just labor. I had fantastic editorial support, but anybody with the same editorial support could have done the story. I truly believe that. Because with a scene like that, you can\u2019t mess up.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n***
\n
\nJim Staggers,<\/strong>\u00a0an Army chaplain, father of two young sons, and frequent reader of the Book of Job, had needed to find a quiet place to hide at Freeman Field earlier that afternoon. He had already changed into his dress blues in the airport office, and even in there, in that relative privacy, the curious and concerned had asked him about the small plane due to come in. But he didn\u2019t know more than anybody else \u2014 he had watched plenty of dead soldiers leave in the bellies of C-130\u2019s, lifting over the brown Afghan hills, but he had never before been on the receiving end, at least never in a place like this. Across the tarmac, the doors of a white hangar were open, and an empty church cart waited out front. Inside, workers had set up chairs and laid out a table of refreshments. Everybody was moving carefully, and everybody spoke in whispers. Any building can be turned into a church, Staggers thought.
\n
\nHe had come down to Seymour from Indianapolis in the van with the rest of the funeral detail, those Indiana National Guardsmen who had seen Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s name written on the whiteboard in their office. There were several different marker colors used on that board, but black \u2014 the color in which Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s name was written \u2014 was the most significant. That usually meant an active-duty soldier killed in action, and that meant Specialist Andrew Schnieders and Sergeants Capricia Gerth and Flor Snell-Rominger and three other pallbearers \u2014 take them out of uniform and they might look like lifeguards or college students \u2014 would be asked to carry someone very much like themselves from the plane to the church cart and into the waiting hearse. \u201cHonorable transfer,\u201d they call it, the last in a series of military handoffs, when the Army finally turns over a dead son or daughter, husband or wife, to his or her family.
\n
\nStaggers stole away behind the hangar to read his Bible. He had confronted grief for most of his adult life, but he had to get his head straight. He had somehow seen this future for himself while standing at the lip of a mass grave in Bosnia a decade ago, had seen it in the faces of two hundred men, women, and children massacred and thrown in a pit. \u201cThat was a spiritual moment,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s when I said I will follow this calling that you\u2019ve been pestering me with, God, for all my years.\u201d Since then, he has worked as a sheriff\u2019s chaplain, and alongside one of the Army\u2019s casualty notification officers, and in the trauma room of a city hospital. Most recently had come his tour in Afghanistan, where he had missed the birth of his youngest son to pray over the bodies of the sorts of men he hoped his son might one day become.
\n
\nToday, though, was new and it was different: It was not a farewell but a return. Today would be about framing a reality that was only now coming home. \u201cI was thinking, What would I want for my wife and kids if I were the one not to make it back?\u201d Staggers said. \u201cI would want someone to give them 100 percent of their attention and preparation.\u201d
\n
\nWhen Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s family arrived from Scottsburg a short time later, and after Don Collins Sr. had parked his hearse and opened the door, Chaplain Staggers introduced himself and did his best to prepare them for what they were about to see. He went over the mechanics of the ritual, but he also tried to steady them for the emotion that would follow. There might have been times over the past week when they felt like they were in a movie, actors playing parts. That feeling would end this afternoon.
\n
\nThe guardsmen had carried enough caskets to deduce, from what their arms told them as they grasped the handles and lifted, something of the person inside. They know if the dead soldier was big or little, and they can also make a good guess at how he died, whether he was killed by small-arms fire or a helicopter crash or an IED. Sometimes they\u2019d lifted caskets and been surprised by the weight of them \u2014 wooden caskets are heavier than metal, and that combined with a strapping young man can make for a considerable burden, several hundred pounds \u2014 and sometimes there was barely any weight at all, and they knew that inside the casket was a pressed uniform carefully pinned to layers of sheets and blankets, between which might be nestled only fragments of a former life, sealed in plastic.
\n
\nThey had also learned how not to betray a hint of this sudden knowledge. Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s casket was lighter than they were expecting, but they kept what they call their \u201cgame faces.\u201d They\u2019d learned to train their eyes on one place, focusing usually on a point in the distance, the way sailors settle their stomachs by looking at the horizon.
\n
\nOn that short march from planeside, Schnieders stared at the logo on a police car parked nearby. Gerth accidentally caught sight of tearful children and scrambled to find somewhere else to look. Snell-Rominger whispered to her to look at just this one girl in the hangar \u2014 not at her face but at her pretty dress, which had flowers on it. \u201cPick out a flower,\u201d she said, and both of them stared at a flower on that girl\u2019s dress until they had set the casket on the church cart. <\/a>Here\u2019s the second amazing detail \u2013 the girl in the flower dress. You say any idiot could do this story, but I\u2019m not sure any idiot knows that there IS a girl with a flower dress that you can dig for.<\/span> But I didn\u2019t know there was a girl in a flowered dress. When you start \u2013 you know we were talking about the video of the funeral, how it makes you ask questions that you might not have asked, because you can see. I didn\u2019t have that for any other scene. So it\u2019s not like I went into the scene saying, “OK, don\u2019t forget to ask about the girl with the flower dress. She sort of surfaced, very organically. That\u2019s reporting. I remember getting that detail. It\u2019s one of the details that I\u2019m most proud of having in the story.” I like that I don\u2019t know who this girl is, I like that she\u2019s a mystery.<\/span> How did you get at it?<\/span> This started with the obvious question, because the soldiers said that it\u2019s very important that you keep your game face on. You keep your emotions in check. You can\u2019t be crying when you\u2019re delivering the casket. That leads to the very obvious question: How do you not cry? Because this is really hard. I was told again and again that the moment the family sees the casket is devastating, like the wind comes out and takes their legs. So how, in this moment of extreme emotion, do you keep your emotions in check? That to me is a very obvious question. And their answer was vague: You don\u2019t look at the family. You look at something else. That leads to the question, and it\u2019s a hopeful question \u2013 I mean they can just say, “I have no idea what I was looking at.” This is where the group interview actually helped. Because one of the guys talked about looking at the logo on the sheriff\u2019s car, and then these two female soldiers started sort of whispering to each other, and that\u2019s how they remembered the girl in the flower dress.<\/span> I guess that what I\u2019m trying to say is that maybe the years of experience have led you to trust this process that a series of questions might take you, sometimes, to an amazing detail.<\/span> Yeah, you have to know that the possibility is there. You have to have enough experience to know that you might get that. And you have to have the patience to understand that 95 percent of the time you\u2019re going to go down a path that leads nowhere. That\u2019s what I mean by the blunt force of reporting. Sometimes it\u2019s just \u201ckeep going.\u201d That\u2019s what I mean by labor. That\u2019s why the moments when you do get something, you remember them so clearly. Like that scene I was talking about when I\u2019m sitting with that group of soldiers. I remember that perfectly, and that was eight years ago. I can remember everything about that day, because it\u2019s so rare when you get that moment.<\/span> Does this make you more confident in your work, after you get something like this and see that there is sort of a process behind it that you can trust and fall back on?<\/span> I haven\u2019t really thought about it, but I can see how experience just makes you believe that once you\u2019ve done it 100 times you can kind of go into it knowing that you can do it. But the biggest thing is I think it makes you stubborn. It makes you aware of the importance of one more phone call, of asking one more question.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe pallbearers withdrew in formation. Staggers took their place and stood alone with the casket, pausing for a moment. He looked at Missie and the children, and he couldn\u2019t help thinking again of his own wife and children. \u201cGod is our refuge and our strength,\u201d he began. \u201cTherefore, we will not fear.\u201d
\n
\nHe finished with a reading from the Forty-sixth Psalm \u2014\u00a0The Lord maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 and invited the family to approach the casket. Gail was the first to step forward, followed by Missie and Micah and then the children.
\n
\nMissie folded her arms on top of the flag and put her face into them and wept.
\n
\n\u201cDaddy\u2019s here,\u201d Gail said, bending down and clutching her grandchildren from behind before she reached out to smooth a corner of the flag.
\n
\nAnd Staggers put the flat of his right hand in its white glove onto the flag as well, over the stars, and he gave up trying not to cry.
\n
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t deny your humanity,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can put up the wall for so long, but it always crumbles. It crumbles.\u201d
\n
\nAfter a few minutes \u2014 there is no protocol for this, only feel \u2014 he signaled the honor guard that it was time to march forward and lift the casket to their waists again, and to carry it to the back of the hearse.
\n
\nAs the state troopers, the Barclay brothers, led the funeral procession south toward Scottsburg, the honor guard turned north, heading back to Indianapolis. They talked about what they did right and what they did wrong and how they could be better next time.
\n
\nA few months later, two of the people in the back of that van, Sergeant Edward Blackburn and Lieutenant Matthew Mason, would join more than three thousand members of the Indiana National Guard bound for Iraq.\n

[Part Two]<\/h3>\n\nDover Air Force Base <\/strong>
\n
\n<\/a>This was the first reporting trip, right?<\/span> Dover wasn\u2019t a gentle introduction. But I knew that part of the process happened there. The rest was still a mystery. So going there, being in such a visceral place, was a hard place to start, but probably the best place to start.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nSteve Greene picked up the phone in late November 2006. It was the Pentagon. <\/a>Was it hard to get in?<\/span> I got Pentagon approval in a two-minute conversation, like at Esquire. No door ever closed to me \u2013 everybody wanted to talk. The only people who said no was Evergreen Aviation, a private company that flies the bodies from Germany to Dover, and they wouldn\u2019t cooperate.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Greene, a burly guy with a nicotine-stained mustache, works for a company called Kalitta Charters out of a hailstone-dented trailer at the airfield in Morristown, Tennessee. Kalitta\u2019s head office is in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and much of its business had been staked on flying parts for the auto industry. But with Detroit scaling back production, Greene had been talking to the Air Force about chartering his fleet of white-and-burgundy Falcon 20\u2019s, reliable, low-cost twin-engine jets with decent range and an oversized door for large cargo. \u201cI thought, There\u2019s a niche somewhere for this plane,\u201d Greene said recently. \u201cOf course, this was the furthest thing from my mind.\u201d
\n
\nNot long ago, and for decades, the remains of soldiers were shipped like parcels in the bellies of commercial planes. That practice began to end on November 15, 2005, when a twenty-one-year-old medic with the 101st Airborne named Matthew Holley was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. His parents, John and Stacey, had also served with the 101st Airborne; now they were told that their only child would arrive home in San Diego as freight in the hold of a US Airways flight, ferried to the family by baggage handlers.
