"From Your Archive Competition"

Marine Corporal John Blocker never saw the homecoming his parents and peers gave him when he came back to Jacksonville on November 8, 1983. He came home in a casket. The readers of the Florida Times-Union saw the weeping mother. They saw the father comforting his wife while he stared in disbelief at the casket being rolled across the tarmac, and they saw a Marine officer, sharply saluting a comrade who had died. In the one image, I had accurately portrayed the actual cost to that small town without actually showing an image of the fallen soldier.