LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the military’s largest and most advanced medical facility. It’s where doctors send some of the most seriously burned and wounded soldiers to recover, sometimes with artificial limbs. Since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, thousands of soldiers, like Private Carlos Gomez, have suffered injuries like his. He was on a scouting mission and was seriously wounded when his vehicle ran over a roadside bomb in Afghanistan earlier this year.

PVT CARLOS GOMEZ: Well, the blast, it shot us straight up in the air so the impact actually broke my left leg. It shattered my heel and my bones down my right, left leg, I mean, and my right leg got crushed. They couldn’t save it anymore so they had to amputate it here at Brooke Army Medical Center.

SEVERSON: Two other soldiers were wounded in the blast. One was killed. At first Gomez wasn’t sure he wanted to live.

PVT GOMEZ: I woke up, you know, not really knowing what happened still. I didn’t know that my leg was amputated, and when I was fully, you know, aware of what’s going on, I saw my leg, yeah, I broke down in tears, you know, and I hated my life, and I didn’t want nothing to do with it.

SEVERSON: The first battle many seriously wounded soldiers face is whether they want to go on with their lives and then endure the long, painful process of healing, often alone. Doctors have learned that wounded soldiers heal faster and more completely when they have family around them. That’s what happens here at the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio. It is the only one of its kind. It was the dream of Judith Markelz, and now she’s the director.

JUDITH MARKELZ (Warrior Family Support Center Program Manager): We attempt to form a home away from home for wounded warriors and their families, to help them feel some kind of connection to each other, things for them to do every day to take them outside of their own world and help them transition back to active duty or to the civilian community where they’re going to have to adjust and make a lot of changes.

SEVERSON: Although it’s located on an army post, the Warrior and Family Support Center is funded entirely from private donations and staffed by about 150 volunteers. Families live in apartments close by, so they can help soldiers accept what is called “the new normal,” which means their life will never be quite the same again. Sometimes family is as important as the medical care.

MARKELZ: To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors. If you believe in the triad of the healing of the mind, body, and spirit, then we probably fall in the category of the healing of the spirit.

SEVERSON: Bryant Casteel is a Baptist chaplain at the center. He says the most important part of his job is simply to be there.

CHAPLAIN (CAPT) BRYANT CASTEEL: You know, sometimes you want to find the right words. I found many times when dealing with soldiers there’s not a right word. There’s no right way to tell someone you’re going to be okay. And some say, hey, can you pray for me chaplain? You know, can you let me know things are going to be all right? I can’t promise you, but I can promise you I’ll be here to support you.

SEVERSON: One of the favorite nights around here is bingo night. For a while they forget that the war for them is not yet over. For those who think this must be a very sad place, Judith Markelz says the opposite is true. She says it’s a place of hope, which is the name of the sculpture hanging in the center which was created by a staff sergeant who had 29 surgeries while he was at Brooke. She says the wounded may cry in their beds at night, but never in public.

MARKELZ: These young men and women do not want your sympathy. They want your support and in the help of their healing, because they’re going to be okay. They did what they were commanded to do, and they did it with great integrity and honor.

SEVERSON: And many paid a huge price, like Master Sergeant Doug Reed with the Ohio National Guard, critically wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. He’s the father of seven kids, here with his wife, Jana.

MSG DOUG REED: The angel of death had me in his arms, and Jesus said, “No, I’m not done with you.” So they fought over me, and my jaw came off.

JANA REED: He was very close to death, in the fact that I mean with every surgery they didn’t know if he would ever wake up or ever become independent. And so that’s when I just had to say, “Okay, God, I am not in control. The doctors are not in control. But you are in control, and you are going to have to fix this, if this is what you want.”

SEVERSON: And when he finally did wake up, for two months he didn’t know his wife. He didn’t even know who he was.

JANA REED: But when our kids walked in the door he gave them a hug, and he called them all by their pet names, and so the kids began to cry, not because of what they saw, but because it’s dad, he does know me, when the doctors were saying we don’t think he’ll know you.