\n
\nAfter lodging a complaint with the Army and receiving help from California senator Barbara Boxer, the Holleys saw their son met by an honor guard instead. Still angry, they began a campaign to change the way all military dead would be delivered. California representative Duncan Hunter, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote legislation that eventually became known as the Holley Provision to the 2007 Defense Authorization Act. It directed that the bodies of fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines would no longer be booked passage on US Airways, Delta, Northwest, or Continental but would be flown on military or military-contracted flights and met by honor guards.
\n
\nThe Air Force had already auditioned Kalitta: In June 2006, two soldiers, Privates Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca, had been kidnapped, executed, and mutilated in Iraq, and their bodies needed to be flown from Dover Air Force Base to Redmond, Oregon, and Brownsville, Texas, respectively. \u201cIt was a high-profile thing,\u201d Greene said. \u201cAnd I guess because it was so high profile, they didn\u2019t want to use the air carriers like they had been doing. I told them there was no reason we couldn\u2019t do it, and we did.\u201d
\n
\nNow, just weeks before its January 1, 2007, deadline, the Pentagon was on the phone once again. Greene was asked if Kalitta\u2019s pilots could do for every soldier killed in action what they did for Tucker and Menchaca. He said they could. He was given a statement of work and a flight estimate \u2014 \u201cThankfully, we have not had to fly the number of missions they anticipated,\u201d he said \u2014 and Kalitta agreed to station four of its Falcon 20\u2019s and flight crews at Dover full time. After company mechanics worked through Christmas designing and building a portable electric lift and outfitting the jet interiors with ball mats and roller strips, room for two caskets each, the pilots flew themselves into place on New Year\u2019s Eve. The next day, they were back in the air.
\n
\nThe crews were assigned randomly out of Kalitta\u2019s ranks. One of the pilots was a low-key, goateed twenty-eight-year-old from Michigan named Greg Jones; one of the copilots was a seventy-two-year-old Alabaman named Royce Linton, an Air Force veteran, soft-spoken and sinewy. They had each worked for Kalitta since September 2003 \u2014 flying car and washing-machine parts, organs for organ transplants (\u201cFour hours for a heart, two days for a liver,\u201d Jones said), golfers to Pebble Beach, and Kid Rock to Vail. Now they would work two weeks on, one week off, hauling bodies in caskets.
\n
\n\u201cOnce you\u2019re in the plane, you\u2019re just flying,\u201d Jones said. \u201cYou just keep your eyes forward.\u201d
\n
\nJones and Linton have flown some routes so frequently they could fly them blind, because not all towns have lost in equal measure. The thumbtacks stuck into their mental maps are in bunches. <\/a>You said you wrote in chunks.<\/span> The first section I wrote was the pilots, Jones and Linton, flying from Dover to Seymour. And in fact, the first paragraph I wrote, is this \u2013 with thumbtacks\u00a0and their mental maps. I didn\u2019t even start with the beginning of that section, you know, I was just writing chunks as I had them.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nBoise, Idaho, has suffered more than most, and so has Little Rock, Arkansas. Then there are the gaps, entire states having escaped their touching down. Jones has never flown into Vermont; by fluke of scheduling, Linton has somehow avoided his home state of Alabama.
\n
\nBefore the afternoon of May 29, 2007, neither man had flown into Seymour, Indiana. Their manifest that day included two deliveries. They stopped first for fuel in Ypsilanti en route to Fargo, North Dakota, where they set down Sergeant Jason A. Schumann, twenty-three, of Hawley, Minnesota. His nickname was Tuba, after the instrument he played in his high school band; he was killed south of Baghdad by a roadside bomb. After topping up the fuel tanks, Jones and Linton charted course southeast, with only Joe Montgomery\u2019s metal casket now tied down in the back. Sergeant Dunaway sat in the jump seat between the pilots, Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s paperwork and medals on his lap. As they approached Freeman Field, Jones and Linton circled, high in the bright blue sky. From the ground, it looked as though the pilots were offering a sweeping final salute. They were only getting their bearings.
\n
\nAfter they touched down and taxied toward the open-sided hangar, they took stock of the waiting crowd. This is going to be tough, Linton thought. \u201cIt just seems the smaller the town, the bigger the turnout,\u201d he said later.
\n
\n\u201cAbsolutely,\u201d Jones said. \u201cAlways.\u201d
\n
\nBack in January, their first flights had ended in echo chambers. Linton flew a boy to Stockton, California, where the soldier\u2019s parents, divorced, were fighting over the funeral arrangements, and neither showed up. \u201cI want to tell you, it made me mad,\u201d Linton said. Jones had a similar experience. His first assignment was a flight to Atlanta, and the dead soldier\u2019s father had insisted on accompanying his son, sitting in the cockpit jump seat. (\u201cThey have that option, but it doesn\u2019t happen very often,\u201d Jones said.) After touchdown, the honor guard was nowhere to be found, and Jones had to enlist airport personnel to help him carry the casket. \u201cI was pissed,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m like, this is pathetic, especially with the father there. That was the worst one. They got better after that.\u201d
\n
\nBy the end of May, everybody involved was more practiced, and the crowds had grown bigger, at least in small towns. The Ypsilanti-Fargo-Seymour leg was in the middle of a particularly busy, brutal run, coming with the troop surge in Iraq. Jones and Linton would log eighty-five hours of flying time in a single two-week stretch.
\n
\nThey unbuckled themselves from their seats, readied the lift, unlatched the door, and immediately felt the heat radiating off the tarmac. Sergeant Betty Clarett, the Indiana National Guard\u2019s designated \u201cplane dawg,\u201d because she\u2019s little, climbed on board. She checked the paperwork to make sure the name matched the name on the office whiteboard, and that the flag on the casket hadn\u2019t slipped or been damaged in flight. After Jones had unloaded and readied the lift, Linton bent down to push the casket onto the ball mat.
\n
\nInside the hangar, Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s family had been waiting for what felt like years. Chaplain Staggers might have tried to warn them, but they still had to live through the moment. Jones and Linton had seen it often \u2014 the moment when the family is hit by the truth, when the nose of the casket finally pokes through the door. That\u2019s when the air comes out of them and the place they\u2019re in, as it did that afternoon in Seymour. The hangar emptied with a gust that buckled men\u2019s legs.
\n
\n\u201cI think that was the hardest part of this whole thing,\u201d Gail would say later, before stopping, unable to say anything more.
\n
\nLinton pushed the casket the rest of the way off the ball mat onto the lift. Jones pressed a button to lower it to pallbearer height. During his first few flights, Linton had stayed in the open door, but that was before an immigrant family in California whose son had been killed in Iraq rushed the casket when it was still on the lift. The family had angrily opposed their son\u2019s decision to enlist, and now they let loose on him, beating the sides and top of the casket and screaming at him through their tears. Linton didn\u2019t want to turn his back to their suffering, and so he stood statue-still in the door for five minutes, ten, and then fifteen, watching from above while this family aired their last grievances with their rebel son. On the flight back to Dover, Linton told Jones, \u201cI\u2019m never standing there again,\u201d and he never has. After he centered Sergeant Montgomery on the lift, Linton stepped back into the shadows inside the plane.
\n
\nSometimes, Steve Greene said, the phone rings in his trailer and he hears from dispatch that the pilots need a little extra time before they lift back into the air, although that happens less than it once did. Now they have delivered hundreds of dead soldiers back to their families, and their recollections of the flights have begun to run together. But some Jones and Linton remember more clearly than others. They can remember the thirty-year-old father of five they brought in south of Omaha and seeing the dead man\u2019s youngest son, maybe two years old, toddle up to the casket and twist the bottom bar of the flag in his tiny hand. They can remember dropping out of the low clouds over Juneau, Alaska, on their way to Fairbanks, and seeing the light reflecting off the mountains and the water. And they can remember their approach to Seymour, Indiana, when they circled in the sky and there were so many people below, waiting in a hangar in the heat, including a girl in a pretty flowered dress. <\/a>Why did you come back to the girl in the flower dress at the end of this section?<\/span> For me she was an anchoring detail that helps the reader with the chronology. I felt that she would stick to the reader. The same with Joey\u2019s ring, which comes back again later. That was intentional.<\/span><\/span>\n
\n
\n***
\n
\nThe first time Major Cory Larsen<\/strong>\u00a0entered the Port Mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, in 2006 \u2014 and saw what he has seen nearly every day there since \u2014 he went back outside into the sunlight and gulped down the fresh air and resolved to call his mother more often.
\n
\nBy 0800 on Friday, May 25, when he arrived for his shift, Larsen, a thirty-two-year-old Air Force reservist with a shaved head and hooded eyes, had completed two tours within the building, officially called the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs. There were only twelve permanent staff, including four licensed morticians; the rest of the fifty or sixty people who worked within the building were ordinary airmen and reservists, like Larsen, who had been pressed into tours that spanned four months. Many of them, like Larsen, had worked as many as seventy-five days in a row without a day off. Many, like Larsen \u2014 who worked in the unit that catalogs incoming remains \u2014 volunteered to return.
\n
\n\u201cSome people are broken here,\u201d said Karen Giles, the director of the Carson Center. \u201cBut there are a lot of repeaters. We\u2019re very protective of each other.\u201d
\n
\nGiles has served here since 2003, when the building opened that fall, the world\u2019s largest mortuary, she said, seventy-two thousand square feet of stainless steel and tile. She is small, with a short haircut, and she dresses modestly, in a golf shirt and cargo pants, but she is a presence in the room: She has seen things that she will never discuss, but she isn\u2019t shy about what must happen here. <\/a>Did you see any autopsies being performed?<\/span> I was in the building. They would not let me into that chamber. They showed me pictures and I talked to bunch of people that were working there, but I was not watching transfer cases be unpacked. I really didn\u2019t like Dover at all \u2013 that\u2019s not to say that the people there aren\u2019t doing something important. I just found it a really hard place to be. I was there for a few days because the preparation of the body is there and the pilots are there. I talked to the pilots at a Buffalo Wild Wings, but all the mortuary people I talked to at the mortuary. Karen Giles gave me the mortuary\u2019s coin and a talk. It wasn\u2019t threatening but she basically said, “This is important. Don\u2019t fuck this up.” She said I should have it on me when I reported, on my computer when I wrote, and I did that. I still have it. It was a good reminder for me early on in the process.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nIt is a long, low building with broad stretches of tinted glass; surrounded by parking spaces, it looks a little like a shopping mall. The original facility, which opened in 1955, was one-third the size and looked like a warehouse \u2014 too much like a warehouse, some people thought after September 11, 2001, when the men and women killed at the Pentagon were brought here for processing. Now, behind the front doors, there is an atrium with plants and a fountain. \u201cDignity, Honor and Respect\u201d reads the motto on the stone wall, above a sweeping display that commemorates moments in history that ultimately ended here.
