Esquire's Version of Shock & Awe

"We Shot This Image To Catch Your Eye So You Will Pick Up This Issue And Immerse Yourself in the Most Gripping Story You Will Read This Year. It's on pg. 102."

When the teaser is that blatant, a reader with healthy curiosity and an equally healthy skepticism about magazine hype turns to Page 102, muttering, This better be good.

Fortunately, it is.

"The Things That Carried Him," by Chris Jones, is the true story of Sgt. Joe Montgomery's death in Iraq and his nine-day journey home to Scottsburg, Ind., to be buried. It's a very strange article -- essentially the story of the transportation of a corpse -- and Jones makes it even stranger by telling it in reverse chronology, beginning with the funeral and moving slowly backward to the moment when Montgomery was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

But somehow it works, and in its painstaking accumulation of detail, it becomes a deeply moving story about how ordinary Americans live and die and attempt to help one another salvage a measure of meaning and dignity in terrible circumstances.

Growing up, Joe Montgomery was a skateboarder and a Nine Inch Nails fan with a goofy haircut and an anarchist symbol tattooed on his arm. He married his high school sweetheart and got a job in a steel forge. But no matter how hard he worked, he couldn't support his wife and three kids, so in 2005, he joined the Army.

On May 22, 2007, Montgomery and his platoon were marching down a dirt road, heading toward a farm where insurgents were rumored to hide weapons, when a buried bomb exploded. Montgomery became the 3,431st American serviceman killed in Iraq.

His body was placed in an aluminum "transfer case," packed in ice, and flown to Kuwait, then to Germany, then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the U.S. military maintains the world's largest mortuary. Montgomery arrived in a shipment of 14 corpses -- 10 soldiers, two Marines and a body too mangled to be identified.

"He was then unpacked from the case, which would be cleaned and shipped back to Baghdad to be used again," Jones writes. "He was still zipped inside the black body bag, cold and wet to the touch. . . . There was massive blast and burn damage to his legs and he was missing most of his right hand. His torso was intact, and his face was unmarked, except for a single blemish on his forehead."

Jones details the work of the military morticians, who treat the bodies of their fallen comrades with a deep sense of brotherly love. "The mortician assigned to Sergeant Montgomery put him back together as best he could. He built a right hand out of gauze and cotton and similarly stuffed the legs of his uniform pants. He paid particular attention to Sergeant Montgomery's face, which, with the help of the airmen stationed alongside him, he washed and shaved and layered in makeup."

"It's very intimate," says David Sparks, a chaplain at the Dover mortuary. "Preparing remains is a very intimate thing."