The war in Iraq has opened such a deep and bitter divide among Americans that few attempts at communication succeed in bridging the gap.  The media (perhaps because of our willingness to blame the bearer of bad tidings) has come under withering crossfire for its coverage of the conflict.  While facing unprecedented dangers on the battlefield, the press has been attacked by the right for undermining the war and rebuked by the left for failing to challenge the premises of the pre-emptive invasion in the first place.  Stories that break through the entrenched positions and speak with equal power to people on all sides have been few and far between.  “Final Salute,” a prize-winning feature that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on Veterans Day, 2005, ranks high among those few and precious stories. 

"Final Salute" documents the last journeys of five fallen Marines, as their bodies arrive back home from Iraq, are met by mourning families and laid to rest with military honors.   The photography by Todd Heisler and text by Jim Sheeler, both of whom won Pulitzers in 2006 for their work, perfectly complement and amplify each other.  According to John Temple, editor and publisher of the Rocky, “Their story of the impact of the Iraq war at home and how the commitment to never leave a Marine behind extends to the families of the fallen is a testament to the power of collaboration.” 

While melding words and images, Heisler and Sheeler also provided emotional support for each other as they documented the anguish of young wives learning that they were widows or parents hearing that they’d lost a son.  “Sometimes when I would see them after a particularly difficult few days, they both would look like wrecks,” said Temple. “But at least they were in the same place, and had somebody there with them who could understand.”

The other person whose collaboration was absolutely critical to the story was Major Steve Beck.  A Marine ‘Casualty Assistance Calls Officer,’ Beck was charged with the gut-wrenching task of personally notifying bereaved families and helping them cope with the last rites for their loved ones.  The moment of notification is so fraught with tension that Marines have had their faces slapped by distraught mothers and one father was so unhinged that he torched the van that the notification team arrived in. Beck never encountered such extreme reactions.  But one young and pregnant widow, Katherine Cathey, who would later develop a deep bond with Beck and be portrayed in some of the story’s most powerful images, met him at the door with a furious glare, turned her back and refused to speak to him for an hour. 

The military’s script for such occasions reads: “The Commandant of the Marine Corps has instructed me to express his deep regret that your (relationship), (name), (died/was killed in action) in (place of incident), (city/state or country) on (date).  (state the circumstances).   The commandant extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family.” 

Some Casualty Assistance Calls Officers read straight from the script.  Major Beck tossed it away and displayed a profound empathy for each loss.  He surrounded himself with young Marines who shared his commitment to give the fallen warriors a “Final Salute” that was worthy of their sacrifice and respectful to their families.  After carrying the coffin of a dead comrade in arms, one of these Marines remarked, “You always hear statements like freedom isn’t free.  You hear the president talking about these people making sacrifices.  But you never really know until you carry one of them in the casket.  When you feel their body weight.  That’s when you understand.”

Believing that the way his Marines shoulder this sad responsibility was a story that needed to be told, Major Beck granted access and opened doors for the journalists both with the military and with the grieving families.  Beck’s openness stands in stark contrast to previous Pentagon policies that banned press coverage and photos of military caskets returning to bases in the States from Afghanistan and Iraq.  It took a Freedom of Information lawsuit to change that policy in 2005. 

Beck wanted to be a leader on the battlefield and was eagerly anticipating his deployment to Iraq when the military assigned him to Casualty Assistance at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado.  “Beck looks like the job: hard and soft,” writes Sheeler.  “His white cotton gloves cover calloused hands.  They lead to thick regular-guy arms shaped by work instead of weightlifting, and a round pale face with big cheeks that turn red when he hasn’t had enough sleep, which is most of the time.”  Beck is a scholar of military history with two Masters degrees and a bookshelf packed with titles ranging from the History of the Peloponnesian War to the 9/11 Commission Report.  But he has, according to Sheeler, “an everyman quality that can’t be faked.”

Just as Beck is an unlikely Casualty Assistance Calls Officer who turned out to have the ideal qualities for dealing with bereaved families, so Todd Heisler is an unlikely war photographer who proved to have the perfect instincts for negotiating the emotional minefield of “Final Salute.”  Now 34, Heisler was a Fine Art major who fell in love with photojournalism while working on the campus newspaper.  Lacking the journalistic training given by high-powered ‘J’ schools, he began his career by shooting for small community newspapers in Chicago suburbs that were notable chiefly for their lack of visible conflict or controversy. 

Rather than bemoaning the fate that confined him to the sticks or seeing ‘community journalism’ as a kind of reportorial backwater, Heisler took the advice of an editor who advised him to cover the ‘burbs as if he was working for National Geographic.  He also made a practice of reaching out to people who were more mature in the profession, learning from his mistakes and accepting criticism.  He developed a philosophy of being passionate about the smallest assignments, believing that every story “is important to someone” and searching for the “quiet moments” that escape the eyes of sensation-seeking shooters. 

“I've always been drawn to quiet images because I like to look for the moments-between-the-moments and the things that people would overlook,” said Heisler. “Especially with “Final Salute.” It wasn't all screaming and anguish and tears. It was a lot of very slow, very quiet times. When the Marines perform these ceremonies, their movements are very slow and methodical.  That’s how I wanted to photograph this story.”

Heisler’s work ethic, adaptability and skill helped him climb the ladder until he became a staff photographer at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News.   When the Rocky first asked Heisler to go to Iraq as an embedded photographer in 2005, his initial reaction was, “Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?”  The editors were sure, and Heisler went, thinking the assignment was a challenge that he couldn’t refuse.  On the last nights before embarking, he found himself lying in bed beside his wife, wondering if he would come back to her in one piece or at all.  Those doubts were far from exaggerated.  According to Reporters without Borders, Iraq has been the bloodiest conflict for journalists since WWII, with 103 members of the press dying since the conflict began and two still missing.  Others, like Jill Carroll, have been kidnapped and subjected to the physical and psychological ordeal of prolonged captivity.