\n
\nIt includes, in part:
\n
\nVietnam: 21,693 Deceased \u2026 Mass Suicide, Peoples Temple Cultists in Guyana: 913 Deceased \u2026 Terrorist Bombing of Marine Headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon: 237 Deceased \u2026 Crash of the Space Shuttle\u00a0Challenger<\/em>: 7 Deceased \u2026 Operation Desert Shield\/Desert Storm: 310 Deceased \u2026 Bombing in Nairobi, Kenya: 11 Deceased \u2026 Pentagon, 9\/11: 188 Deceased \u2026 Crash of the Space Shuttle\u00a0Columbia<\/em>: 7 Deceased \u2026
\n
\nAnd for Operation Iraqi Freedom \u2014 every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine killed in action to date, including number 3,431: Sergeant Robert Joe Montgomery Jr., of Scottsburg, Indiana.
\n
\nWhen Larsen arrived that Friday morning, Sergeant Montgomery was still in his aluminum transfer case, packed in ice, inside a large refrigerator, along with the remains of the twelve other active-duty soldiers and marines who had arrived at Dover with him. He would spend five days here, being readied for the trip home.
\n
\nLike every transfer case, Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s was carried first into the E.O.D. Room, or Explosive Ordnance Disposal Room. Its foot-thick, steel-reinforced walls are built to withstand a blast from a pound of C-4. Sergeant Montgomery was scanned for unexploded bombs, ammunition, booby traps\u2026. None was found. <\/a>Let\u2019s talk about writing this section.<\/span> The mortuary was always the most problematic for detail. There are four morticians, and because they had processed at this point more than 3,000 bodies, there\u2019s no point to asking them: \u201cDo you remember this?\u201d Of course they don\u2019t. So there\u2019s that sort of hindrance, and there\u2019s also the fact that I found that section the hardest. I was worried about Gail reading the story and I found that section just really tough. It was really gory, and it revealed things about Joey that she didn\u2019t know. And I left stuff out.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nHe was then unpacked from the case, which would be cleaned and shipped back to Baghdad to be used again. He was still zipped inside the black body bag, cold and wet to the touch. His remains were lifted out onto a metal table and digitally photographed and archived. Besides the photographic record, the bodies \u2014 and parts of bodies, if separate \u2014 and their personal effects are bar-coded to make sure nothing is lost. \u201cYou can\u2019t make a mistake here,\u201d Giles said. \u201cYou make one mistake, you\u2019ve automatically made two.\u201d Deliver the wrong wedding ring to one wife and another wife is left longing.
\n
\nNo personal effects were found on Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s body. Had there been, they would have been taken to another room, where they would have been cleaned and placed in a clear plastic bag for return to his family. The staff assigned to the personal-effects detail are never asked to work with human remains; personal effects turn the bodies, sometimes unrecognizable, back into men and women.
\n
\nIn the atrium, there are two doors, labeled Counseling and Meditation. They are used by families on rare occasions \u2014 such visits aren\u2019t encouraged \u2014 but most often by those assigned to cleaning and cataloging dog tags, wallets, packs of cigarettes and gum, photographs of baby girls, and envelopes that still smell like perfume.
\n
\n\u201cIf I\u2019m shoulder to shoulder with them, working with them, that\u2019s where the conversation starts,\u201d said David Sparks, one of the chaplains here. He is retired military, a civilian now, a unit unto himself: tall, with gray hair and a bit of a belly held in check by a New England Patriots belt buckle. He was first called to the Port Mortuary during the days following September 11, and he never left.
\n
\n\u201cThe chaplains are back there with us every single day,\u201d Larsen said. \u201cEveryone appreciates that.\u201d
\n
\nWhen Sergeant Montgomery arrived, like all the dead when they arrive, he carried \u201cbelieved to be\u201d status; identity can be confirmed only here. The fingerprints of his left hand were examined by experts from the FBI; dental and full-body X-rays were made; DNA samples would be compared with those on record, obtained before deployment with a blood sample. Only then was the body on the table officially given his name.
\n
\nThen the autopsy began. <\/a>Is this part of what you left out, and what came back in on rewrite?<\/span> Yes. Gail didn\u2019t know Joey had lost his legs. Because they hide it. He was wearing pants and they stuffed the pants. So that wasn\u2019t in the first draft. And a lot of the details about the reconstruction \u2013 the wires that close the skull fractures, for example \u2013 I didn\u2019t have them in there. On my first edit with Peter the biggest thing was rewriting the Dover section. He said, \u201cI can tell you\u2019re holding it back here. And yes, that\u2019s partly because you don\u2019t have the same level of detail as you do in the other sections, but it\u2019s also because you know stuff that you\u2019re not saying. And I can tell. \u201d He called me on my shit basically. And he gave me this really good talk about how if you do a story like this, you do the whole thing. You go all the way with it. You can\u2019t pick and choose what you\u2019re going to include. So I went back and rewrote Dover. I made a decision I would talk to Gail before the story came out and tell her what was in there.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Sometimes it\u2019s made complicated by the work of doctors and medics in the field: ribs cracked open, hearts bruised from massage, holes from IV lines up and down pale arms.) The gross causes of death \u2014 explosion, automatic-weapons fire, falling bricks \u2014 may be obvious, but the medical examiners set out to chart both specific causes and the mechanisms and pathways of death. They do so, they say, because they are as interested in predicting the future as in documenting the past. Earlier in the Iraq war, for example, they began to notice a disproportionate number of deaths caused by small shrapnel wounds to the neck. They recommended that soldiers on the ground start wearing armored collars, which have significantly reduced the number of fatal neck wounds dissected at Dover.
\n
\nAt Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s autopsy, it was noted that he had suffered traumatic injuries consistent with proximity to an explosive device. There was massive blast and burn trauma to his legs, and he was missing most of his right hand. His torso was intact, and his face was unmarked, except for a single blemish on his forehead. But death would have been instantaneous. It was also noted that his remains were incomplete. (Not long after, as is customary, someone from the Army would call Gail at home in Scottsburg and ask: If more of her son were discovered and subsequently identified at the Port Mortuary, would she like those missing pieces returned to her? She declined.)
\n
\nOnce Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s wounds were documented and recorded in the mortuary\u2019s database, he was moved to the embalming suite to be prepared for burial. He was placed on top of one of about a dozen workstations, marked by an American flag on the wall and spools of wire to close skull fractures. <\/a>How did you reconstruct this?<\/span> I asked and I had pictures of the place and I asked: What\u2019s that? The wire spool was one of those things.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0This is difficult, painstaking work; few of the men and women brought here have died from natural causes or in their sleep, which means that most of them died with their eyes open. Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s eyes were blue. Only here were they finally closed, two gloved fingers delicate on his eyelids. For the morticians, that is almost always the first step. <\/a>Did you tell the family these details when you met them or before the story ran?<\/span> Before the story ran. I remember having a long conversation with Gail \u2013 I told her I didn\u2019t think she needed to read it, that there were things in there that might hurt her. I remember being sick to my stomach waiting to hear after it ran. But they couldn\u2019t have been better.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nWhat remained of Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s bodily fluids was replaced by preservation agents. Strong solutions are employed, because the morticians don\u2019t know where the body they are working on might be sent. In some cases, when injuries are too extensive, no reconstruction is attempted. Instead, the remains are wrapped in absorbent gauze and sealed in plastic; they are then tucked inside crisp white sheets, closed with safety pins, one inch off the crease, the head of every pin facing the same direction; a green blanket is wrapped around the entire cocoon, and a full uniform is pinned on top.
\n
\nBut the presumptive goal of the morticians and their staff is what they call \u201cviewability\u201d \u2014 to give the family at least part of their son or daughter back as they remember them. (In the end, the families of about 85 percent of those killed in action are able to hold at least a partial viewing.)
\n
\nThe mortician assigned to Sergeant Montgomery put him back together as best he could. He built a right hand out of gauze and cotton and similarly stuffed the legs of his uniform pants. He paid particular attention to Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s face, which, with the help of the airmen stationed alongside him, he washed and shaved and layered in makeup.
\n
\nChaplain Sparks tells a story he heard from one of his fellow chaplains. He was on the floor, watching an airman who was tenderly washing the blood and sand out of a young soldier\u2019s hair. He would later comb it carefully into place, but for now he concentrated on cleaning the dead man\u2019s hair, rinsing it, and washing it again, the water running through it and his fingers and into the sink. The chaplain asked the airman about that, and the airman said, \u201cHis mother washed his hair the first time, and I\u2019m washing it for the last time.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s very intimate,\u201d Sparks said. \u201cPreparing remains is a very intimate thing. This is hands-on.\u201d
\n
\nThen, like Sergeant Montgomery, the bodies are placed in caskets \u2014 wood or metal, it\u2019s up to the family \u2014 and dressed. The mortuary contains a full uniform shop, the most complete in the country, including every size of uniform shirt, jacket, and pants of every branch of service \u2014 every badge, every insignia, every cord, every bar, flag, and stripe. Sergeant Montgomery was dressed in his Class-A uniform. His three stripes were stitched to his sleeve, and his Airborne wings were pinned to his chest, along with a freshly made plastic badge that read MONTGOMERY, white on black.
\n
\nKaren Giles tells a story about another young airman, who was polishing the brass on a dead soldier\u2019s uniform jacket. He was using a little tool, a kind of buffer, to make sure that every button shined. A visitor complimented him on his attention to detail. \u201cThe family will really appreciate what you\u2019re doing,\u201d the visitor said. But the airman replied, \u201cOh, no, sir, the family won\u2019t know about this.\u201d The airman told him that the family had requested that their son be cremated, and just a short while later, he was.