MSG REED: I didn’t know what I looked like. It couldn’t have been good, and they don’t see that. They don’t care if I have teeth or not or my jaw is out of shape now or anything else. What they cared about is I was still alive. I was still with them.

SEVERSON: Judith Markelz says the families themselves need support.

MARKELZ: This is not a singular effort. It involved families, children, wives, mothers. An injury or a death is like dropping a rock in the water, and the ripples go forever, and they affect everyone with whom they ever came in contact.

SEVERSON: Private Gomez has two children, and he says he knows things will get better when he gets his prosthesis, but in the meantime his seven-year-old son is having a hard time.

PVT GOMEZ: It’s affecting him. I know definitely it’s affecting him. You know, he has to help out his dad a lot with stuff that I can’t do, like picking stuff up for me, you know, putting on my shoes, stuff like that.

SEVERSON: Gomez says he’s always been religious, but one of the few times he didn’t have time to pray was when he rushed out on a mission in the middle of the night, the mission that cost him his leg. He says the war has not cost him his faith.

PVT GOMEZ: I don’t question God, not one day, you know, why this happened to me. I thank him actually, because it could have been the opposite, you know. I could have paid the ultimate sacrifice and passed away. It was because of him I’m still sitting here talking to you right now.

SEVERSON: Jana Reed says her faith and her husband’s are actually stronger.

JANA REED: Because every day we have a miracle that has been answered, and some people might say, oh, it’s a coincidence, but we’ve just had too many coincidences in the pasts 16 months that I do not accept it. It is not a coincidence.

SEVERSON: Chaplain Casteel says he has seen how the Warrior and Family Support Center has helped soldiers get better quicker. But he worries about what happens when the soldiers go home.

CH CASTEEL: When you walk around here, you don’t feel like you’re different. You don’t feel like, wow, someone’s staring at me or looking at me like I’m strange, and so I think here for a soldier it can be safe. Now when they leave this environment, going back to their home of record, then it could be a little more challenging, and I think that anxiety rises again for the soldier: Hey, will I be accepted?

SEVERSON: There was a time when wounded soldiers returning from the Vietnam War received more hostility than community support. But times have changed.

MARKELZ: Whether you agree with what these young men and women did is of, frankly, no concern to me. If you don’t like the war, it is not an issue for me. The issue is that we continue to support these young men and women for the rest of our days and theirs, because this doesn’t end tomorrow.

SEVERSON: She says that there are now other warrior and family support centers being built around the country modeled after the one here.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Antonio, Texas.

DEBBIE FRIEDMAN: When people are sick, when they are emotionally sick, when they are physically sick, there’s a feeling that nobody could possibly understand what it feels like to be in this body or in this mind, in this heart, and it is so isolating and so painful, and when people come together in a healing service the secret’s out. Everybody knows that every single person there is struggling with the same pain.

We are doing these healing services because healing isn’t being addressed, until recently. We can’t talk about spirituality, and we can’t talk about God, and we can’t talk about sickness. And I think that spiritually if you don’t have the opportunity to exercise your heart and soul, you don’t really fully understand all that you are.

I think that each one of us is here for a purpose, and that is really the focus of my work—that each of us needs to acknowledge what blessings we carry within us, that it’s up to each one of us to give all that we have to the world. I’ve said this before, but we are not here for a free ride. We are here to do a job.

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Originally broadcast July 16, 2010

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Abraham Verghese has all the credentials and degrees befitting a professor at Stanford Medical School. But he is best known and acclaimed for his writing — two best-selling memoirs and a new work of fiction that evoke a different kind of medical vocation.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE: My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry.

DE SAM LAZARO: His goal is to have today’s medical students aspire similarly to a calling­ as much as a career in medicine, to awaken a more basic curiosity as they sharpen their clinical acumen. These third-year medical students were studying abnormalities on a scan, specifically the prominence of certain blood vessels.

VERGHESE: (Speaking to students) This is what’s called pulmonary redistribution. Have you heard that term? It’s an early sign of heart failure. Who’s got good hand veins that I can borrow?

DE SAM LAZARO: Verghese offered a simple physics explanation of why blood vessels should not normally be visible above the level of the heart.

