FT. BRAGG, N.C. — After Army Pfc. Joel K. Brattain was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad a year ago, the painful task of notifying his family got underway thousands of miles from his hometown of Yorba Linda.
Officers from Brattain's unit in Iraq, the 82nd Airborne Division, contacted their rear detachment at Ft. Bragg, the division's home base. A soldier here alerted the post casualty assistance center, which then telephoned the Army base nearest to Yorba Linda -- Ft. Irwin.
There, Sgt. Lloyd Cook, who had never heard of Brattain, answered his cellphone at home on a quiet Sunday morning and was ordered to tell a stranger that his son was dead.
There was no military chaplain available to help Cook deliver the news to Brattain's father, Gary Brattain. He would have to do it alone. It was his first time. He felt a wave of anxiety.
"I mean, telling someone their loved one is gone -- that's hard," Cook recalled. "I wasn't sure how to do it."
The ritual that played out later that day in Gary Brattain's living room, with Cook in his dress uniform struggling to get the words out, is repeated virtually every day somewhere in the United States. At least 1,571 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq. And casualty notification officers are knocking on doors and delivering staggering news to families across America as the war enters its third year.
The choreographed visits trigger overwhelming shock and grief for spouses and children, parents and siblings. But death notifications are also searing emotional experiences for those charged with delivering the news.
Notification officers are not trained grief counselors or, for the most part, veterans of previous notifications. They are ordinary soldiers whose sudden call to notification duty is difficult and draining in its own way.
"They feel inadequate -- they don't know what to say," said Capt. Christopher Dickey, 33, a soft-spoken Ft. Bragg chaplain who presided at Brattain's funeral. "I tell them that just their being there communicates more than they could ever put into words."
Before driving two-and-a-half hours to Gary Brattain's home in Brea, Cook stopped at the Ft. Irwin casualty assistance office, where he was told the details of the death of Brattain, 21. But nothing, he said, could have fully prepared him to knock on someone's door and tell him his child is dead.