\n
\nThe flag comes last. They hang by the dozens on a rack on the wall beside a rollaway door, through which a beige van will carry the caskets back to the tarmac. The flags are pressed in the uniform shop, so they are creaseless. And they are longer than a standard flag \u2014 nine and a half feet long by five feet wide, a different proportion from the more usual eight by five \u2014 to ensure that they cover the ends of the casket; a polyester elastic braid is wrapped around the casket, close to the bottom edge of the flag, to keep it in place until it\u2019s folded and given to the family. The flags are always draped the same way, with the stars over the soldier\u2019s heart.
\n
\n***
\n
\nMajor General Richard P. Formica is stout,<\/strong>\u00a0with a high-and-tight haircut and a voice that sounds custom-built for giving orders \u2014 but now he was sitting in a boardroom in the Pentagon, choking on his words.
\n
\nThe Army Chief of Staff ordered that not only must a general officer attend every funeral of every soldier killed in action, but also that a general officer must greet every plane landing at Dover with dead soldiers in its hold. This is because the return of the dead to American soil is viewed as more than just another leg in their journey; it also serves to remind the corps of generals of the personal cost of war.
\n
\nIt had been Formica\u2019s turn on that Thursday evening, May 24, when a Boeing 747 \u2014 chartered by Transportation Command from an Oregon-based freight company named Evergreen International Aviation, and bearing the remains of Sergeant Joe Montgomery \u2014 taxied across the tarmac at Dover. This particular 747, tail number N47OEV, was sometimes converted into a supertanker, dropping thousands of gallons of retardant onto forest fires. But when it touched down a little after 5:30 p.m., just a bit more than forty-eight hours after Sergeant Montgomery had been killed, it carried only the bodies of fourteen men in flag-draped aluminum transfer cases. Thirteen of them had been flown separately out of Iraq by Air Force cargo planes \u2014 including Sergeant Montgomery, whose point of departure was Baghdad International Airport \u2014 and assembled at Camp Wolf in Kuwait. Ten of them were soldiers; two were marines; one was classified as \u201cdisassociated portions\u201d \u2014 incomplete remains that were not yet identified. The group was then flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they were transferred onto the Evergreen jumbo jet and locked to the cargo-hold floor for the flight over the Atlantic Ocean. At Ramstein, the fourteenth case, containing the body of a retired veteran who had died in Europe and was being given passage home, was also loaded on board.
\n
\nWaiting for the plane were honor guards from the Army, Air Force, and Marines, including Major Larsen, Chaplain Sparks, a representative of the base commander, a Marine colonel, and General Formica. They waited together in the passenger terminal, where volunteers from the local branch of the USO had put out their usual spread of soup and sandwiches and chips; the waiting can weigh on the men and women inside the terminal, rolling in their hands the \u201cincoming sheets,\u201d long lists of the dead.
\n
\n\u201cI remember many nights sitting there with someone from the base, talking about what his religion says to him about all of this,\u201d Chaplain Sparks said later, \u201cand maybe there are things that are deeper, not that religion\u2019s not important, but maybe there are things that are deeper than that. And I\u2019m born and raised religious, that\u2019s my job, that\u2019s what I do. But a lot of what religion has to offer doesn\u2019t speak very well to fourteen transfer cases. Is that an awful thing to say?\u201d
\n
\nAfter the pilots shut down the plane\u2019s four huge engines, the K-loader \u2014 a large truck with a platform on top that can be raised and lowered like a scissors lift \u2014 pulled up to the cargo door, just behind the wing. On base, the K-loader is called the Red Carpet; a length of red carpet had been rolled across the platform.
\n
\nThe honor guards marched out in order (Army first, because it\u2019s the oldest branch of service), followed by the general-officer party, including Formica and Sparks. The Air Force detail had already boarded the plane and prepared the transfer cases, unlocking them from the floor. Now the others followed them into the belly of the jumbo jet.
\n
\nSometimes there is a single case waiting there in the semidarkness. The worst planeload Sparks can remember \u2014 he has administered to more than seven hundred of these flights \u2014 contained the bodies of forty-two men and women, a flying cemetery. <\/a>Is that you or does that come from one of the people you talked to?<\/span> Don\u2019t recall. I want to say that it was me.<\/span> Because that\u2019s writing again.<\/span> If that was a quote I feel like I would have put that in quotes. That was probably me. That was probably writing. It passes my fact test though, that sentence. But it also does have writing in it.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cIt never becomes old habit,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I walk up on the back of a plane, it takes my breath away, as much as it ever did.\u201d
\n
\nThe Air Force honor guard moved only one case at a time and, as is their protocol, whenever a case was moved, no matter the distance, it was given a three-second salute, present arms. The airmen carried each case onto the Red Carpet, placing them carefully in neat rows of three. When the last case was in place in front of the cargo door, the general-officer party stood at attention before it, and Sparks said a prayer. He writes a different prayer for every flight he meets. In the case of Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s return, Sparks wrote the prayer on the incoming sheet that afternoon, during the wait. Now he looked at the cases in their rows and prepared to speak.
\n
\nSparks has a beautiful, rich voice, a tenor\u2019s voice. <\/a>Tell me about the prayer.<\/span> I\u2019m hesitant to talk about this because it makes me sound weird. Chaplain Sparks is in this section, and I really liked Chaplain Sparks. He had told me that he writes a different prayer for every plane, and at that point, he had done six or seven hundred\u00a0planes. I knew when I asked the question of whether he remembered the prayer he said over Joey\u2019s plane the answer would be obviously \u201cno.\u201d<\/span> And he didn\u2019t have the prayer?<\/span> No. And much later in the day, I was talking to somebody else and he came into the room, and I can only describe him as white \u2013 he had lost all the color in his face, and was holding a sheet of paper. He said: \u201cYou won\u2019t believe this.\u201d He had gone back to his desk with stacks and stacks of paper, and he knocked over a pile of papers, and among them was the manifest from Joey\u2019s flight, and it had Joey\u2019s name on it, and on the back he\u2019d written the prayer. And I remember him saying that he had goose bumps when it happened. And for him that\u2019s religious, right? That\u2019s divine intervention. It\u2019s not that for me but there were moments like that throughout the story when I just felt I was doing the right thing with the right man, with the right family. The fact that that happened that day was just one of those moments when I was, OK, I am supposed to be doing this. Because early on I was having doubts, and that sort of helped.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nOn the night when he\u2019d spoken to the forty-two dead, his voice had failed him. \u201cI walked up on the ramp and opened my mouth for the prayer and nothing would come out,\u201d he said. \u201cIt took some seconds before I could get control to be able to speak at all.\u201d
\n
\nBut on this evening, his voice was strong and clear:
\n
\n\u201cIt is the dream of all people that we may live together without fear, without prejudice, without hopelessness. We thank you this night for giving to us these so brave and courageous. We are saddened by the overwhelming and devastating loss of these young men who will now never see the fulfillment of the dream for which they died\u2026.
\n
\n\u201cWe are proud to welcome home these fallen heroes, to share the grief of their families, and to offer our honor and respect.
\n
\n\u201cNow, as always, we pray for a time when we are not cursed by terrorism and when young men and women do not die in war.
\n
\n\u201cThis we pray in the name of the Prince of Peace.
\n
\n\u201cAmen.\u201d
\n
\nFormica and the others returned to the ground to watch, but Sparks stayed in the plane, in the empty space. The lift was lowered, and the honor guards took turns carrying the cases off the lift and into a pair of trucks. There was no way for them to know which body was in which case, so the Army might have carried a marine and vice versa; sharing the load was also a practical matter, because the cases can weigh as much as five hundred pounds each. After the first group had been moved \u2014 again, one at a time, again saluted \u2014 the Air Force detail lifted each remaining case forward. The process was repeated, as it is repeated, exactly, for every flight, until the Red Carpet was empty and the trucks were full.
\n
\n\u201cThis is the most important thing I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d Sparks would say later of his job here. \u201cI may never do anything more important.\u201d
\n
\nBack in the boardroom near his office in the Pentagon, Formica would pause before talking about that day. \u201cThis is personal for me,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery one of these chokes me up. When I\u2019m performing this service, my most conscious thought \u2014 especially when that door closes and the truck drives away \u2014 I always think about what these families are going through, waiting for their son or daughter. Please tell them that they were welcomed home with dignity and respect. Please let them know that.\u201d <\/a>If I didn\u2019t misread this, this is him telling you to write this.<\/span> Yeah, and I remember this was one of the things we talked about cutting. I do remember Peter wanting to cut that, because it takes you out of the immediate narrative.<\/span> So why keep it in?<\/span> That\u2019s another thing I remember. I was sitting with this general in the Pentagon. He was crying when he said this; there was something about sitting there with this man. It was an important moment in reporting. I feel like now, with some distance, I probably wouldn\u2019t put that in, and Peter was probably right not to put that in. And looking at it know you could use the Sparks quote \u2013 \u201cI may never do anything more important…\u201d \u2013 and then go to \u201cOnce the trucks were loaded….\u201d I wouldn\u2019t fight on that now, if Peter said to cut it. It\u2019s funny. Time does funny things with how you look at things.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nOnce the trucks were loaded, Sergeant Montgomery and the others were driven away toward the Port Mortuary, where their transfer cases would be carried inside, placed in the refrigerator, and guarded until eight o\u2019clock the following morning, when it was time to go to work.\n

[Part Three]<\/h3>\nForward Operating Base Falcon<\/strong>
\n
\nStaff Sergeant Terry Slaght sat in a helicopter two days earlier, facing backward, looking down at the body of his friend lying across his boots. <\/a>This is reported in Alaska?<\/span> So Joey\u2019s unit comes back to Alaska \u2013 and it\u2019s a great big base in Anchorage \u2013 and I knew some of the people I had to talk to, but I didn\u2019t know who was in the helicopter with Joey to the Baghdad airport. I remember standing in one of these great big halls where tons of people were running around, and I was saying to somebody, \u201cI need to find the guy who was in that helicopter with Joey.\u201d And Terry was just walking past and heard that and said, \u201cI was the guy that got into the helicopter with Joey.\u201d And this was, like, happening in a town; it\u2019s not like there were 10 people in the room. There was this massive number of people. And it was one of those moments when I was like, \u201cHoly shit!\u201d<\/span><\/span>\u00a0He stared at the green Army blanket that had been draped over the body bag and stretcher; the blanket replaced the American flag that had covered Sergeant Montgomery overnight, because it was heavier and wouldn\u2019t blow off in the rotor\u2019s wash. Slaght is twenty-five, a nice kid from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, with red hair and oversized features. He had known Monty for a long time, since 2005, when both men were among the first to join Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. He had a hard time believing that his friend was the shape under the blanket.
