The Soldiers' Stories: Picking Up the Pieces of Slain Troops' Lives

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- 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.

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."

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