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"  This interview is about Chris Jones&amp;#039;s moving feature, &amp;quot;The Things That Carried Him,&amp;quot; from the May 2008 issue of Esquire. To read that story, please click this link. *** ESQ: What prompted you to write this story? CJ: The first time I saw Sgt. Montgomery&amp;#039;s name was in a story on CNN.com. One of his buddies was interviewed and he talked about carrying Joey&amp;#039;s body. It was very short and pretty vague about how Joey was killed and transported back to the base. My curiosity just got the better of me. How did that guy -- Sgt. Joseph Montgomery -- how did he get from there to Scottsburg, Indiana?  ESQ: What was the most surprising thing you learned about how bodies are transported back from Iraq? CJ: How much ritual is involved throughout the journey, almost from the very beginning. The people who bring these bodies back take their jobs really, really seriously. They do everything to an exacting standard. I found that emotional in some way, the idea of these people doing this hard work so carefully, even though no one&amp;#039;s watching them. And yet, it&amp;#039;s still a process. A machine goes into action every time someone&amp;#039;s killed. This journey has happened four thousand times now. And when you take stock of how many people are involved and the ripple effect each body has -- and realize that it&amp;#039;s multiplied thousands of times -- it had that much more impact on me. ESQ: Was there one person at the Pentagon you could talk to about this whole process? CJ: The short answer is no. People who are intensely involved in one part of the journey have absolutely no idea what&amp;#039;s going on in other parts of the journey. In some ways, (and I don&amp;#039;t want to give myself too much credit here) I was linking pieces of the chain together in ways that it&amp;#039;s never been linked. No one understood the whole thing. The people I talked to would know what had happened immediately before they received the body and who they passed the body to, but little beyond that. They would turn around and ask me what happened next.  ESQ: Did the Pentagon try to stop you at all? CJ: No. But I had to get approval. To get it, I called a guy, Lt. Col. Melnyk, at the Pentagon. I said, &amp;quot;Listen, I have to get Pentagon approval to do this story and I don&amp;#039;t know how to go about that.&amp;quot; He asked me to describe the story. So, I spent a couple of minutes talking about what I envisioned and I talked about Joey. Then he paused and said, &amp;quot;Okay. You can do it.&amp;quot; I was expecting it to be much more difficult. And really, that was true for the whole story. I never once ran into a roadblock. People were proud to share their stories. ESQ: In earlier days, dead soldiers were shipped like cargo, right? CJ: Yes. There are some fantastic pictures of bodies coming off of Delta flights, with the passengers looking out the windows -- you know, flying off to a weekend in Vegas and there&amp;#039;s a body coming out of the plane. In fact, John and Stacey Holly, whose son was coming back that way, started the grass-roots movement to change the process -- they weren&amp;#039;t going to have their son carried by baggage handlers. And he wasn&amp;#039;t.  ESQ: This kind of system cannot handle massive, unthinkable numbers of casualties, can it? CJ: They couldn&amp;#039;t do this with the number of casualties that we had in Vietnam or World War II. That&amp;#039;s why you see these massive cemeteries of American soldiers buried over in Europe. As far as I know, there are no American dead buried in Iraq. This might be one of the first wars in history where everybody&amp;#039;s brought back. But if there&amp;#039;s another war, what happens then? The infrastructure might be able to handle it -- the Port Mortuary is one of the largest in the world and there are enough planes to fly everyone back -- but I don&amp;#039;t know about the manpower. If it got bad, you&amp;#039;d run into shortages. There aren&amp;#039;t even enough buglers to go around right now. When Joey landed in Seymour, Indiana, usually the Fort Knox honor guard would have received the body and carried him to the hearse. At the start of the war, that&amp;#039;s how it was. Now there are so many casualties, the National Guard took over the role. ESQ: This was a pretty emotional story to read. CJ: It was hard to write. I had several bouts where I really just lost it. ESQ: Like, literally, crying and typing? CJ: Yeah. I met a chaplain, Chaplain Staggers, and he admitted to crying. He said, &amp;quot;You can try to build that wall, but it always crumbles.&amp;quot; I tried to keep that wall up. I was trying to cross into Ohio, coming back from Scottsburg, and I just lost it on the road. I had to pull over. I&amp;#039;m not ashamed to say that. If anyone reads this story and really starts thinking about it, you can&amp;#039;t help but become emotionally invested. When you say four thousand dead, that doesn&amp;#039;t really mean anything. It&amp;#039;s just a number. You can dismiss it. But if you start getting into names and faces and you see the mom and you eat pot roast with her, and you drink beer with their friends, and you listen to the guys who carried him back talking about the blood on their uniforms -- you can&amp;#039;t dismiss it. And that&amp;#039;s just one. That&amp;#039;s just one. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a32881/things-that-carried-him-interview/>