“You take these?” Zig asked.
“Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?”
Zig shot him a look. “Do not mess with Dolly Parton. That woman is a saint.”
“Am I from Tennessee? You should be thanking my state just for birthing her.”
Zig knew he meant it. After three years of running the Navy’s newspaper on the USS George H. W. Bush, Casper had wanted one thing: to get off the ship. The first job opening that came up was Dover photographer, where he took photos when top Pentagon brass came to tour the main base so they could pose with the fighter jets.
Soon after, he got transferred to the mortuary, taking photos of the flag-covered coffins as they were carried off the cargo planes. But what really made him rise through the ranks was his ability—no matter how intimate the setting, even when the President of the United States came years ago to pay his respects after the passing of astronaut John Glenn—to disappear into the background. Like a ghost, someone said, earning Casper his nickname.
“Casp, you sure this is everything?” Zig asked with a finger swipe to the left, scrolling through a cascade of photos, every moment since Mint’s body arrived at Dover. The first shots were always the same: a closed transfer case with Mint’s ID tags, then the canvas body bag with handles on the side, when its steel zipper was first opened. Priority number one was making sure you had the right fallen soldier.
From there, as the fallen soldier’s body was placed on a conveyor belt and x-rayed to make sure there was no unexploded ordnance or other booby traps hidden inside, Casper took photos of all of Mint’s personal effects—wedding ring, cell phone, crumpled receipts in his pockets, plus every item in his wallet, from his driver’s license to gas cards, gym membership, school pictures of his kids that were clearly a few years old, and an old laminated fortune from a fortune cookie that Mint kept: Your dearest wish will come true.
Casper even took photos in the autopsy suite, where there were ten-foot ladders, like someone was painting the ceiling. Casper had installed the ladders years ago, so he could climb high enough for a shot of the entire body. As the autopsy progressed, he’d add shots of each wound at every point of impact—from bullet wounds in the skin to punctured livers or hearts—as well as every scar, tattoo, and beauty mark . . . details that a family needs before they’ll accept that their son or daughter is dead.
In the photo Zig was looking at, Mint was on one of the autopsy tables, naked, his clothes cut away, his bare arms and legs bent awkwardly in that way that only a corpse bends. He had two small tattoos, both on his right shoulder: baby handprints with cursive script underneath—one labeled Huck, the other Violet—his kids. Zig swallowed hard, taking a quick glance outside, like he was checking to see if Chaplain Pete was coming. But right now, he wasn’t thinking about Chaplain Pete.
“Another couple inches and the bullet would’ve blown out his whole face,” Casper said.
Zig nodded, turning back to the screen. Yesterday at the funeral, Colonel Mint was dressed in full dress uniform, looking serene, the repair work all done. In this picture, taken just before the autopsy began, his buzzed blond hair was a mess of blood and sweat, his mouth sagging open. There was a tidy black hole in Mint’s left cheek, then a bigger hole where the bullet exited, diagonally down the right side of his neck, bits of burnt skin shredded like black crepe paper.
According to the medical examiner, the bullet missed his skull, hitting only soft tissue. What actually killed him was when it pierced the carotid artery in his neck.
“Is it me, or does his coloring look off?” Zig asked, flipping to the next pic, one of just the top half of the body, enlarging Mint’s face.
“Gray is gray. That’s his skin,” Casper replied, standing over Zig’s shoulder, reaching for the chaplain’s candy dish and unwrapping a pink Tootsie Roll.
“Not his pigmentation. His . . .” Zig pulled in even closer, to Mint’s right cheek—the one without the bullet hole. “Here. Does it look like something got smudged or wiped away?”