Final Salute
Todd Heisler
Rocky Mountain News / Polaris
They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. For close to a year, the Rocky Mountain News followed Marine Major Steve Beck as he took on the most difficult duty of his career: casualty notification. When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan first began, Beck envisioned himself leading men in battle. Instead, he was trapped with the duty of notifying families of their loved ones’ deaths and planning funerals. As Beck and his comrades kept constant watch over the caskets of the men they never knew, the Marines also comforted the families of the fallen, and choked back tears of their own. After the knock on the door, the story has only begun.
Preview
I first met Major Steve Beck on the way to Denver International Airport to receive the body of a Marine who was killed in Fallujah. As the plane arrived, he said something that stuck in my mind, something that sums up the next nine months we would spend with him. “There are moments in this experience that lift you up, and there are moments that suck you dry. Those moments are short, but they are so defining. And you are about to witness one of them.” This project is not meant to politicize the war, rather, its intent is to put a name to the numbers that fall out of public consciousness more and more each day.
