At Dover, the couple’s oldest son finally appeared, the second-to-last of the dead: Jeremy Wise, 35, an ex-Navy SEAL and CIA security contractor.

He’d been one of seven Americans killed by a suicide bomber at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30, 2009, in one of the deadliest attacks on agency personnel in decades. The carnage at Khost could be measured not only by the number of bodies that had been flown to Dover, Del., but also by the powerful men awaiting them, including then-CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, and senior executives from Xe Services, one of the CIA’s most secretive contractors and Jeremy’s employer.

Jeremy’s 28-year-old widow, Dana, stood next to the other Wises as a white-gloved military team slowly carried her husband’s remains to a transport truck. His younger brothers, Ben, a medic in the Green Berets about to leave for Afghanistan, and Beau, a Marine who had flown home from Afghanistan, clasped each other’s arms.

“I can’t believe this. I am going to be the oldest now,” Beau remembers Ben telling him, as frost cut through the air.

Three days later, at Jeremy’s memorial service at a Virginia Beach military chapel, Ben and Beau strode up to the dais in uniform, side by side. Ben wanted to speak, but asked his younger brother to take over if he fell apart in front of hundreds of mourners. Instead, Ben spoke with firmness, in a gruff, almost rumbling whisper.

Unlike his sister, Heather, who recounted the time Jeremy went surfing during a hurricane and the childlike way he played ninjas with his 6-year-old stepson, Ben kept his eulogy short.

The Green Beret described how he’d relied on Jeremy. He “always seemed to find me right after a mission, when I was exhausted,” Ben said. And he paid tribute to Jeremy’s unshrinking candor. “You would get his honest opinion, whether you wanted it or not.”

Ben called him “Jerms” and Jeremy called him “Benny.” Jeremy had been his confidant, his rival, his co-conspirator, his inspiration.

“I can’t imagine my life without my big brother,” Ben said. “What a mess I’d be in had God not used Jeremy to set me back on the right track more times than I can recall.”

He paused and looked up. “Jeremy, I miss you, and I love you, brother. And [I’ll] see you again.”

But after high school, all three brothers struggled to settle on a direction. Jeremy won an appointment to West Point but only lasted a semester before enrolling at Liberty University in Virginia, then transferring again to Hendrix College in Arkansas. Ben, who once had hoped to become a missionary overseas, jumped from Hendrix to Southern Arkansas University before dropping out and becoming a waiter at a Little Rock steakhouse. Beau, a percussionist who earned a music scholarship to Southern Arkansas, partied too much and dropped out.

Over time, each brother came to see the military as the solution. It offered the action they craved: “I just want to kick down doors. Shoot machine guns. Blow things up,” Beau told Jeremy. And it promised a sense of purpose, especially after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon burned.

Suddenly, a nation — and a family — were going to war.

‘An inner strength’

They’d been running for miles in jungle boots and camouflage when Jeremy’s legs buckled and he collapsed on the powdery sands of Coronado Beach. He’d suffered heat stroke in a place where physical weakness isn’t tolerated: the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training program in Coronado, Calif.

The grueling six-month course requires men to run without knowing for how long, swim several miles in the frigid Pacific and go days with almost no sleep. The vast majority of candidates fail.

By mid-2002, Jeremy had become one of the washouts, stunning his fellow SEAL trainees. “He could do at least 40 pull-ups, maybe more, from a dead-hang,” says Brooks Crenshaw, a close Navy friend of Jeremy’s. “He was a stud.”

Jeremy was ordered to a kind of Navy purgatory, Crenshaw recalls, forced to serve as a glorified janitor and live with the other SEAL dropouts in a separate barracks until a slot opened on a ship.

But Jeremy refused to accept his fate. He asked for a meeting with Ryan Zinke, then the Naval Special Warfare Center’s No. 2 officer, and requested another chance. In his eight years in that job, Zinke says he gave that to about 10 people, out of about 2,500.

“Jeremy convinced me he was worth a second shot. He wasn’t intimidated by me,” Zinke says. “Jeremy had an inner strength, the one thing you can’t train.”

‘Jeremy’s gone’

Five days after Christmas, Dana was about to take Ethan to run errands when two men from Xe appeared at her house. Their pronouncement that Jeremy was dead shocked her so much that she kept pressing her visitors over and over: “What happened?”

Her husband, she later learned, was among those waiting when a red Subaru pulled up bearing Humam al-Balawi, the jihadist whom the CIA thought it had turned and whom it decided not to search in advance. Beneath his flowing kameez tunic, the Jordanian pediatrician had strapped on a suicide vest filled with 30 pounds of homemade explosives and hundreds of nails. Jeremy and another Xe colleague drew their guns as soon as Balawi balked at getting out of the car on the side where they were standing. As he emerged from the other side, they shouted at him to show them his palms. Instead, he declared in Arabic, “There is no god but God,” and hit the detonator.

