The NYT's Dexter Filkins, writing in the NYT Magazine, tells about what it was like when he confirmed to a U.S. Marine that his comrade -- his face "opened in a large V, split like meat, fish maybe" -- was dead. Filkins was out on patrol with the jarheads in Fallujah, Iraq back in November 2004:

I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places, and you think they’re overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head; keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry, and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear traveling across the wide desert plain. You need a corpse for the newspaper, so you take a bunch of marines to get one. Then suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you have always avoided, smiling back at you as if it knew all along. Your fault.

Filkins needed the corpse of an insurgent for a photo. The Marines offered to go up a minaret tower in search of one, bounding ahead of Filkins and his photographer.

The soldier who died that day was Lance Cpl. William L. Miller, a 22-year-old from Pearland, Texas. Filkins ran into the yound Marine's parents a few months later while at a memorial service in North Carolina. He approached them with trepidation.

“We’re so grateful to you,” Lewis (the father - BD) said to me when the service was over, down on the gym floor. “If it weren’t for you, we would never have known how our son died.”