\n
\nSlaght had been up all night arranging the flight \u2014 angel flights, they call them \u2014 from the moment he had first heard the letters KIA crackle over his radio at Forward Operating Base Falcon, eight miles outside the Green Zone, in south Baghdad. He had been up late planning the next day\u2019s mission, mapping out the path the platoon would walk to the next house, the next palm grove, the next weapons cache. At first, he had heard his men calling for a medevac, urgent surgery, but his stomach turned over when the calls became less urgent and the men said they didn\u2019t need a medevac anymore. KIA, they said, and they said it again, KIA, as though they couldn\u2019t quite wrap their heads around it.
\n
\nThen Slaght had found out that it was Monty who was dead, through a kind of radio code: Charlie Echo Mike (for Montgomery), and the last four digits of Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s social security number, his battle-roster number. Slaght had pushed through his trembling and made new plans for tomorrow; now they included himself as courier. He\u2019d summoned a pair of Black Hawks \u2014 they always fly in pairs \u2014 to touch down at Falcon at 0600 and lift him and his friend into the early morning light, dust-filtered and thin.
\n
\nHe hadn\u2019t put on the headphones, because he didn\u2019t want to listen to the chatter between the pilots and the two gunners perched over his shoulders. He just listened to the thrum of the helicopter, and he stared at the blanket, and he began to feel guilt well up inside of him. Slaght had been promoted while in Iraq, which meant that he was no longer out on hump with the rest of the guys. Instead, he helped direct their footsteps from the relative safety of Falcon, and one of those footsteps had killed Monty. I should have been there, he thought. I should have been out on that road in the tall grass in the dark.
\n
\nBaghdad\u2019s low-rise sprawl opened up before him, the sun rising on this May 23, just about halfway through Charlie Troop\u2019s tour in Iraq. It wouldn\u2019t take long, maybe fifteen minutes, to reach the tarmac outside the makeshift Mortuary Affairs building, draped in brown camouflage, at Baghdad International Airport. As the helicopters touched down, a single bread truck backed up toward them, its doors open.
\n
\nSlaght, the helicopter gunners, and a three-man detail from Mortuary Affairs grabbed the stretcher\u2019s poles and carried Sergeant Montgomery into the truck. It drove through a rollaway door into the two-room plywood building. After, Slaght sat in the office, waiting for another helicopter to take him back to base, trying not to think about what was being done to his friend on the other side of the wall.
\n
\nOver there, Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s body was examined for distinguishing features to help confirm his identity, and note was taken of the tattoo of an eye on his left forearm; his pockets were cut open to make sure no personal effects had been overlooked; he was zipped back into his body bag, placed in an aluminum transfer case that was stamped HEAD at one end and FOOT at the other, and packed in ice.
\n
\nSergeant Montgomery would be in the air to Camp Wolf in Kuwait six hours later; Slaght would wait in the office for more than twelve. Mostly, he watched TV \u2014 ESPN was on, beamed via satellite from some distant, make-believe universe \u2014 and he watched the day turn into night before he finally got a tap on his shoulder: time to go. The helicopters dropped soldiers off at bases all over Baghdad, up and down and up again, four or five stops before Slaght was finally back at Falcon. He had been awake for nearly forty hours. He dropped onto his cot, pulled up his blanket, and forced himself to sleep.
\n
\n***
\n
\nMicah Montgomery,<\/strong>\u00a0who had visited his little brother outside Baghdad only the week before \u2014 unknowingly posing for their last photographs, his big arm draped around Joey\u2019s shoulders \u2014 was now among the first to learn he was dead. Micah had been shaken awake in his cot by someone with word from the in-country grapevine. After a few minutes, his shock was pushed aside, at least for the moment, by worry for his mother. He knew it wouldn\u2019t be long before two grim strangers, a notification officer and an Army chaplain, would receive their orders and make the short drive north from Fort Knox, through Louisville, to knock on her door. Looking at his watch, Micah subtracted the hours \u2014 it was a little after two o\u2019clock in the morning on Wednesday, May 23, in Baghdad, but still Tuesday evening in Scottsburg \u2014 and feared that they might arrive in the middle of the night. He imagined Gail standing in the open door in her nightgown and her heart giving out. <\/a>Did you feel as you were reporting that you, as sometimes reporters think, that not having Micah and Missie and to a lesser extent not having Evergreen Aviation on board, that the story wouldn\u2019t gel together?<\/span> Because I was so obsessive about getting everybody, it bothered me when I didn\u2019t. The Evergreen Aviation thing really pissed me off. I remember being really mad about it, because I knew the flight number. I knew all the information. And Micah and Missie \u2013 I really would have liked to have spoken to them but they were not part of the process, whereas the Evergreen people were. That little chunk was the only part missing! Like making a puzzle and having one piece missing. I didn\u2019t understand why they wouldn\u2019t.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nMicah decided to call his uncle, Mayor Bill Graham, but couldn\u2019t reach him. Next he called his Aunt Vicki, who was just home from work in nearby Sellersberg. It was still light outside.
\n
\n\u201cHi, A.V. It\u2019s me, Micah.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cI know\u2026. Why are you calling here?\u201d
\n
\nUnlike his brother, Micah rarely called home from Iraq and never called Vicki. Her heart had begun to pound.
\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s about Joey.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cWhat about Joey? Is everything all right?\u201d
\n
\n\u201cNo,\u201d he said.
\n
\nThen Micah asked Vicki to go to Gail\u2019s house \u2014 not to tell her, please don\u2019t tell her, but to be with her when the soldiers walked up her driveway, up to the little yellow house, past the tree with the two yellow ribbons tied to it.
\n
\nAt Fort Richardson, Alaska, where it was only mid-afternoon, dread suspicions were first raised by a communications blackout at Falcon, which was never good. Word spread through unofficial channels that one of Charlie Troop\u2019s wives would be finding out that she was now a widow. As was the practice, women began to gather together so that one of them would not be alone when she found out. Three of the candidate wives \u2014 Britany, Tawnya, and Katie \u2014 gathered by chance at Missie Montgomery\u2019s place, 516A Beluga Avenue. The group of them had formed a kind of surrogate, extended family, first when they were new in Alaska and now in the absence of their husbands. Every Sunday, before the deployment and during, they would get together for cookouts in the courtyard behind Joey and Missie\u2019s house. They would rent an inflatable playground for the kids to bounce around in, and they would set up volleyball nets, and they would eat hot dogs and drink beer. Britany, a twenty-eight-year-old from Mississippi with three kids the same ages as Missie\u2019s three kids, was especially close to them. \u201cWe knew something was wrong,\u201d Britany said later. \u201cBut we didn\u2019t know what or who.\u201d <\/a>Did this part, about the family hearing the news, come mostly from Vicki and the women around Missie?<\/span> Yeah, so I talked to the women who were in the apartment with Missie, and they\u2019re not in the story, and I talked to soldiers who were with Micah. And I talked to Aunt Vicki and Gail about that moment. And Gail\u2019s daughter was important for this part. And Ryan was important for this part because he\u2019s the one who accidentally told Missie. So I was sort of working around some of the limits. I really wanted to talk to Micah. I don\u2019t blame him one bit for saying no, he couldn\u2019t do it, but I did really want to talk to Micah.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThey sent their kids to play at a neighbor\u2019s house, sat down in Missie\u2019s living room, in a circle, and began an interminable wait, looking at one another and wondering if one of them would need to be caught. They didn\u2019t know how the news would travel or how fast: whether the phone would ring with information about another of the wives; whether they would hear crying from a neighbor\u2019s yard; whether someone would knock at Missie\u2019s door, looking for one of them.
\n
\nBack in Scottsburg, Vicki pulled up in her truck behind Gail\u2019s house. From inside her kitchen, through the small window in the back door, Gail saw her sister get out of her truck, and she saw that Vicki was shaking. Gail opened the door.
\n
\n\u201cNo, no, no, no, no, no\u2026\u201d Gail said, beginning to cry.
\n
\nVicki began to cry, too.
\n
\n\u201cWhich one?\u201d Gail asked.
\n
\nVicki could only mouth the word: \u201cJoey.\u201d
\n
\nAnd Gail began to scream, \u201cNot my baby! Not my baby!\u201d Neighbors started coming out onto their front steps, and it wasn\u2019t long before phones across Scottsburg began to disturb the early-evening wind-down, at the mayor\u2019s office, at the church, and at Ryan Heacock\u2019s house, where an ordinary day suddenly ended.
\n
\n\u201cI heard sooner than I should have,\u201d Ryan said later, his cigarette drawing down to his fingers. Too soon, because his first instinct had been to pick up the phone and call Missie, who was still sitting in that circle in her living room.
\n
\nHer phone rang, and Missie answered.
\n
\n\u201cMissie,\u201d Ryan said, \u201cI\u2019m so sorry.\u201d
\n
\nThen Ryan heard the clatter of the phone on the floor.
\n
\nBritany picked up the phone and asked Ryan what he knew, which wasn\u2019t much. She hung up. The women hugged and cried and began a second round of waiting. Minutes turned to hours, afternoon to evening, and a kind of helplessness set in. There wasn\u2019t much to say \u2014 what could be said? Someone did the dishes. Someone else did the laundry. The calculations went unspoken, but the women knew that Missie and her kids would be leaving for the funeral, and that the funeral would be in Indiana, which was hotter than Alaska. Britany quietly began digging out the children\u2019s summer clothes.
