Spread across several tables in a vast warehouse here are the pieces of one soldier's life.
There is the photo album with images of graduations and family gatherings, tanks and smiling military buddies. There are piles of brown T-shirts and socks, a jumble of sneakers and boots, a plastic bag filled with handwritten letters. A knife. A stack of video games.
Nearby, surrounded by walls of metal mesh, are rows of dusty black footlockers that have just returned from war. Inside each are the artifacts of other lives cut short.
This is the Joint Personal Effects Depot, a pair of warehouses on this base northeast of Baltimore that serve as the military's main repository for the possessions of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Within days of troops' deaths in action, their clothes, pictures and books and everything else that defined their lives on the battlefield wind up here.
It is then the job of 138 people to inventory, photograph, clean and pack all of the items so they can be sent home to grieving families, the last remnants of the ones they loved.
Job 'takes a toll on you'
There are ghosts here, whispers of these people who sacrificed their lives to serve their country. In a recent tour of the facility, the names and identifying information of the dead were concealed to protect their families, but the presence of the dead was still strong.
"There's a lot of each individual in those lockers," said Lt. Col. L. Scott Kilmon Jr., who commands the depot. Working with the materials day after day can be an emotional strain, he said. "It takes a toll on you."
The workload has gotten steadily heavier over the past few years, as nearly 3,000 U.S. troops have died in the Middle East and thousands more have been injured. The seriously wounded who are evacuated from the fighting also have their things shipped to Aberdeen now. Kilmon said the depot is bracing for the fall and winter, when there have been higher levels of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
And because the fighting seems likely to continue, the Defense Department is working to establish the depot as a more permanent operation. Kilmon said there are plans underway to move the temporary, wartime facility to Dover Air Force Base by 2009, which would put it at the same facility where the troops' remains are processed. Now, the items are flown to Dover and are loaded on semitrailers for the 90-minute drive to this makeshift operation in Maryland, where the effects are organized.
The warehouse feels a bit like a morgue. The rows of mesh cages are chilly, and somber employees meticulously sift through the items.
"Five brown T-shirts," called out Pfc. Alisha Ricketts, sitting in one cage cataloguing the contents of eight footlockers that belonged to a noncommissioned officer recently killed in Baghdad. "One white washcloth."
A photograph of two young children peeked out of a plastic bag in front of Ricketts. Spec. Tyrone Wheatley placed woodworking magazines into a footlocker and glanced at a clipboard. Dirty socks, Fruit of the Loom underwear, shirts and shorts were streaked with desert dust and grime, the pile giving off the scent of the soldier's sweat, fresh from the Iraqi summer heat. A little bit of Baghdad.
Laying out their lives
In most cases, after all the items are inventoried, workers wash the clothes, scrub the boots and clean all equipment with compressed air, said Maj. Leslie Rafferty, the depot's operations officer. Washers and dryers hum constantly. Compact discs are wiped of dust. Camera film is developed.
"We slowly but surely lay out their life," Rafferty said.
Some families, she said, send notice that they do not want the clothes washed, so they can smell their loved one when the items are returned. All government-issued items are logged and returned to circulation, so the sleeping bags and compasses are later issued to others who might be deployed.
Marvin Scott, 63, looked up as he tied the laces of a soldier's left Asics sneaker, tucking the bow behind its tongue.
"You're seeing the pictures of their families, their wives, their children, and you know they have a lot of hurt," Scott said. "It can be very emotional. Not everyone can work here."
Scott, a civilian contractor who puts the finishing touches on items that are to be sent home, folds creases into T-shirts and creates careful stacks of DVDs. It can be heartbreaking, he said, but he wants each family to see that someone has taken the time to neatly pack the reminders away for them. And he has seen a lot of those reminders up close.
"You can read a lot about a person by what they had with them," Scott said. "You can tell how they dressed, you can tell what they listened to, what they watched and what they read. Sometimes you can really see them."
This soldier, the one Scott was getting to know on a recent day, was devoted to video games and anime . A PlayStation 2 sat in a plastic bag, a large television tipped on its back in a footlocker. Games like "Ape Escape: On the Loose" lay next to such DVDs as "The Matrix," "Eraser" and "South Park," a veritable catalogue of young-American-male pop culture.
In a separate bag with a set of the soldier's dog tags was a solitary black plastic comb, its tines bent and color slightly faded from countless runs through the man's hair.
Nearby, on a set of tables where a new footlocker was just unlocked and opened, Pfc. James Childress ran a gloved hand over a pile of books, traces of dirt slipping from the worn pages. Stephen King's "Desperation" sat next to a yellowed copy of "You've Come a Long Way, Charlie Brown." Farther down the table was a pair of flip-flops, an impression of feet in the foam.
All documents, letters, data drives and photographs are carefully examined in a secret environment to make sure that nothing classified returns home, and also to make sure that nothing untoward is left for parents, spouses and children. Pornography, for example, is removed. "Human beings are human beings," Rafferty said.
Wills, messages to family members found
Kilmon said depot employees have found wills and messages to family members on computer drives, including an audiotape one soldier made for his child, who was not yet born when he recorded the message. Sometimes workers have to walk off the line to gather their emotions.
Big-screen televisions have become more common, and employees said they see a lot of guitars, too. An acoustic guitar waited on a table to be packed last week. The most unusual item: a motorcycle.
Though clothes with blood or tissue on them are supposed to go with the bodies for transfer to medical examiners, they appear at the depot from time to time. A large cardboard box sits on a loading dock, labeled "medical examiner." Under the lid are dozens of translucent red biohazard bags filled with camouflage clothes, some bloodstained. Sometimes there are bits of human remains.
The officers here know that when there are mass casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan, their operation is going to be busy about three weeks later; there is an average of 22 days between a death in the field and the arrival of personal items at the depot. Another 11 days or so later, the items are shipped by FedEx to families around the country.
"In my first days here, I was just in awe," Childress said, standing back for a moment to survey one soldier's belongings. "These are all real people. We know we're the final link between them and their families."