VERGHESE: (speaking to students) The level of her right atrium is about here. So watch what happens as I raise her hand. You still see the veins, nice three dimension, right? See how they’re flattening out? Now they are gone.

DE SAM LAZARO: The bottom line: Well before an x-ray, a doctor might spot telltale signs of disease.

VERGHESE: (speaking to students) And you see their neck veins and they’re not coughing, speaking, singing, straining, they have increased venous pressure.

DE SAM LAZARO: Increasingly, he says students and practitioners of medicine in the West rely on technology in a system that stresses cognitive knowledge and machines over the skill that comes from touch and feel.

VERGHESE: I’m the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn’t compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that. Only my hand can say that this pulsatile mass, which might be an aneurism, is also painful, which is therefore maybe a leaking aneurism. You know, there are nuances to the exam that no machine is going to give you.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s a theme Verghese has sounded repeatedly over the years, writing in magazines, including the New Yorker and Atlantic, and now in a best-seller called “Cutting for Stone.” It fulfills a long-held desire to write fiction, as he told this book club in Menlo Park, California.

VERGHESE: (Speaking at book club) Dorothy Allison, a wonderful American writer, she says fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.

DE SAM LAZARO: The setting for Verghese’s novel is far from Silicon Valley — a mission hospital in Ethiopia. It is a textured, 650-page narrative, set amid that country’s turmoil in the 60s and 70s. Its stories of medicine, doctors and future doctors at the hospital all illustrate what the author calls the “Samaritan role” of the healer. Verghese went from med school in India to Boston, Tennessee, Texas, then Stanford. He was born and raised in Ethiopia to parents originally from Kerala, India and from its Syriac Orthodox traditions. Faith was a big part of life for this and other expatriate communities in the Addis Ababa of his youth, which may unwittingly have shaped some of the novel’s characters.

Woman at Book Club: You said that what really inspired you to write the book was you wanted to write a book that would get people interested perhaps in medicine. But there was so much in the book about faith and different types of faith, and so how did you come to have so much of this, of another theme in your book?

VERGHESE: Well, you know, the honest answer is I don’t really know. It all just sort of evolved that way. And I think when you’re in medicine, you agonize over matters of faith.

DE SAM LAZARO: The confluence of faith and medicine, and the mission hospital itself, attracted Duke University Divinity School dean Gregory Jones to Verghese’s book. It was a timely find, just before a recent trip to discuss his church’s own mission work.

GREGORY JONES, Duke University: It becomes a shaping institution that plays a really significant role in any developing country and one that we need to pay a lot more attention to. My trip to London was actually to deal with issues around southern Sudan, and so I was struck by the significant role this hospital was playing in the novel about Ethiopia.

DE SAM LAZARO: And even though its setting seems distant, Jones says the novel’s context is very relevant to many students he sees at Duke.

Gregory Jones

JONES: I think a lot of Christians go into nursing or medicine or other health-related vocations out of a deeply formed and felt Christian vocation, but sometimes the practice of health care, in the United States particularly, often pushes those apart. And I think the novel portrays that in a really beautiful way.

VERGHESE: I joke but only half joke that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.

DE SAM LAZAROAll the emphasis on machines, he says, adds cost to the health care system, and comes at the expense of one of our most important rituals — a visit with one’s doctor.

VERGHESE: Rituals are about transformation. You know, we marry with great ceremony to signal a transformation. We are baptized in a ritual to signal a transformation. The ritual of one individual coming to another and confessing to them things they wouldn’t tell their spouse, their preacher, their rabbi, and then even more incredibly, disrobing and allowing touch, which in any other context would be assault. You know, tell me that that’s not a ritual of great significance. If we short-change the ritual by not being attentive, or you are inputting into the computer while the patient’s talking to you, you basically are destroying the opportunity for the transformation. And what is the transformation? It’s the sealing of the patient-physician bond.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, Verghese says, research is emerging that corroborates the importance of this bond, the virtue of the Samaritan healer.