\n
\nAround dinnertime, they came, two men from the base, friends of Joey\u2019s filling the door. \u201cI can still see those men standing there, every night,\u201d Britany said, and she cried, remembering. \u201cMissie, she just put her face into the wall.\u201d
\n
\nAfter the men had left, friends blocked out the empty spaces in the house and bags were packed. The same sort of gathering was taking place at Gail\u2019s house in Scottsburg. People brought chicken dinners wrapped in tinfoil, cases of Diet Coke, cartons of cigarettes. Joey\u2019s boyhood friends \u2014 Ryan and the rest of \u201cthe guys\u201d who had spent so much time on Elm Street; \u201cI raised them all,\u201d Gail said \u2014 erected a flagpole on her lawn in the dark and roped an American flag halfway up. Soon a small stone bench arrived, and a photograph of Joey, and a Bible, and a wreath, something new for just about every person who stopped by. The house was full to bursting until late that night, when Gail was finally bundled into bed, and everybody else cleared out except for Mindy, who lay awake in the next room.
\n
\nAt four o\u2019clock in the morning, there came the knock at their door.
\n
\n***
\n
\nSergeant Joe Montgomery<\/strong>\u00a0was riding shotgun earlier that night, May 22, 2007. The platoon was heading in a convoy, six Humvees on a string, from Falcon to Patrol Base Red, a drive that could take anywhere between twenty minutes and forever. <\/a>The level of detail is again pretty heavy. Was that something you intended, to recreate the night of Joey\u2019s death?<\/span> Yeah. I wanted it to be really vivid. The advantage here was the number of people present. You weren\u2019t relying on one person, 25 people were there that night, so I could talk to a lot of people and get a lot of information. And actually at the start of that section there was a lot I didn\u2019t know had happened.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0To pass the time, Sergeant Montgomery had rigged up his iPod to the headsets that he and his team wore so they could talk over the noise of the engine. Now he cranked up \u201cB.Y.O.B,\u201d by System of a Down, its ironically melodic chorus filling the night, lit by only a sliver of moon.\u00a0Everybody\u2019s going to the party have a real good time.<\/em>
\n
\nA kid from Parker, Colorado, Private Kaylon Ross, twenty years old, was driving the truck. He bounced his head to the music. In the backseat, the platoon leader, Lieutenant Eric Rudberg \u2014 twenty-five, a stocky Arizonan who for some reason sounds like he\u2019s from Boston, the sort of guy you would want leading you into battle \u2014 monitored the radios. The team was rounded out by the gunner, Specialist Ron Gilliland, twenty-three, from Butler, Pennsylvania. Sometimes he shivered uncontrollably, his hands seized by tremors on the grip of the machine gun. But the loud music helped. It gave him something to think about other than snipers shooting at him from rooftops or the truck rolling over a pressure plate and liquid copper darts firing through the floorboards.
\n
\nSergeant Montgomery was quieter than usual, perhaps thinking about the conversation he\u2019d just had with his wife and kids, his weekly morning phone call \u2014 night for them in Alaska, twelve hours behind. Skyla and Robert got on the line first, as they usually did. This time, Skyla had a question for him. Who knows how a nine-year-old\u2019s mind works, when she was going to sleep or out on the swings, but she had been thinking that she would like her name to be Skyla Montgomery from now on. She sounded almost shy when she\u2019d asked her dad whether that would be all right. Sergeant Montgomery had promised that they would sign the papers as soon as he got back from away. <\/a>You talked to them in Alaska; you had no idea the unit was not in Iraq.<\/span>\u00a0They were in Iraq when I started working on the story. But I had very long and hard conversations with my wife, who at the time would\u2019ve been pregnant, so we would\u2019ve had Charlie, our two-year-old, and then she would\u2019ve been pregnant with our second son. She did not want me to go, and I was going. I felt like the story would be just totally incomplete if I didn\u2019t have these guys in it. And then luckily enough they got recalled.<\/span> Do you think that made it easier in a way? You talked to 25 of them \u2013 I don\u2019t know how that would\u2019ve happened in Iraq.<\/span> Yeah, I don\u2019t know. I mean, I was so crazy about the story that I wanted to go on the road. I was like, \u201cTake me to this place.\u201d That wouldn\u2019t have been, in hindsight, probably very smart. And you\u2019re right, I would\u2019ve had guys on patrol, or guys at the forward operating base, they would\u2019ve been scattered to the wind. In Alaska they basically set me up in this office and they just brought guys in. One at a time, two at a time, three at a time. They would talk, and then they would leave and someone else would come in. It was a very easy process. What I didn\u2019t get was to see Iraq first-hand, which maybe would\u2019ve helped.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThen he\u2019d asked to speak to Mom. They hadn\u2019t been on the phone together long before Missie heard an explosion. That wasn\u2019t unusual \u2014 explosions interrupted their conversations as often as doorbells \u2014 but this blast sounded closer than most.
\n
\n\u201cOh, my God, I\u2019ve got to go,\u201d Joey had said, and he\u2019d hung up.
\n
\nThese were always anxious waits. Skyla had filled this one, excited about her new name, until a short e-mail landed. Joey had wanted to let Missie know that everything was all right before he hit the road.
\n
\n\u201cI\u2019m okay,\u201d it read.
\n
\nNow the trucks turned onto Senators, heading east toward the Tigris River. The route between Falcon and Patrol Base Red was not a straight shot; straight shots were death in Iraq. But driving remained dangerous, because there were only so many roads, and it was easy to predict American traffic. Pack an IED into what looked like a curbstone, wait in the bushes for the convoy to drive by, trip the circuit with a cell phone, and a planeload of dead soldiers would be on its way to Dover.
\n
\nThe music changed up, \u201cFriends in Low Places,\u201d by Garth Brooks. <\/a>How did you get the songs?<\/span> That\u2019s from the guys that were in the truck. That\u2019s another one of those things when they would\u2019ve said, \u201cJoey liked listening to music.” And I would\u2019ve said, \u201cDo you remember what music?\u201d So I got some of the songs. I got Garth Brooks. I got System of a Down. They remembered certain songs, and certain moments. I had no idea they listened to music when they were out on patrol. But if they volunteer the information that they\u2019re listening to music, the next question you have to ask is: What songs?<\/span><\/span>\u00a0The convoy turned right onto Red Wings \u2014 on Army maps, the roads in Baghdad\u2019s southeast were named after hockey teams. They were approaching the edge of the city, near an affluent collection of Sunni farms stretching between rows of irrigation canals and fish ponds. Rudberg hated the canals, because canals meant bridges, and bridges were too easy to bomb. Charlie Troop had eighty men in it; on a patrol like this, the platoon would be carrying between twenty-two and thirty packs. There just weren\u2019t enough eyes or ears between them to cover so much ground. They were too thin.
\n
\nRed Wings started straight and hard-topped, but as it neared Patrol Base Red, the road began to buckle and turn to gravel and then dirt. This was the most stressful part of the drive; it was easier to hide things in dirt. The danger was worse in summer, especially on dark nights like tonight \u2014 closing in on eleven o\u2019clock, well past curfew \u2014 when Iraqis would bed down on their rooftops to find relief from the heat. They would stir and watch the convoy, these families turned into shadows, leaning over the parapets, and it was so hard to know if they had been visited that week by men bearing threats or a small bundle of money, and if now there was a machine-gun nest where their sleeping mats had been. <\/a>How do you think it would\u2019ve helped being there, being on that road? Maybe in terms of reporting I feel there\u2019s something deeper here that you were going for, in terms of seeing it, not just reporting\u00a0the details of it.<\/span> I believe in being there; I\u2019ve always believed that with reporters. I hate it when people interview by e-mail and stuff like that. I mean, at least pick up the phone. Or go. We\u2019re not in the Middle Ages where people ride a horse. Just go. Get in your car. I feel like there\u2019s a responsibility when you do a story like this to be as complete as you can. You\u2019re not pitching a story and saying, \u201cI would like to write this story, and I would like to half-ass this section.\u201d So for me, being there was very natural. My wife was making a very rational case why it was unwise for me to go to Iraq. I\u2019m looking back on that and wow, in hindsight I\u2019m really glad I didn\u2019t have to go. But at the time I remember being disappointed I wasn\u2019t going because I almost think you owe it. There would\u2019ve been something about being at Joey\u2019s grave site, and being at the place where he died. It would\u2019ve meant something to me. Would it have changed one word in the story? I don\u2019t know. Maybe not. Psychologically it was important for me to go.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAt last, the Humvees pulled gratefully inside the walls at Patrol Base Red. It was a house, a mansion by Iraqi standards, once owned by a chicken farmer with a penchant for planting IEDs, so the Americans had seized it and made it into an outpost, a fort on the frontier. There were still boot marks on the front door from the first raid. Since then, the troop had built rings of defenses around it, spools of wire and T-walls, concrete slabs fifteen feet high and eight feet wide. Every window had been filled with sandbags, and firing positions on the roof were permanently manned. The platoons would cycle through in shifts: three or four days guarding the house, sleeping on the cots upstairs; three or four days, like today, shuttling between Falcon and Patrol Base Red before heading out on patrol; and then maybe two days of semirest back at Falcon, cleaning weapons and trucks, getting some proper sleep in air-conditioned barracks. The house had marble floors and chandeliers and a big kitchen with a microwave; whenever Sergeant Montgomery was posted here, he would zap the bags of popcorn that Gail sent him by the boxful and share them with the boys. It would have been all right if the generator had given off a bit more juice and there had been running water. Its absence meant that the platoon shared buckets for their bathroom, which meant that house duty sucked, but it sucked less than patrol. At least here there were walls.
\n
\nCaptain Derrick Goodwin \u2014 a big guy, African-American, with a deep voice, who had taken over command of the troop only the week before \u2014 went inside the house with Rudberg to look at the maps on the wall and confirm the night\u2019s mission. In a few minutes, they came back out and briefed the platoon. While he listened, Sergeant Montgomery took a dip from his can of Copenhagen.
\n
\n\u201cIf he didn\u2019t have Copenhagen, I don\u2019t think he would go on the mission,\u201d Ross said later.
\n
\nThey had a pretty good hump ahead of them that night, five clicks, there and back, nearly two hours each way. An informant had told them they should raid a farm out there, down a track called Compound Road; there were rumors that the farmer had a cache of weapons in his palm grove. The platoon would walk out, shake down the house and the trees, and walk back by early morning, before light.
