The Marines entered the dark room one at a time, and without prompting, spilled their hearts to Jim Sheeler, a reporter at the Rocky Mountain News and later Pulitzer Prize winner. In that room beside the chapel, the Marines told him what it is like to notify families of their fallen loved ones, how scared they are to be deployed, and how dedicated they are to protecting Katherine Cathey, the young woman just outside mourning the loss of her husband and how their unborn child would never meet him.
I recently had the chance to speak with Jim Sheeler about his story that followed—a more than 12,000-word piece called “Final Salute” that tells the story of Maj. Steve Beck, a Marine in charge of casualty notification, the story of Katherine, a pregnant woman who had just lost her husband in the war and the story of our country, one that both is and is not managing to get through this time.
The idea and reporting
“I decided I wanted to show people all those things they weren’t seeing,” Sheeler said. “In order to do that, you have to make yourself part of the wallpaper of the story.”
Most of his really great ideas came from being a beat reporter and wanting to tell his stories in a different way. So when an editor sent Sheeler to cover the funeral of the first soldier from Colorado was killed, Sheeler started his story with the grave digger.
“I started realizing all the things that were happening that nobody had seen,” Sheeler said. “Even at the funeral I was talking to [the deceased soldier’s] mom, and she told me there were Marines stationed at their home because they were worried that since people knew they were going to be at the funeral home, somebody might rob their house.”
But Sheeler was reporting on the war for another year before he met Maj. Beck, a casualty notification Marine who allowed Sheeler to follow him for months—about seven, in fact, before Katherine Cathey entered their lives.
“When I asked her if we could come along with her, but [the photographer and I] didn’t get full permission to see everything[…]So we went [to Katherine] and I said, ‘We really want to see all this stuff that we haven’t seen before, but you have to give us permission. And first, we could just make a deal that if you ever feel like we’re too close or that we’re stepping on your emotions or getting in the way, all you ever have to do is just wave us off.’ I think by giving her that trust and that power it created a trust among all of us, and she never had to call us off. She said, ‘I want you there for everything.’”
And that was how Sheeler spent the next few days—witnessing everything with Katherine. From seeing her husband’s casket taken off the plane to spending the night before the funeral in the chapel and even after the processions were complete, Sheeler was there, making sure nothing would go unnoticed. The best balance he found, he said, was knowing “when to ask questions and when to just shut up and let the story happen.”
Organization and composition
“The way I try to write is think of, if this is a movie, where would the camera be?” Sheeler said. “[…] All of these amazing scenes are happening, and I was able to be part of it because I was moving around so often, as if I were a camera, trying to get different angles and different parts of the scene.”
When it became time to organize his 7-month relationship with Maj. Beck and 4-day relationship with Katherine, Sheeler said he took a step back and approached it like a movie. He posted the photographer’s photos all over his walls like a storyboard got a better understanding for of the scenes. Post-it notes then listed all the scene names, and Sheeler rearranged them until they seemed to be in the best order.
“The great thing about knowing I was going to put all these other scenes in there is if I got stuck on a scene, or I just couldn’t write it, I would just skip to another one,” Sheeler said. “I was writing several scenes at the same time, and I would jump around. Then I would start from the beginning of the story and start rewriting from the top down every single time I started writing it.”
Sheeler wrote for about four weeks and edited during the fifth, letting friends and colleagues tell him if parts worked or not. The final composition looked something like a lowercase “e,” he said.
“If you write a lower case ‘e,’ you start at the point where you draw out from the ‘e,’ and you imagine that’s your story going forward,” Sheeler said. “Then you curve around so you’re going backwards, and then you meet up at the beginning point of your story again. Then you continue forward.”
That was how he decided “Final Salute” should be written—starting straight out with Katherine, looping backwards to explain Maj. Beck and his job, and then reconnecting with Katherine and moving forward with her story.
Rewriting
“I still second guess myself all the time on my stories,” Sheeler said. “I have to have someone else tell me whether or not something works in a story or not.”
After weeks of writing, it was time to send the story to the editors, but Sheeler had built in an extra 15 to 20 minutes before deadline, like he always does, to have another person read over it.
“It was a lot of going through it, and I probably had 20 different people read the story, mainly reporters and friends of mine, before the story went in,” Sheeler said. “Of course, then came the main editors who made the big changes.”
The editors helped Sheeler to trim his words (“I tend to write long,” he said.), and pull out scenes that, although he was personally connected to them, would prevent the reader from wanting to finish the story, much of which came from the scene when the Marines entered that dark room and spilled their hearts out to Sheeler.
“I was so personally close to it that I had a really hard time letting go, and I argued, and I tried to put more of it back in, and finally the publisher just put his foot down and said, ‘No, it has to come in at this certain length, and you can cut it, but it has to come in at this length because I don’t want anyone to stop reading it,’” Sheeler said. “And that was the key. If they didn’t make it to the end of the story then it’s not worth having that scene in there.”
And so his story was shaved to its Pulitzer-winning form, making sure to focus on Maj. Beck’s story, making sure to focus on Katherine and making sure to focus on the larger picture.
“It has to have that larger element to it, also, that’s always sort of hovering in the background,” Sheeler said. “This is, in many ways, a story about how the war affects or doesn’t affect us all.”
Future advice and suggestions for further reading
Most importantly, Sheeler said, continue to search out reporters and writers. Send it to them if you are struggling or have question. And always, always, he said, keep reading:
“Once you start reading, it can give you ideas for how to shape your own reporting. That’s been the best teacher for me, just reading some of these stories and realizing they’re possible—seeing a technique that I didn’t even know existed and then finding out this is something Steinbeck used or Hemingway used, and you go back and realize there’s so many possibilities and great things that are out there and techniques that none of us can possibly know all of them, but it’s great to continually discover all of them.”
In a follow-up email, Sheeler also suggested the following sites for reading:
Nieman Storyboard – A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
http://thestoryofastory.tumblr.com/