VERGHESE: We’re learning that you can have a powerful effect on patients, or a powerful negative effect on patients based on context, based on your tone of voice. They are actually associated with significant chemical changes in the brain. The Parkinson’s patients’ dopamine levels go up with a placebo. We’re now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of comfort to get there, which would make your drugs so much more effective. It’s an incredible insight, and you know, a couple of decades now of practicing medicine, it’s lovely to come full circle to where I started, but with the science to back it up.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

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Originally published July 16, 2010

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“Part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey,” says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed’s Warrior Transition Brigade. Produced and edited by Patti Jette Hanley.

CHAPLAIN RANDY HAYCOCK (Walter Reed Army Medical Center): Certainly the idea of pilgrimage is common to many faith traditions, as well as just to human experience. Part of the pilgrimage experience, and a lot of what we do at Walter Reed, is to help people again reconnect with what it means to be a safe, whole, healthy human being.

Speaking in Cathedral: Just relax and try and be in the present moment.

One of the questions that a lot of warriors have when they come to Walter Reed is what’s my life for? They’re looking for a sense of purpose and meaning, and that’s sort of the idea behind the life journey exercise at the beginning is to just get them to stop and reflect a little bit about their life. It’s become for me a kind of metaphor for life itself—that really we’re all on journeys and learning how to deal with things like loss and the horror of engaging in war.

Speaking in Cathedral: Many warriors tell me that they sometimes feel guilty that their friend had died and they hadn’t.

I think that’s part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart. There’s this kind of longing for more in life, and the idea of being on a journey with someone else is something that people get well in military life, because your life depends on the people around you. You gotta know people have your back.

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll walk this way and go into the War Memorial Chapel.

The War Memorial Chapel where they have the opportunity to talk about how their own journey intersected with the journey of their friend and basically just to do some grief work, and telling the story is an important part of healing in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Pilgrim-Soldier: It was like losing a brother, losing, you know, a family member, and that’s just always kind of haunted me.

Thousands of people have come into that little piece of geography to remember their war dead. So I think there is a kind of energy field here that, you know, I could come and just bring soldiers into that space and say “blah blah blah” and something would still happen simply because of the prayers and tears and, you know, heartfelt emotions that others have let loose in that place.

The next step is to gather around the High Altar, and then using that [Eric] Clapton song [“Tears in Heaven”] — there couldn’t be a better song written for warriors, because many of them feel like what’s the sense of going on?

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll call off the names of those we have come to remember…

Pilgrim-Soldier: Lance Cpl. Joseph Jose Gutierrez…

Concluding the way the army ordinarily does with coming to attention, calling off their names, sounding taps helps them to make a letting go of their friend so that they can get on the with the rest of their life.

BOB FAW, correspondent: For the women of the Magdalene community, now mornings begin quietly, with prayer.

WOMEN PRAYING: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

FAW: With meditation and expressions of gratitude.

WOMAN: Today I don’t feel alone. I know God has got me right where he wants me.

FAW: It is a long way from the violence and addiction they have known. Tara Adcock, once in and out of prisons, started that life on the streets of Nashville at 17.

TARA ADCOCK: My pimp—I was just like his everything. He fed me with crack, bought me new clothes. I didn’t know nothing about none of this, and then just one night he said come on I’m taking you and another girl, and she’s going to show you the ropes. So he dropped me off right here. I’ve been dragged up and down this road. I was raped. I hated myself.

FAW: For 12 years, Regina Mullis also worked the streets.

REGINA MULLIS: I never thought that I would be in prostitution and an addict. I did it because this man offered me $300 to be an escort at a dinner ball, and he was a doctor, and he sent for me in a limousine, and I was like, if this is what it’s about I can do this. But throughout the years quickly it went from being a $300 escort to, you know, just accepting $5.

FAW: Regina has a job now after going back to school and reclaiming her children. She survived, along with Tara, with the help of a remarkable program called Magdalene started by a somewhat unconventional Episcopal priest, Becca Stevens—a free spirit who not only preaches barefoot at the Vanderbilt University chapel but who turned a vision into reality.