Heisler found that his own forebodings gave him an extra measure of empathy for the brokenhearted families he would later encounter while working on “Final Salute.”  His favorite photo from that story is an image of Katharine Cathey sleeping by her husband’s coffin on the night before his funeral.  “The image of Katherine sleeping by Jim's casket, that's the one that stays with me the most,” Heisler said. “Just because I think about my own wife and having to leave her behind to do an assignment over in Iraq, and to know how that feels, and to see the outcome of that -- of somebody who didn't make it home -- it really stuck in my mind.”

Another experience that increased Heisler’s empathy with the subjects of “Final Salute” was a close encounter with an Improvised Explosive Device on his second tour as an embedded reporter in Iraq.  Just around dawn in April, 2005, he was riding in a Humvee between two heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles.  The lightest vehicle in the first convoy of the day is the target of choice for roadside bombs hidden overnight.  An IED went off under the Humvee, launching Heisler out of the vehicle and onto the dusty road.  Since ambushes frequently follow IED attacks, Heisler picked himself up and started running to catch up with the rest of the convoy.  On the way, he shot pictures, too shaken to remember to focus his camera or notice that he had broken a finger in the fall.  Almost 1,000 of the 2,600 servicemen who have died in Iraq, including many of the Marines whose families Heisler photographed, have fallen victim to IEDs.  In the single month of August 2006, roadside bombs claimed the lives of more than 25 U.S. soldiers.

Although journalists have a reputation for being hard-boiled, Heisler is anything but.  During his work on “Final Salute,” the most difficult challenge he faced was balancing his responsibility to take pictures with his innate sense of decency and desire to give the families space in their moments of grief.  “Some cultures believe that taking somebody's photographs is taking their soul. I don't believe that, but I believe a really great photograph captures somebody's soul. They’re really opening themselves up to you.  That's a gift,” Heisler said. “They're exposing themselves on the deepest level. That's where responsibility comes in.  You can't sacrifice your journalistic integrity, but you can be sensitive to people and still get the message across.”

Out of sensitivity to his subjects, Heisler tried to be unobtrusive, to move slowly and quietly, to fade into the background.  He didn’t bring along a big strobe or tripod, and he certainly didn’t pose people or situations.  His equipment was basic—two zoom lenses (24 – 70 and 70 – 200mm) on two Canon Mark II bodies.  Nonetheless, his images in “Final Salute” show richly saturated colors and telling highlights.  “A lot of images were shot in very low light, and they were all hand-held,” said Heisler.  “But I’m really passionate about light.  I try to capture what’s there and work with that. It’s harder that way but the payoff is the mood you see in the pictures.”

The most celebrated and symbolic image from the story was also the most technically challenging.  Shot on the runway at Reno International Airport, it shows a Marine color guard removing 2nd Lt. Jim Cathey’s flag-draped coffin from the belly of a commercial jetliner while passengers look down from their windows at the sad spectacle on the tarmac.  The scene, which perfectly encapsulates American society’s arms-length relationship to the sacrifices of the war, was pointed out to Heisler by Major Beck at the first airport they visited.  “You see the people in the windows, they're gonna remember bringing that Marine home for the rest of their lives, and they should,” said Beck. 

Heisler tried three times to capture the scene.  The first time, his angle was wrong; the second time, there were no passengers in the windows; the third time, all the conditions were right.  “I actually didn’t think it was possible to catch it,” said Heisler, “but all the elements came together-- the fact that it was at night and that I was standing next to the family when it was happening, gave me the right angle and the right expressions ... You hate to express gratitude for elements coming together in a photograph like that because of the subject matter, but I guess it was one of those magical moments.”

Afterwards, some people would question the veracity of the photo.  “I still get emails from people who think it’s fake,” said Heisler.  “They don’t believe that all the faces are in the windows.  They think it’s Photoshop.  I’ve seen blogs were people go on and on about it.  That level of mistrust is disturbing but I guess it also shows that people are looking at the pictures.” 

Such skeptics may know something about Photoshop but they are completely clueless about Heisler and his dedication to the highest standards of photojournalism, which to him is not just nine-to-five job, but an all-encompassing lifestyle that takes a tremendous toll on personal and family life.  He believes that the first responsibility of photojournalists is to the truth and that you have to care about people to be good at the job.  “I think people recognize if you don't care. You have to be conscious of what your responsibility is to the people that you're documenting.  If your heart’s not in it, maybe you should be doing something else.”

Heisler has a real regard for humanity and meeting new people is one of his favorite parts of a demanding job.  The universal impact of “Final Salute,” has everything to do with his ability to frame one of the most complex and contentious issues facing our world today within the context of individual human experience.  “The Iraq war is an immense subject, very complex. But with this assignment, I found my voice by going back into my community and seeing how it affects them.  We really didn't want to inject politics into the story. People would have latched onto the political parts and lost the idea.  This was all about individuals and how they were affected by the larger issue.  In a way, it’s not just about Iraq and not even just about war.  It’s about grief and loss and how human beings react.”

Although he has won journalism’s highest honor and a boatload of other awards for a story about war, Heisler remains rooted in community photography.  “I wouldn't consider myself a war photographer,” he said. “I've done a little bit of it, but so many other people have done more that I wouldn't want to take that title. To me, you can make great pictures everywhere. You just have to find the stories in your community. This story is about that's something that's happening across the country. If you meet the right people, you could do it anywhere.”