We all think our jobs are hard. Even though I can pop out freely for school plays and doctor appointments, I go around thinking mine is a doozy. It's not, and neither are those of the loudly suffering hedge-fund managers, who work in climate-controlled offices on ergonomically correct chairs and get outsized rewards. Any garbage man, meter maid or retiree flipping hamburgers would trade places with us.
I raise this because I discovered the two hardest jobs in the world over the July 4th weekend while lounging on the beach: first is the person who notifies NOK (next of kin) that a loved one has been lost in combat, immortalised in a new book, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler.
Second is the public affairs officer for Arlington National Cemetery. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reported that officer Gina Gray was trying to ease new restrictions that went beyond army regulations in keeping the media away even when a grieving widow or fatherless child wanted the final goodbye to be recorded.
For her efforts, Gray was demoted, hit with petty requests like notifying her supervisor every time she left the office. At the end of June, she was fired. Gray, who served in numerous war zones and still has hearing loss from a roadside explosion when she was working with the 173rd Airborne in Iraq, is fighting the expulsion.
Without a draft, sacrifice isn't spread randomly across the populace. Some give everything, others nothing. This is the first war not financed by new taxes. But the Pentagon and Bush White House exacerbate our distance from the human cost of war by keeping us from bearing witness to the burial of the dead, the sacred pageantry of the bugler playing taps, the 21-gun salute, an American flag folded precisely.
President George W Bush himself rarely attends a funeral. He has honoured the troops by giving up golf since the war in Iraq started. Perhaps for the mounting casualties in Afghanistan, he will give up mountain biking.
The administration did publicise one funeral when it orchestrated a nationally televised memorial for Corporal Pat Till-man and awarded him a Silver Star, although officials had been alerted that the former football player's death was probably a result of friendly fire.
This week the eighth investigation into how high up that false story went concluded that rampant amnesia and missing documents would stop short of punishing anyone ranked higher than a three-star general.
Before Gray's work at Arlington, which holds burials every day in its 624 acres of 9,000 trees, shrubs and flowers, Major Steve Beck does his. He is a ''notification officer'' called upon, with little training, to visit the NOK whom a manual suggests be ''seated prior to delivering the news''. Beck needs no instruction. Naturally decent, kind and empathetic, he does everything to ease a family's pain, cutting through red tape, letting each person suffer in their own way, once chastising a chaplain to stop shushing a grieving mother cursing Bush.
Sheeler, an unobtrusive, understated former reporter for the Rocky Mountain News who won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories on grieving families, shows Beck sitting in his car before knocking on the door. For the family inside the house, just the sight of him will unleash feelings as bad as anyone will ever feel.
One of Beck's visits was to the wife of Lieutenant James Cathey, pregnant with their first child in 2005. She didn't want to leave her husband alone the night before his burial. Beck got her an air mattress to rest on when she wasn't hugging the coffin. A Marine stood guard while she slept.
Another scene shows the lengths to which the military goes to hide the returning dead before they get to Arlington. Instead of flag-draped coffins returning in military jets to dignitaries, cameras and a solemn ceremony, Cathey returned like checked baggage on a commercial jet. A photograph shows passengers' faces pressed against the window as a hearse and an honour guard meets the plane. They see ''a Marine extending a white-gloved hand into a limousine. In the plane's cargo hold, Marines readied the flag-draped casket and placed it on the luggage conveyor belt. Inside the plane, the passengers couldn't hear the screams''.
Sheeler knows that not all casualty officers are like Beck. He writes about another officer who arrived at the home of the newly-widowed Melissa Givens, whom he addressed by the wrong name. After reciting a standard text, he argued with her when she questioned whether he'd gotten the wrong person, whether it was her husband or someone else married to ''Mrs Gibbons''.
Givens drowned on May 1, 2003, when his tank flipped over into the Euphrates River, the same day Bush announced ''Mission Accomplished''.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that the army secretary ordered a review of Gray's firing. Army spokesman Paul Boyce says it's ''not about Gina Gray. It's about striking the right balance at a time of high emotion between the media and the needs of the deceased, the family, and the cemetery for a res-pectful distance''.
About Gray's claim that the distance had been lengthened from 30 feet to 50 feet, Boyce says the geography of the cemetery doesn't lend itself to a ''tape measure''.
Everyone in Congress should read this book, not for its position on the war, for it is without one, but because it opens a window on death and life you've never seen before, in prose you will never forget, and through a character, Beck, you'd wish your own family to have.
For members who don't want to spend the $25.95, I'll send you a copy free, shipping and handling included.
Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.
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