Final Tribute:
An appriciation for jobs done well under the most difficult conditions
By Eric Barendsen

Photo by Thomas Cooper/Colorado Press Association Jim Sheeler holds a glove worn by a member of a Marine Corps honor guard during the 2007 Colorado Press Association convention. Sheeler received the CPA Achievement of the Year award and, later the same day, the Editorial Best of Show award for his “Final Salute” project.

With his youthful face and wire-framed specs, Jim Sheeler ('07) doesn't look a day over 30. But for this Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, looks are misleading.  At 39, Sheeler has a depth of experience of life and death and an appreciation for the dignity and the good in people that might never bloom in others decades older.   

His words tell it all.

He writes simply, directly, in a style that shakes right down to the reader's emotional center. Sheeler is a humanistic storyteller at the top of his game, and he has returned to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication to teach a reporting class and share his gifts with others.  

Here's a taste from "Final Salute," his Pulitzer Prize-winning feature for the Rocky Mountain News that ran on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2005:

There were no footprints in the snow. That struck Beck as he sat across the street in his government SUV that night, outside a house in Laramie blanketed by cold and quiet.

In his briefcase was a sheet of paper: "INITIAL CASUALTY REPORT," it read. "LCPL. KYLE W. BURNS."  Every second he waited would be one more second that, for those in the house, everything was still all right. He stared at the front door, at the drifting snow, then looked at his watch.

In "Final Salute," Sheeler escorts us on an impossible mission alongside Maj. Steve Beck, a remarkable Marine with the one of the hardest jobs in the military: knocking on doors to inform families that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq.  The story spilled across a 24-page special section, brought to vivid life by the color images of Todd Heisler, the former Rocky photographer now at The New York Times who also won a Pulitzer for the piece.  In it, Sheeler bears witness to scenes that forever changed the lives of everyone touched by them. 

"People have seen the knock in the movies, but very rarely have we been able to see what happens afterward. It's usually a single knock or a doorbell, but it really never stops.  The impact of that never really stops," Sheeler says. 

Sheeler takes us into homes where we see children who won't see their fathers, where we hear widows read last letters and where we see the people who are trying to take care of them, such as Beck.

"In a way, he's this sort of guide, that white glove (of his uniform) is a guide that brings you through the story and prepares you for all that's about to come," Sheeler says. With his articulate voice of dignity, Beck models the strength and compassion that help hold families together through tragedy. 

"I think a lot of people think of the Marines as these sort of automatons," Sheeler says, "but when you do look behind those eyes, there are guys who are absolute poets and incredibly thoughtful, caring people." 

“It’s not a statement about the war, but it is a statement about the sacrifice and how we all need to feel it more than we are,” says Jim Sheeler about his Pulitzer Prize-winning series “Final Tribute.”

Beck's job, as he performs it, is to become far more than a messenger. "Major Beck is the last person any of them want to see, but after they realize he's just doing his job, just as their sons were, he in many ways becomes an anchor for them,"  Sheeler says, adding that he and Beck know quite well, as all journalists eventually learn, that you have to treat grieving families "as if they were your own family."

"As journalists, we have to go up to the people who are in desperate situations a lot," Sheeler says. "I think we would be much better as a profession if before we go up to that grieving person, we think, 'What if that person was my mother or my sister, what kind of a reporter would I want to be asking them questions?'  And that's the kind of reporter you have to be."

Ultimately, "Final Salute" is about the price being paid by the men, women and children of the military.  "It's not a statement about the war, but it is a statement about the sacrifice and how we all need to feel it more than we are," Sheeler says. The emotional toll he has paid is also a sacrifice.  "I think if you don't open yourself up to feel the story, then you don't deserve it."

Sheeler relates the timeless moments in "Final Salute" with such intimacy and delicacy, such immaculate precision that they transcend language and enter the realm of art. Yet he, the reporter, the teacher, the husband, the father, remains down to earth.

Nearing completion on his master's degree at the SJMC in 1992, Sheeler accepted a position as a business reporter in Boulder for the Daily Camera. All he had left was his professional project, but he didn't look back.  At least not for a long time.  In 1996 he was a founding writer at the now-defunct Boulder Planet, where he cut his teeth on the obit beat by bringing an unusual dedication to his reporting.  There he sharpened his style and practiced the empathy and compassion for people in grief that would open so many doors in his career. Sheeler says he started doing obituaries on everyday people, people who'd never been in the newspaper before.  Doing those stories, taking the time to sit with grieving families and giving them the space and the time to tell the story of their loved one's life, prepared him for "Final Salute."

"There have been some incredibly wrenching moments.  I have a lot of notebooks with tear stains on them. But you have to allow yourself that humanity," Sheeler says. "Then people will share parts of their lives that they otherwise would never." 

In 2003, as a general assignment reporter at the Rocky, he was tapped to cover the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Thomas Slocum, the first casualty to come back to Colorado from Iraq.

"In a way, I was just kind of thrown into it," Sheeler says.  "I really never stopped covering the war from that point on.  I started seeing things, even then, that nobody else was seeing, from the gravediggers in the cemeteries, to the old veterans who turned up, to the Marines themselves who were carrying these caskets for the last time."  He says he knew there were many stories out there not being told.  The groundwork for "Final Salute" and his stepping stones to the Pulitzer were in place.

After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, he decided to finish his master's degree in journalism at CU, teach a class and take time to work on his forthcoming book – an expanded version of "Final Salute" bearing the same title and scheduled to be published in May by The Penguin Press.  His book, "OBIT: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People who Led Extraordinary Lives," was published last summer.

When Sheeler came back to CU, he says he had an ace up his sleeve for his thesis:  another knockout story idea.  It would be an opportunity to take his obituary form to new elevations.  It's about an American World War II general whose friends were trying to get him the Distinguished Service Cross medal before he died. "And even though he didn't care about the medal, his buddies wanted to get it for him," he says.   

"In (Sheeler's) research, he found the German who had this guy in his gun sights and didn't shoot," says Associate Professor Len Ackland, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the SJMC and former newspaper reporter. "That was part of the story and shows the kind of research that he does.  He doesn't go part way. He made obituaries into a form of art.  He just told the stories of everyday people and told them very well. He's a beautiful writer."

Sheeler earned his master's degree last May.  After a 15-year trek, the circle of his first hero's journey is complete. If he took an unusual road, it only makes the story make perfect sense.  Because, after all, there's no rule about what order you're supposed to get your Pulitzer and your master's.

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