When I was deployed to Iraq my platoon ran the post office on the FOB, and one of the jobs we all had was going through packages that other soldiers were mailing home to make sure everything they wanted to send was safe/legal to ship. There were several instances where I had to go through footlockers that belonged to soldiers who were killed (their belongings get mailed back to their family once the family has been properly notified; the shipments are handled differently/tracked differently than regular mail). It always fucked me up to go through someone's stuff, knowing they were now dead. Like, you get this little window into their lives: pictures of their family, CDs of the music they liked, books they were reading, all that shit, but then you see the bookmark in that book where they left off and you realize they're never going to finish it, just little things like that that were hard to process, whether you personally knew that soldier or not.

But then it gets even more fucked up because weeks and sometimes months after they were killed, they're still getting mail from people in the states that sent it way before that person was killed, so now you have stacks of letters and packages and post cards for a dead person that they're never gonna get, and the post cards are filled with "I love you and miss you" etc etc, and it kinda crushes your soul a little bit, because you have to go through it all just like the footlocker and ship it all back to the family.