Recording Every Fallen Soldier

WUNC | By Brent Wolfe

Published January 3, 2011 at 4:50 AM EST

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A North Carolina woman is beginning her sixth year chronicling every U.S. military casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Caroline McKinley lives near Camp Lejeune. She posts stories about every soldier killed on her website, Freedom Remembered. McKinley says the site is particularly useful for soldiers still serving in Afghanistan and Iraq:

"They don't get to come home. They don't get to come home and pay their respects at a funeral for example, or spend time with the family. These are their buddies. So they don't know what happened. They don't know where they were buried. And they come to my site, and they see that."

McKinley says she's posted stories about more than three thousand soldiers. She says she'll keep working until she has an entry for every soldier killed in the two conflicts. McKinley supports the website herself with some help from donations.

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Brent Wolfe

Brent Wolfe grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and majored in American Studies at Tufts University outside Boston. In college, Brent was inspired by the narrative journalism style of J. Anthony Lukas' "Common Ground," the story of school desegregation and court ordered busing in Boston. After college, he donned a ranger hat with the National Park Service to tell visitors the story of Boston's African American community in the 19th century. Brent eventually made his way to public radio- learning the basics at WBUR in Boston and doing political reporting at KQED in San Francisco. He moved on to report for WILL in Champaign-Urbana and then Minnesota Public Radio in Rochester where he covered stories from medical research at the Mayo Clinic to a gopher catching festival. Brent joined WUNC's reporting staff in March 2000, became news editor in February 2003, and News Director in 2011. Brent served on the Board of Directors of the Public Media Journalists Association as Treasurer from 2019 to 2021.

See stories by Brent Wolfe