Behind the Scenes at a Military Funeral: A Pulitzer-Winning Legend and Some Very Mixed Emotions

Reporting at a funeral feels like the most unnatural thing in the world.

If you are a photographer, your camera is clicking away as family members cry over the coffin of the most important person in their lives. If you are a reporter, you are putting pen to paper and scribbling notes, quoting a mother’s mournful wails.

It’s one of the rare days where the job violates every instinct in your body.

So why do it?

I found myself asking that question Monday as I covered the Hero Mission of 22-year-old Anaheim native Jason Weaver at the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base.

A Hero Mission is where soldiers killed in the line of duty are flown home. Their flag-draped coffins are carried off the runway to a waiting hearse. But first, fellow soldiers, the color guard, the community, friends and family pay their respects. The Los Alamitos Base has conducted 14 of them since 2009.

It is a solemn affair.

I attended in order to do a story letting the community know that they have the opportunity to pay their respects to fallen soldiers and their families at these Hero Missions. For many families, it is comforting to see the community pay tribute to the sacrifice paid. The Hero Missions are open to the public at the request of the soldier’s family. The Weaver family allowed the public to attend Monday.

They were kind enough to talk to reporters. Briefly, they shared a glimpse of the man that Jason Weaver was. He was an only son who talked to his mom nearly every day from the front. He had dimples, and he played football. He loved children and wanted to be a police officer upon his return from the war. He was strong-willed. Try as they might, family members could not talk him out of enlisting.

I had never attended a Hero Mission and did not know what to expect. I had covered funerals before, and knew that I would struggle to contain my emotions. I would try not to cry. I feared I would fail, and I would try to hide my tears from the other journalists.

I braced myself for the emotional experience in much the same way as did the other reporters and photographers around me. We chatted.

Kept to ourselves across the airfield from the family and crowd, we talked about everything but the emotional experience that lay before us.

The Press Telegram photographer, whom I had seen on an assignment a few weeks earlier, pointed out that the Orange County Register photographer who had also been on that assignment had since lost his job in the paper’s latest round of layoffs.

I chatted with Patch photographer Thomas Wasper about music. He pointed out the Associated Press photographer Nick Ut to me.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked me.

Ut turned out to be the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer whose photo of the naked girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War was credited by President Richard Nixon in the Nixon tapes with helping to end the war.

We whispered in awe.

I caught up with the Register reporter, an old friend I had worked with when I was at the Register.

“Do you know who that reporter is?” I asked Wasper. “He used to be in the band No Doubt.”

Again we whispered in awe.

Then the plane landed, and the mood changed entirely. The hundreds of people gathered were completely silent. A noise blended in with the hum of the plane engine, and I told myself I didn’t know what it was.

The soldier next to me had attended several Hero Missions, and I asked her, “Is that his mother?”

“I was hoping not, but I think so,” answered the soldier.

As the coffin was lowered, Patricia Weaver’s plaintive wail turned into soft cries. She hugged her only son’s coffin, crying “Oh, my baby, my sweet Jason.”

It was gut-wrenching. As the tears rolled down my cheeks, I backed away from the crowd of journalists. Maybe I was hiding my tears. Maybe I was hiding the fact that I was taking notes at a funeral while a mother cried over her son’s coffin. Maybe I was instinctively backing away from the scene because if you can’t reach out and comfort someone in such intense agony, just standing there feels wrong too.

One of the television reporters seemed upset as well.

He pointed at the photographers and shook his head. “This isn’t right. They shouldn’t be doing this.”

He seemed agitated. He stood further back and talked on his phone animatedly. I assumed he felt it was exploitative to be filming a mother’s grief.

It didn’t feel right to me either, but I knew I had to report the details.  It's such a distant war, and I don't believe it's up to me to leave out the painful details when they come close to home.

As I was walking to my car, I witnessed an exchange between the reporter and a passerby. Here is what I heard, minus the expletives:

“What do you care what kind of car I drive?” I heard the television reporter snap.

“I just wanted to know what kind of car a big shot reporter drives,” said the passerby. “I am going to watch channel 7 from now on.”

I don’t know that television reporter, but I have seen him in action enough to know that he is very empathetic and must have been intensely affected that day by Patricia Weaver’s agony.

As I was pulling away in my car, I spotted Ut, the Pulitzer-winning photographer, whose own brother was killed in the Vietnam War.

I pulled my car over, got out and ran up to him.

“I think some of the reporters felt that we shouldn’t use some of the footage of the mother’s grief,” I said. “I know who you are, and I’d be curious to know your opinion.”

Ut’s reply was instantaneous.

“Of course you use it,” he said. “These things are always sad.”