\n
\nRudberg\u2019s custom was to rotate the squads \u2014 a platoon consists of three nine-man squads \u2014 through lead position. Tonight, it was first squad\u2019s turn, Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s squad. He volunteered, as he often did, to walk point. Ross would take second position; Gilliland would take third. Behind them were a couple more regulars \u2014 Specialist Jarod Meeks, a lanky twenty-two-year-old from Spanaway, Washington, and Specialist Mark Leland, a twenty-five-year-old Baptist from South Bend, Indiana. In the past week, Leland had pulled the guys aside, in ones and twos, and apologized to them for his letting Iraq change him. He had let himself curse and tell rude jokes, and now that part of his war was over. \u201cI was being challenged in my faith, just because of the situation we were in,\u201d he said later. \u201cI remember talking to Monty about it. He told me that he wasn\u2019t sure exactly what he believed, but he knew he believed in God.\u201d
\n
\nNow they moved out, led by Sergeant Montgomery, outside the walls and down the road. The boys behind him, especially Ross and Gilliland, ribbed Monty all the time about his age. Only in the Army could a twenty-nine-year-old man be called Gramps, Father Time, Skeletor. But it was good-natured ribbing, because those boys loved him. They loved him because he was first in that line, and if he was scared \u2014 and he was almost certainly scared \u2014 he never let them see it. He told his family back home that he was scared only of the big camel spiders that scurried behind the men, keeping in their shadows for the extra degree of cool. He tried to ignore the sound of their chase, his boots crunching on the gravel, spitting out juice from his dip.
\n
\nThe men wore night-vision goggles, their nogs, over one eye, everything cast in a ghostly green. They had to choose whether to focus them near or far; most of the men chose to see on down the road rather than their feet. They didn\u2019t speak much, except for the occasional crackle over the radio. With about thirty feet between each man, they stretched in a great long line through the night. Goodwin, at the back of the line, was probably six hundred feet from Sergeant Montgomery. They snaked like that, between the farms and over the bridges, cursing under their breath at the incessant barking of dogs. The dogs were like spotlights in a prison yard. Plenty of American soldiers had died because dogs had betrayed their position.
\n
\nThey walked out of the houses and into the fields. There were no dogs here, and the barking stopped. About three clicks out from Patrol Base Red, beside them rose the ruins of an ADA, an air defense artillery site, concrete bunkers covered with steep mounds of earth. Saddam had built them everywhere around Baghdad; this one, like most of them, had been bombed into craters during the initial strike. Recently, though, there had been reports that insurgents had returned here to train. Weeks earlier, a car riddled with bullets, as though it had been used for target practice, had been pulled out from it. Now some of the men felt as though they were being watched.
\n
\nRudberg, who was tenth in line, called Sergeant Montgomery on the radio. They identified themselves by numbers. Sergeant Montgomery was number 11. \u201cHey, 11, take your time,\u201d Rudberg said. \u201cWe\u2019re in no rush.\u201d <\/a>Did you get any of the radio or is the dialogue reconstructed from interviews?<\/span> The dialogue is all from interviews.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Sergeant Montgomery had built a gap between himself and Ross. It closed a little when they rounded a bend. The track was soft here, loose dirt, bordered on either side by thick, waist-high grass. There was only one path to take, one foot in front of the other.
\n
\nTwo sounds broke open the night:
\n
\nCrack,<\/em>\u00a0then BOOM.
\n
\nIt was impossibly loud, \u201cthe loudest noise I\u2019ve ever heard in my life,\u201d Goodwin said.
\n
\nRoss did a backflip, landing on his face. Gilliland was knocked down, too. The rest of the men dropped to the dirt and scattered to the sides of the path. In front of them, a plume of black smoke billowed, darker than the dark. It rose out of a great cloud of dust.
\n
\nRoss couldn\u2019t hear Gilliland yelling at him, \u201cRoss, are you hit? Ross, Ross!\u201d
\n
\nHe staggered to his feet, his ears blasted past ringing, dirt still raining down on his shoulders. His pants were covered in blood. Gilliland thought it was Ross who\u2019d been hurt. It wasn\u2019t.
\n
\n\u201cThen you two started screaming his name,\u201d Meeks recalled later.
\n
\n\u201cWe couldn\u2019t see Monty,\u201d Ross said.
\n
\nThey wanted to rush forward, but IEDs were often planted in clusters, and they couldn\u2019t see anything in the dust, especially through their night vision. It was just so much green smoke.
\n
\nNear the back of the line, the platoon sergeant, Bob Bostick, a skinny thirty-four-year-old Texan, was calling for Sergeant Montgomery on the radio, trying to find out what happened: \u201cHey, hey, come in 11, come in.\u201d
\n
\nRudberg now moved forward. He found Ross and Gilliland disoriented. \u201cWe can\u2019t find Monty,\u201d they said. Rudberg had the rest of the squad take defensive positions on either side of the path, scouting for a triggerman. He also called on the radio for the medic, who was near the back of the line. They still couldn\u2019t see for shit, but they pushed into the cloud.
\n
\nRudberg fell into the crater, dead center of the path. Gilliland fell into it, too, and he landed on Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s rifle, an M4, stripped down by the force of the blast. \u201cThat\u2019s when I got really scared,\u201d he said.
\n
\nThey looked all around for Sergeant Montgomery. Gilliland finally saw what he thought was a pile of dirt from the crater bending down the tall grass, about twenty feet left of the path. He reached down blindly to touch it and grabbed hold of what felt like a uniform. He adjusted his nogs, fumbling with the dials, so that he could see close-up.
\n
\nThat\u2019s when he saw Sergeant Montgomery. His eyes were open, but his body stopped at the waist.
\n
\n\u201cI knew he was gone,\u201d Gilliland said.
\n
\nRoss staggered over and saw him, too. \u201cThere was nothing we could do. We just knew.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cI remember seeing his blank stare,\u201d Rudberg said. \u201cIt\u2019s all so surreal, too, because you have to see it with that fucking night vision.\u201d
\n
\nRudberg radioed Bostick, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t look good.\u201d He also radioed Goodwin, who radioed Patrol Base Red and then Falcon. Some of the men, including Leland, had been busy clearing a landing zone for a medevac in a nearby field, hoping somehow that Sergeant Montgomery was only hurt. Now Leland saw Goodwin walk by, saying, \u201cKIA, KIA\u201d into his radio to Staff Sergeant Slaght, and they stopped clearing the field.
\n
\nThey decided they would take turns carrying Sergeant Montgomery out. Rudberg had a poleless litter in his pack \u2014 a nylon sheet with handles, room for three carriers on each side \u2014 and together the men gathered what they could of Sergeant Montgomery and his belongings. They found his helmet, his nogs, his gun, his pack. But they never found all of him. \u201cWe didn\u2019t find his ring, either,\u201d Gilliland remembered. They laid everything on top of the litter, and they began to push out of the grass.
\n
\nThey stayed off the path, and they all took turns carrying the litter, including Ross, the closest of them to the blast. Everyone kept asking him if he was really all right. \u201cIt was such a big explosion, and I didn\u2019t get a single scratch,\u201d he said. \u201cMy ears really hurt, but no one believed me when I said I was okay.\u201d
\n
\nThe handles of the litter dug into their hands. Only Gilliland refused to be spelled. \u201cI never let go of the litter,\u201d he said. \u201cI just couldn\u2019t do it.\u201d
\n
\nWhen he wasn\u2019t carrying Sergeant Montgomery, Ross put his arm around his friend. \u201cWe just kept walking,\u201d he said.
\n
\nNo one spoke.
\n
\nSome of them were in shock.
\n
\nAll of them were covered in blood.
\n
\nThe platoon carried him like that for an hour or so, a couple of kilometers back up the track and out of the fields. About a click from Patrol Base Red, in sight of the house, one of the sniper teams met them on the road with a Humvee. They placed Sergeant Montgomery on the hood of the truck, and they drove him slowly down the road, the platoon walking flank until they were back inside the walls.
\n
\nThe medic later couldn\u2019t bring himself to talk about what happened next, but this is what happened next: He went through Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s pockets, and he went through his person, removing anything he thought the family might want. He found Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s wallet, his ID card, his pack of Marlboro Lights and his Copenhagen, and the laminated photographs of Missie and the kids that he kept tucked inside his helmet. The medic put them all in a bag, and then he put Sergeant Montgomery in a different bag, black with a long zipper. And then the snipers draped an American flag over it, and they placed it on a stretcher, and they laid it across the backseat of Bostick\u2019s truck.
\n
\n\u201cIt felt like time was standing still,\u201d Bostick remembered. On the short, silent drive back to Falcon, in the middle of the convoy of six trucks, his mind turned to Micah Montgomery. Bostick had known him for a while, and when he had handpicked Joey Montgomery for Charlie Troop, Bostick had made a promise to his friend. \u201cI told Micah then, I\u2019ll take care of your brother. So I had a lot of questions that night. I just kept thinking, Did this really happen? What about his wife? What about his children? What do I say to a guy who\u2019s just lost his brother?\u201d
\n
\nBostick didn\u2019t get a chance to break the news to Micah; someone else did, and Micah was on a plane home to Scottsburg before they could talk. <\/a>What kind of feedback did you get from people who were not involved in the story, in terms of the experience of going through it?<\/span> A lot of it was that it was long. [Laughs.] I remember that being a response. It is, I can’t argue, long. That’s a fact. I got some really gratifying responses. I’ve heard from a lot of soldiers, widows. I heard a lot from people who took comfort in this story. I’ve also heard from a lot of angry people, who thought it was really\u00a0celebratory\u00a0of violence and things like that.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe two of them didn\u2019t speak, in fact, until that July, two months after Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s death, when Bostick\u2019s own brother, Major Tom Bostick, was killed in Afghanistan. He was thirty-seven years old, with a wife and two children.
\n
\nThe platoon finally drove through the gates at Falcon. It was nearly two o\u2019clock in the morning. The rest of the troop had heard, been rousted out of their cots, and they stood in straight lines, many of them in tears, and they saluted the men in the trucks.
\n
\n\u201cThat\u2019s when I lost it,\u201d Meeks said.