REV. BECCA STEVENS: I wanted to create a space that felt like it was healing and luxurious and safe and hopeful for women, so that there would be a space to feel like you could do the work and the healing that needed to happen in your life.

FAW: What Stevens created was a nonprofit organization for female addicts and prostitutes, most who have been sexually abused, all who have been raped. By hand they create natural bath and beauty products—soaps, balms, candles—all made under the label Thistle Farms.

STEVENS: The thistle is the weed or the flower, depending on your perspective, that still grows on the streets and the alleys where the women walk. It has the deepest taproot of any plant, and it can push through two, three inches of concrete. It is a great reminder that all of us, with our prickly outer selves, have this beautiful, deep, rich center that’s a gift from God.

FAW: Here they not only pick thistles but crush, moisten, soften and then turn the thistle into paper. With the products and through donations which Thistle Farms has raised, Stevens has opened a residential community of six homes where women off the streets are given rooms and food for two years at no charge. Stevens takes neither federal nor state money.

STEVENS: It’s great because it keeps you pretty honest, and it keeps you working pretty hard. You know, give us this day our daily bread. Be thankful for this day and for all the gifts. I mean people give to us because they’re grateful for all they’ve been given.

FAW: Here residents not only get shelter but medical help, counseling, and spiritual guidance.

STEVENS (speaking to woman): Where is God in this recovery for you?

FAW: And here faith is a component of healing, but no doctrines are taught. Nothing is force-fed or imposed. There is a very spiritual, loving foundation, Magdalene graduate Katie Lynn says, but…

KATIE LYNN: …they don’t push religion on you, so that you can make the choice of your own, because a lot of people such as myself come from a background where I was told that if anything bad I did God was going to get me.

STEVENS: I think most of the women have pretty strong feelings about what their spiritual path looks like, and I’m more interested in encouraging them to have that religious and spiritual voice, where nobody’s saying like this is what you need to believe.

FAW: For the women who come here there is no staff hovering about, no one telling them what to do. What they do get: something most of them have never gotten before.

KATIE LYNN: I felt unconditional love. They loved me for who I was, and they wanted to help me through anything, just to get better.

FAW: At first that environment, that acceptance seemed unreal to Tara and Shelia McClain. When she was very small, Shelia was repeatedly abused for years. Leaving home at 14, getting addicted, at 18 she turned to prostitution. Tara and Shelia bonded when they were working the streets.

ADCOCK: Like we’d go do a trick, a date together, or we’d go to an apartment.

SHELIA MCCLAIN: We were treacherous, okay?

ADCOCK: I would rob and she would…

MCCLAIN: I would flat-back.

ADCOCK: She would flat-back.

MCCLAIN: We were treacherous out there together.

FAW: So on a good day you could make how much?

MCCLAIN: Most days it was easy to make at least $1,000 a day.

ADCOCK: Yeah.

FAW: They both hated it, they say, but neither could break loose.

MCCLAIN: After I turned the trick to get a room, I’d feel the degradation hit and then I’d have to buy dope to medicate how I was feeling about just dealing with the trick, and it’s a vicious cycle, you know.

STEVENS: My theory is no woman ended up on the streets by herself. Whether it’s a failed family, violence experienced early on, she didn’t get out there by herself, and so it’s crazy to think she’s going to come off the streets by herself, you know, out of jail with no provisions. They’re going to call their drug dealer to come get them, and it just starts over again.

FAW: Ready for a change, Shelia wrote to her judge from prison asking to be admitted to the Magdalene program. Two years later, she graduated with the judge by her side. She is different now: clean, owns her own house, is married with two children, and a college student. Tara, who graduates in December, has also put her drug-ridden past behind.

ADCOCK: There was no judgment. They just want to help you. They showed me what I can do, you know, and I believe in myself today.

FAW: Assisted on that Vanderbilt campus chapel by her Grammy-winning songwriter-husband, Marcus Hummon, the barefoot priest sees the Magdalene homes and Thistle Farms as part of her ministry.

STEVENS: I’m doing the best that I can to live out my faith as I understand it, and I’m doing it on the path that I have chosen, and I’ve chosen as an Episcopal priest to do this work.

