A Story behind One Soldier's Last Trip Home

Don Collins Jr. digging a grave at Scottburg Cemetery this winter. Juliana Sohn

The Things That Carried Him -- Esquire

Revisit the award-winning, breathtaking true story behind one soldier's last trip home

Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things.

Indiana state law dictates that the lid of the burial vault be two feet below the surface. That meant Collins had to dig down five feet, ultimately lifting out about a hundred cubic feet of earth. He wouldn't need a tape to measure that, either. Since 1969, his father, Don Sr., has owned the Collins Funeral Home, just up Elm Street, just past the little yellow house with the two yellow ribbons tied to the tree out front. As a boy, Don Jr. had lived upstairs with the spirits and the rest of his family, over the chapel. He and his younger brother, Kevin, would later work with their dad in the back room, embalming the bodies of their neighbors at three o'clock in the morning, and he still assists his father in his capacity as coroner. But Don Jr. has had enough of bodies in back rooms. He likes it better outside, in the sticky air, working with the earth.

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Hat Tip: Good Shit

My Comment: Our prayers are with his friends and family.

Ex-NBA Player Finds True Calling in Army

From Military.com:

MIAMI - Tim James apologized for being late. A rough day at work, said the Miami Heat's 1999 first-round draft pick. Vehicles broke down, problems flared up, and he simply fell behind.

"It happens," James said. "Even here."

Even on the front line of the Iraq war.

A former NBA player who often wondered about his true calling, Tim James is now a U.S. Army Soldier, a transformation that even many of the people closest to him never saw coming.

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My Comment: I guess if there is ever a pick-up game at the base, he will be the first one chosen to be on a team.

New Doubts Raised Over Famous War Photo

Robert Capa’s "Falling Soldier," from the Spanish Civil War has drawn both acclaim and questions over its veracity. Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

From The New York Times:
After nearly three-quarters of a century Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War remains one of the most famous images of combat ever. It is also one of the most debated, with a long string of critics claiming that the photo, of a soldier seemingly at the moment of death, was faked. Now, a new book by a Spanish researcher asserts that the picture could not have been made where, when or how Capa’s admirers and heirs have claimed.

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My Comment: I remembered the first time I saw the photo (I was a young teenager at the time) .... and I felt that it was staged.

Fake or not .... it is what it symbolizes that makes it important. The moment that a life is loss because of war.