\n
\n\u201cThat\u2019s when most of us broke down,\u201d Ross said. \u201cI\u2019ve never been that emotional in my entire life.\u201d
\n
\nSergeant Montgomery was carried into the base\u2019s utilitarian morgue, laid on a rough table at the front of it. Chaplain Jay Tobin waited there. He is a big man, thirty-seven, with short black hair and round cheeks. He asked to be alone with the base doctor. He unzipped the bag, and he saw Sergeant Montgomery\u2019s blank stare, and he nodded. \u201cThis is Sergeant Robert Joe Montgomery,\u201d he said, and the doctor wrote on some papers, and then Tobin zipped up the bag and called in the platoon, red-eyed, still in their bloodstained uniforms.
\n
\nHe led them in a prayer. The boys bowed their heads and they cried and they prayed for Sergeant Montgomery and for his family. Leland prayed especially hard. He thanked God that he had said sorry to Sergeant Montgomery when he did.
\n
\nNot many of them could sleep that night. Most of them met outside, at a burn barrel. They threw their uniforms into the fire, and they watched them burn. <\/a>Did you know where the story was going to end?<\/span> No. One of the things that bugs me a little bit is the section break [that follows]. That wasn\u2019t there originally. For me, it pushes it out of chronology. Because all of a sudden he\u2019s alive, does that make sense? I mean it\u2019s all in perfect chronology, and then at the last section we\u2019ve moved forward in time.<\/span> Right.<\/span> There was not originally a section break there.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n***
\n
\n<\/a>I wanted to ask you about that because visually when you look at it, it almost could be a postscript?<\/span> Maybe that\u2019s what it\u2019s supposed to be. Maybe it\u2019s supposed to be like in the movie when you have the little words at the end that explain what happened.<\/span> When did you write the last paragraph?<\/span>\u00a0I remember writing that scene. I was at my dining room table. It would have been three in the morning, pitch black, kids asleep, wife asleep, and I would have been listening to System of a Down in my headphones.<\/span> And that was the end of the story for you.<\/span> Yeah, that was always the end. The section break changed, but I don\u2019t think a single word of that last paragraph changed. That was always the ending. Often I write my ending first, if I have it. I didn\u2019t write the ending first because of the way reporting worked. Anchorage was pretty late in the game.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe last time the platoon<\/strong>\u00a0saw Sergeant Montgomery was later that morning, at first light. It was Wednesday, May 23. They all came out of their barracks to see the helicopters land. And these sleepless young men, from Colorado, from Pennsylvania, from Washington, they took hold of the poles of the stretcher, three on each side, with their friend from Indiana between them, zipped up inside a black bag tucked under a green Army blanket, and they carried him into one of the Black Hawks, and they watched them lift off into the dawn and dust, and they saluted then, saluted the start of one journey and the end of another, holding their salutes all the while as the birds flew away, until they were gone over the horizon. <\/a>I didn\u2019t count but I\u2019m guessing the last sentence is the longest sentence in the story.<\/span> Yeah, I would guess that, too.<\/span> What were you going for here?<\/span> I don\u2019t know. I kind of always liked that image of helicopters flying away. You know, we begin with the end, and this is almost the beginning of the journey. Joey flying off. I probably thought there was something poetic about it at the time. One of my tics is writing long sentences for the end. Or long final sentences. Just because I like things that sound like music, I guess, and a lot of songs sort of go towards a crescendo, and maybe I felt the same way about it. I don\u2019t mind it. I wouldn\u2019t change that sentence.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n— END OF STORY —\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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You said you were listening to System of a Down, and I know you listen to music while writing. What else was on your playlist?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I can look it up.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Really? The whole playlist?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I listen to things on a loop. So it\u2019s not that long a playlist. See that\u2019s one of those things you ask because you don\u2019t know, and here I have the playlist for “The Things That Carried Him.”<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When do you save the playlist? Or, do you have a playlist for all of your \u2013<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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No, not for all of them. Sometimes it\u2019s just one song. I was working on this story for so long that if I listened to one song for the whole time, I would have lost my mind. So it\u2019s 10 songs. System of a Down is on it. When I was doing the battle scene I was listening to System of a Down the whole time. “BYOB,” that song that they were listening to, I just had it on a loop. Do you want all 10 songs or you just want a couple?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Just name them, let\u2019s see what you have there.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Umm, let\u2019s see. God, this is embarrassing. “Adagio for Strings,” which is from the movie Platoon<\/em>. There\u2019s a song by Sufjan Stevens, “For the Widows in Paradise.” There\u2019s a Canadian one called “Alert Status Red” by a guy named Matthew Good. “Phantom Limb,”<\/em> which is a song by The Shins; Sigur Ros, a song called “Hoppipolla.” Band of Horses, “The Funeral” \u2013 <\/em>great song. Of course I have Explosions In The Sky in here \u2013 “The Birth and Death of the Day.” A song called “Midnight Coward” by Stars, a Canadian band. Bruce Springsteen, “I\u2019m Going Down.” And the last one is Iron & Wine, “The Trapeze Swinger.” So it\u2019s 56 minutes, this playlist. And \u2013 God, no! \u2013 I listened to it 301 times.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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What\u2019s your relationship with the story now? Where does it fit into everything you\u2019ve done?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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You know, I thought you might ask me that question, and it\u2019s a really hard question for me to answer. I\u2019m proud of it. That\u2019s the first feeling I have. It\u2019s a little bit hard when you know something is the best thing you\u2019ll ever do. And I feel that way about this story. Because everything worked. It was one of those stories where the idea, and the reporting, and the writing, and the editing, and how it was received \u2013 everything was perfect. And I know it will never be that good again. And that\u2019s a bit depressing.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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What\u2019s weird is that it was not a good time in my life. Immediately after this, I was in a very deep depression. It was not good. So when I look back on it I don\u2019t have happy memories. The reporting was really hard. I had 101 interviews; for some very large majority of them, there was crying at some point during the conversation. So it was very heavy in that respect.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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But there was something about this story, too, that was sort of like a mission for me. You know, part of being a writer is that you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing each day, which is awesome most of the time. But with this story I woke up every day and I had a mission. I had to find this information, I had to find who this person was. I had to get this phone number. I had to convince this person to talk to me. I had to get in my truck and go to Tennessee. I had stuff to do. And then, when it was over, it was kind of over. Like it was kind of gone, and it was this important part of my life during this really dramatic part of my life, the birth of my second child, and I had a book coming out. It was a pretty crazy time. I don\u2019t look back on it happily.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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So it\u2019s a weird feeling. I\u2019m glad I did it, I don\u2019t regret that I did it, but I don\u2019t look back on it and smile, if that makes any sense. It\u2019s like a whole mix of emotions when I think about it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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I stayed in touch with Gail pretty regularly for a long time and then when I went off the deep deep end, almost out of self preservation, I stopped. And I think I\u2019m going to get back in touch with her, because reading it again I sort of feel ashamed that I couldn\u2019t muscle through the way she did. So it\u2019s good that we talked about it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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So you\u2019ve never told her what came, after, she\u2019s never seen the piece you wrote in Esquire about the aftermath of the story? (About contemplating suicide.<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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I don’t know what she knows. I hope she knows how much I respect her, and how much I care about her, even though I haven’t always been strong enough to show it. It\u2019s funny, Rudberg got in touch with me maybe about a month ago. Out of nowhere. He\u2019s working in Africa. He\u2019s doing nation building in Rwanda. And he got in touch out of the blue. And I was happy to hear from him. It was kind of a relief \u2013\u201cLook, there\u2019s someone from that story, and I\u2019m OK with hearing from him.” You know what I mean?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
\n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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So you actually stayed away from this story as much as you could.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
\n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Not initially. It was after a while. Once I started going off, I just felt like I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I don’t know, I wish I could articulate better how I feel about it. Some stories you look back on and you know you hate them, and you hate everything about them and you can just put them in a box and burn it. And you look back at some stories, and you have really nice feelings about them. And this story is something in between. It\u2019s like pride, but not happy about it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
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Did it change you as a reporter or writer or the way you approach stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
\n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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That\u2019s really hard for me to answer. I don’t know. I mean, if anything, it did convince me that the reporting is what matters. And when I talk to students about work or about writing or about stories like this, the reporting is the thing that I emphasize. That\u2019s the backbone of every great story. And there have been times when I’ve thought about this story, when I was working on another story that hasn\u2019t been easy to report, I’ve sort of gone back to this process occasionally and thought: \u201cOK, you know what, one more phone call, one more phone call, one more phone call.\u201d I don’t know if it changed me as a person. I like to think I’m a better person now than I was when I wrote it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

\n
\n \n\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
\n
\n \n

I was thinking today about whether I would do this story now. And I don\u2019t think I would. Not because I’m not proud of it, because I don’t know that I would have the energy. Or other things are more important to me now. Like I like my kids. A lot. So spending that much time away or being that occupied \u2013 in a way, that story almost demanded a certain craziness that I\u2019m not sure I still possess.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story was published in May 2008, five years into Chris Jones\u2019s career at Esquire. Jones was 35 at the time, and he says it was probably the best time to take on a story as tough as Sergeant Joe Montgomery\u2019s, a soldier who died in Iraq. \u201cI had enough under my belt that I felt I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[103],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-cristian-lupsa"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnotation Tuesday! 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Jones was 35 at the time, and he says it was probably the best time to take on a story as tough as Sergeant Joe Montgomery\u2019s, a soldier who died in Iraq. \u201cI had enough under my belt that I felt I […]","og_url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/09\/29\/annotation-tuesday-chris-jones-and-the-things-that-carried-him\/","og_site_name":"Nieman Storyboard","article_published_time":"2015-09-29T14:00:04+00:00","article_modified_time":"2024-10-19T16:32:14+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/jones-chris-1-e1729354934862.jpg","type":"","width":"","height":""}],"author":"commonmedia","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"commonmedia","Est. reading time":"136 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/09\/29\/annotation-tuesday-chris-jones-and-the-things-that-carried-him\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/09\/29\/annotation-tuesday-chris-jones-and-the-things-that-carried-him\/"},"author":{"name":"commonmedia","@id":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/#\/schema\/person\/ad131fac9b2e8136d6171c8575cfc226"},"headline":"Annotation Tuesday! 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