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“The scenes in this book are true,” Jim Sheeler writes of “Final Salute,” his book about fallen military personnel. “I witnessed most of them firsthand, and have the tear-smeared notebook to prove it.” Nobody who reads Mr. Sheeler’s account of just how the families of the dead are notified, the lost loved ones enshrined and their memories preserved and honored will have any question about where those tears came from.
By Jim Sheeler
Illustrated. 280 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
At The Rocky Mountain News, where Mr. Sheeler won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for the feature writing on which “Final Salute” is based, he says that the publisher asked the staff to treat this story as carefully as the marines fold their dead comrades’ flags before burial. If this material received unusually reverential treatment, that too is understandable. Mr. Sheeler took one of the great underreported stories of the Iraq war and brought it to light.
While “Final Salute” is not a muckraking book, it is still quietly horrifying. It bears witness to the ways in which casualties from Iraq are shielded from sight. Mr. Sheeler’s readers may not have realized, for instance, that dead soldiers’ coffins have been hidden in cardboard boxes (ostensibly to protect the coffins), toted by forklifts and stowed in the cargo holds of passenger planes.
Among the eloquent Rocky Mountain News photographs included here is a shocking image — by Todd Heisler, now of The New York Times — of commercial airline passengers looking out plane windows at Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, trying to see what is happening beneath them. Down there, in the cargo hold, a Marine honor guard is preparing to deliver the flag-draped coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to its final resting place.
Since Mr. Sheeler followed the individual stories of several military men and their families (no dead female soldiers are included in the book), “Final Salute” seemingly qualifies as an extended human-interest story. To some extent that’s what it is, if human interest includes the pain and frustration of surviving the death of a loved one (or breadwinner) in battle. But the book is given tighter focus by the man whom Mr. Sheeler treats as a central figure: Maj. Steve Beck, a marine who specializes in helping the bereaved. When Major Beck became a marine, he had never heard the term “casualty assistance calls officer.” Now he knows exactly what it means. And Mr. Sheeler’s readers will too.

nytimes.com