Although Beck had no training as a casualty assistance officer, in a way he had trained for it all of his life.

His earliest memory begins with a needle.

As a toddler, he learned to hold a syringe to inject his diabetic mother with insulin. His parents had divorced when he was 1. Sometimes, he was the only one there to help.

As he grew up, the family scraped by. Some days he wore Salvation Army clothes to school. Things got harder from there.

When he was 13, Beck and his mother watched his 3-year-old brother die after being hit by a car. Months earlier, young Steve had taught the little boy to play catch.

Before the funeral, Beck stood at the open casket and placed his brother's baseball glove inside.

It took years for Beck and his mother to recover. She retreated and he rebelled, leaving home early.

Eventually, Beck channeled his anger into books, even planning to go to medical school, where he hoped to find a cure for his mother's diabetes.

But the stirrings of the Persian Gulf War shook him as he prepared to take his medical school entrance exams. His father had been a Marine and Beck had long thought of joining. He figured this would be the war of his generation and he didn't want to miss it.

His mother died while he was attending officer training school. When he lost her, he also lost his reason for studying medicine. He never went back.

Though his relationship with his father - a cop and former Drug Enforcement Administration agent - wasn't as close as that with his mother, they eventually reconciled. Then his father was diagnosed with cancer.

"On my last trip out to see him, I took a drive with him and asked him if there was anything I could do," Beck said.

"He asked me if I could get a color guard at his funeral. That's all he asked for: a Marine color guard."

"I said, 'Dad, that's easy.'

"I didn't get to talk to him again."

Witnesses to sacrifice

On a winter night, Beck pulled his SUV into Denver International Airport and looked into the sky, staring at all the lights that were not stars.

A limousine pulled in behind him, followed by an empty hearse.

It was early December, nine months before he would stand on the tarmac in Reno alongside a 23-year-old widow.

There is no rule requiring airports to allow a family into a secure area to receive the body of a fallen service member, and some airports around the country have refused, Beck said, shaking his head.

"In my mind, this is the first time that a Marine is back on Colorado soil, and (the family) deserves to be there," Beck said. "If I had my way, they'd know which frickin' light in the sky is him, which plane is bringing him in all the way."

Inside the SUV, his phone rang. He looked at the number and smiled.

"Hi, babe," he said. "We're at the airport, getting ready to bring one of our guys home. How are the kids?"

For Beck's wife, Julie, and their three young children, his job has sometimes meant his absence on birthdays and anniversaries. He spent last Thanksgiving at a funeral.

Still, when he wakes up in the middle of the night to an ominous call, Julie wakes with him and remains nearby until he heads off to knock on another door. He talks about her the way the families he cares for talk about him: She's his rock.

"Hang in there," he said into the phone. "I'll be home late."

Then another call. Again, he recognized the number: another one of his families.

The contact list on Beck's cell phone is programmed with the numbers of grieving parents and spouses from Rapid City to Reno.

But he's not the only one, he insists, over and over. He said he takes his cues from his Marines, the men and women who get involved to the point where many of their families say they might as well have been deployed overseas.

"This job is all about sacrifice," Beck said. "We sacrifice our family stability. Many of us sacrifice income. We sacrifice our bodies. We break things. We're hard on ourselves. We break each other. And we're asked to make the ultimate sacrifice."

Outside the car, a Denver police officer's walkie-talkie crackled and he motioned to Beck.

The cortege pulled behind the police escort, heading toward the tarmac.

"There are moments in this experience that energize you, and there are moments that suck you dry," Beck said. "Those moments are short, but they're so defining.

"And you're about to see one of them."

As jet engines roared around him, Beck looked at the plane. The Marines marched to the cargo hold, toward the casket.

"See the people in the windows? They'll sit right there in the plane, watching those Marines," Beck said. "You gotta wonder what's going through their minds, knowing that they're on the plane that brought him home."

Commercial airplanes transport caskets every day - including service members killed in action. For the most part, the passengers have no idea what lies below.

Most people will never see the Transportation Security Administration officials standing on the tarmac with their hands over their hearts as a body is unloaded. They won't see the airport police and firefighters lined up alongside their cars and engines, lights flashing, saluting the hearse on its way out.

Occasionally, a planeload of passengers is briefly exposed to the hard reality outside the cabin.

"They're going to remember being on that plane for the rest of their lives," Beck said, looking back at the passengers. "They're going to remember bringing that Marine home.