FAW: Her ministry springs partly from sexual abuse she suffered from a deacon in her church when she was just six to eight years old.

STEVENS: I get some of the recovery issues. I see in my own abuse in my life as in some ways strangely a gift—that I learned a lot. It’s nothing I would have asked for, but it is a gift, and it’s a powerful tool. So I’m a defender of a lot of women, because I know you don’t get over that stuff. I have a tenderness for what it does and how it makes you look at the world.

FAW: Through natural products, private grants, and gifts Stevens has raised nearly $13 million, with it sending the women of Magdalene to visit women in prison. She has also helped fund a school in Ecuador and to help establish a business for women’s groups in Rwanda—abroad and at home demonstrating what she says is the same theme:

STEVENS: That love is the most powerful force for social change. That love could be powerful enough to change a life. And what I think it means now is it has changed my life, and I think I’m really different because of the gift of this work. I believe that more now than when I started out.

FAW: What happens at Thistle Farms and at Magdalene seems to be working. Seventy-two percent of the women who complete the program, says Stevens, are clean two-and-a-half years later. And while not everyone embraces the program—this streetwalker, Angie, said she just wasn’t ready when her old friends, Tara and Katrina, urged her to join— nearly 80 to 100 women are waiting to get in. For those who do graduate from what Becca Stevens has started, there is exhilaration and pride and a conviction that their lives have been transformed.

ADCOCK: I know that now there is a different way, and I will never go back. Never. And a lot of people say you never say never, but I know I will never go back.

MULLIS: My gift now is to be, now that I’m breathing, is to be able to show other women a way out, and Magdalene was that way out for me.

FAW: A way out where abused women bond sharing simple daily chores, where they grow closer helping one another, where, with hands that have known hardship they now make candles which burn sweetly, where the faces change but the circle of healing grows stronger.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Nashville, Tennessee.

CHAPLAIN RANDY HAYCOCK (Walter Reed Army Medical Center): Certainly the idea of pilgrimage is common to many faith traditions, as well as just a human experience. Part of the pilgrimage experience, and a lot of what we do at Walter Reed, is to help people again reconnect with what it means to be a safe, whole, healthy human being.

Speaking in Cathedral: Just relax and try and be in the present moment.

One of the questions that a lot of warriors have when they come to Walter Reed is what’s my life for? They’re looking for a sense of purpose and meaning, and that’s sort of the idea behind the life journey exercise at the beginning is to just get them to stop and reflect a little bit about their life. It’s become for me a kind of metaphor for life itself—that really we’re all on journeys and learning how to deal with things like loss and the horror of engaging in war.

Speaking in Cathedral: Many warriors tell me that they sometimes feel guilty that their friend had died and they hadn’t.

I think that’s part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart. There’s this kind of longing for more in life, and the idea of being on a journey with someone else is something that people get well in military life, because your life depends on the people around you. You gotta know people have your back.

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll walk this way and go into the War Memorial Chapel.

The War Memorial Chapel where they have the opportunity to talk about how their own journey intersected with the journey of their friend and basically just to do some grief work, and telling the story is an important part of healing in cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Pilgrim-Soldier: It was like losing a brother, losing, you know, a family member, and that’s just always kind of haunted me.

Thousands of people have come into that little piece of geography to remember their war dead. So I think there is a kind of energy field here that, you know, I could come and just bring soldiers into that space and say “blah blah blah” and something would still happen simply because of the prayers and tears and, you know, heartfelt emotions that others have let loose in that place.

The next step is to gather around the High Altar, and then using that [Eric] Clapton song [“Tears in Heaven”] — there couldn’t be a better song written for warriors, because many of them feel like what’s the sense of going on?

Speaking in Cathedral: We’ll call off the names of those we have come to remember…

Pilgrim-Soldier: Lance Cpl. Joseph Jose Gutierrez…

Concluding the way the army ordinarily does with coming to attention, calling off their name, sounding taps helps them to make a letting go of their friend so that they can get on the with the rest of their life.