Regarding “A compassionate budget for state's future” (Dialog, June 29):

The faith leaders are right – a budget is a moral document that reflects the values of a society. A budget is also a plan. It tells us where we choose to be in the future.

IMMIGRATION REFORM

Ever since Congress failed to approve immigration reform last year, a pro-enforcement mindset has taken hold at every level of government. Along the border, a fence that symbolizes our failed immigration rules goes up rapidly, over the objections of adjacent communities. In cities and towns, immigrants are prey to random raids, punitive ordinances and policies that criminalize their status. What emerges from this patchwork of measures is the picture of a nation desperately in need of a sensible immigration plan, but clueless about how to achieve it. . ..

– Maj. Steve Beck, U.S. Marine Corps

Sometimes Beck would linger in his vehicle in front of an American home, like that of the parents of Lance Cpl. Kyle Burns in Laramie, Wyo. Beck knew that, as Jim Sheeler writes, every second he waited “was one more tick of his wristwatch that, for the family inside the house, everything remained the same.”

Beck – now Lt. Col. Beck – was a CACO, a casualty assistance calls officer, whose duty was to inform a spouse or parents that their Marine had been killed. He is the scarlet thread – like the stripes on Marines' dress-blue trousers, symbolizing shed blood – that connects the heart-rending stories in Sheeler's “Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives.” The book, which proves that the phrase “literary journalism” is not an oxymoron, expands the meticulous and marvelously modulated reporting he did for The Rocky Mountain News, and for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. His subject is how America honors fallen warriors.