Juliana Sohn

They're always called coffins by people who don't know any better, but they're transfer cases. They're made of aluminum and packed with ice to keep the bodies from decaying over the course of long flights from Iraq or Afghanistan, into Kuwait, to Germany, and then finally to Dover, Delaware. After the man or woman inside the case is lifted onto a slab table in the Port Mortuary, the case will be cleaned, disinfected, and sent back to the front to await the next son or daughter who needs to be brought home. That's the truth of it.

Glad is the wrong word, but I'm at least relieved by the announcement today that the cases can now be photographed for the first time since 1991, given the permission of the affected families. Last year, I spent a long time working on a story called "The Things That Carried Him," which followed a single dead soldier, Sgt. Joe Montgomery, on his journey from the Baghdad suburb where he was killed to the cemetery just down the street from his mother's house in Scottsburg, Indiana. I was moved by every part of the process, but my time in Dover lurched me most of all.

The Port Mortuary is probably the most important unknown building in America. I would guess that most Americans don't even know that it exists. Every single military casualty, no matter the rank or manner of death, is taken there for preparation for burial. During the height of the war in Iraq, there would sometimes be three or four planeloads filled with cases landing on the adjacent runway every day. The worst single planeload I heard about carried forty-two cases. The chaplain who prayed over them told me that he opened his mouth but no sound came out. He was struck that numb by what he saw.

But the rest of us didn't see it. We didn't see the three neat rows of cases unlocked from the plane's shining metal floor. We didn't see the overlong casket flags wrapped tight around each sharp corner, every fold smoothed out. We didn't see the cases being lifted, slowly and one at a time, onto the great lift they call the Red Carpet. And we didn't see the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines salute their dead colleagues before they disappeared into the mortuary. All of that happened on warm days and cold nights, in rain, in snow, in sunshine — the same moving ritual for every single case, more than 4,000 of them, and all of it was invisible except to the men and women who report to Dover and spend the rest of their lives trying to find something half as meaningful to do.

We didn't see how much we had lost, and we didn't see how well the lost were honored.

And that, for me, compounded the tragedy of war. We could watch these men and women say goodbye to their loved ones when they were shipped out; we could watch them fighting in city streets and the desert; if we looked hard enough, we could even watch them die, driving their Humvee over a hair-trigger plate or taking a bullet to the neck. We could watch all of those things as though we were the audience to a film that someone else had made, from a distance, but we couldn't watch the single event that brought the war home to each and every one of us.

During other parts of the process — the honorable transfer of the casket to the mother or father or wife or husband at some small country airport, the burial of the dead in the ground — the family could always decide whether it wanted photographers there to record the moment. Nearly all of them choose to do so. They say yes because they want the rest of us to know at least a little bit how it feels to lose someone so close to us, and because they want the rest of us to know what their children did on our behalf. Most of all, though, because they would like us to remember, and photographs help people remember.

I keep pictures on my desk. I look at them when I sit down to work, and I remember Sgt. Joe Montgomery, and I remember his mother, Gail, and I remember his wife, Missie, and I remember his children, three of them smiling around him but now without their dad, and all of them without a single photograph to remind them how he came home, and how much those people at the mortuary cared about him, and how truthful his service was and how true the moment was when he was back where he belonged.

I hope they take pictures of every single case from now on, and I hope they appear on every front page and Web site, and I hope that every time you see one, you remember the thousands you never got the chance to see.

I hope you remember Joey.

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