It was Jeremy’s sister, Heather, who had to call Ben. He was hosting their parents at his home in Washington state, where his wife, Traci, had just given birth to their first child, a son named Luke.

“Jeremy’s gone,” she told Ben.

Ben swore, Traci remembers, and then “he was motionless.” Later that day, she says, “I asked him, ‘Are you feeling this?’ He said, ‘I have to stay strong for my parents.’ ”

Mary and Jean went from celebrating Christmas with their first-born grandson to mourning the death of their first-born son. “We just sat in the kitchen. I couldn’t even cry,” Mary says. “Jean’s lips were quivering.”

Jeremy had sometimes been hard on Ben, who was four inches shorter and less physically imposing than his charismatic older brother. He’d been infuriated in 2000 when Ben announced he was joining the Army as a grunt instead of an officer, pushing Ben up against the wall of their Little Rock apartment to express his disapproval. And he’d initially questioned Ben’s decision to marry Traci, a divorcee five years his senior with two children.

Through every fraternal throw-down, though, Jeremy had remained Ben’s inspiration. And now he was gone.

It took a little longer for the news to reach Beau, who was with his platoon mates in Afghanistan, poised to pounce on a Taliban safe haven. The lead gunner in the turret of an all-terrain vehicle, Beau was so amped up for the assault that he’d given himself a mohawk — a “warhawk,” he called it.

But on New Year’s Day, his convoy returned to base, where Beau was ordered off his truck. Instantly, he thought he was in trouble. Was it the mohawk? The other members of the platoon were stripping off their gear, but he kept his helmet on until he was summoned to the base’s command operations center. A chaplain was waiting for him. Beau knew this conversation had only one destination.

“Is your brother Jeremy Jason Wise?” the chaplain asked him.

“Yes,” Beau said.

Intelligence reports warned about the mission’s worst-case scenario: enemies attacking from one of the caves west of the village’s homes.

On the morning of Jan. 9, 2012, it took just one hour for the worst-case scenario to begin unfolding. At 7:30 a.m., AK-47 gunfire rang out from one of the caves. An Afghan commando was killed, then a second man took a round of fire in his face, says one of Ben’s teammates, an active-duty Green Beret who agreed to describe the operation only if he wasn’t identified.

Ben bandaged the commando’s purple face and helped him to a dry riverbed for the medevac. Meanwhile, Apache helicopters gouged the caves with laser-guided Hellfire missiles. After the caves had cooked for hours, Ben’s fellow Green Beret didn’t think anyone could still be alive, but he ordered the Afghan commandos to check anyway. They flatly refused.

Ben offered to go first. He tossed a fragmentation grenade inside the cave, then swept around the corner and sprayed gunfire. But gunfire rattled right back, smacking Ben in his body armor and slamming him onto his back. As he writhed on the ground, more bullets pierced his legs.

Air Force Capt. Blake Luttrell fired into the cave and tossed a smoke grenade for cover, then grabbed Ben by his vest, pulling him to safety. “My gut feeling was that he was going to pull through it,” says Luttrell, who was awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day.

Down by the riverbed, Ben’s comrades prepped him for the medevac. His fellow Green Beret applied tourniquets and taped a fentanyl lollipop painkiller to his finger, easing him into a haze.

Ben asked which parts of his body might be missing. “Everything’s good,” his friend assured him.

“I don’t know what went wrong,” Ben told him. “I don’t know what went wrong.”

“I told him there was nothing on Earth that I could give him that was as amazing as what was awaiting him, and the struggles he’d have here on Earth weren’t worth it,” she says. “I told him that it was okay for him to go.”

By the following morning, he was being kept alive by shots of epinephrine every 60 seconds. His liver was failing.

Beau asked the doctor if Ben could be kept alive long enough for Mary and Jean — who were an hour or two away from landing in Germany — to say goodbye. “The doctor just said he could take him back to surgery and make his pain worse, or we could let him go,” Beau recalls.

A decision had to be made. Beau held Ben’s left hand. Traci hovered on her husband’s right side. As a chaplain prayed next to the bed, they watched him die.

‘It took my breath away’

One by one, the men in charge of the war learned of Ben’s fate.

At the Pentagon, the name inside the casualty folder marked with the big blue “X” looked familiar to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash. A Green Beret named Wise from Arkansas? He had to be another Wise son — a realization that startled Panetta, who’d been CIA director when Jeremy Wise was killed, and stunned others, too.

“Oh, God,” Marine Commandant Gen. James F. Amos remembers when he was told by an aide that Ben was the second Wise brother to die in Afghanistan. “It took my breath away.” He wrote the family a letter of condolence, as did then-CIA Director David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. John F. Mulholland Jr., then the commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

The Wises are not the only family to lose two children in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts that have cost almost 6,800 U.S. military and civilian lives. At least five other families have endured the deaths of two sons, according to a Defense Department tally, though only three have been identified in media reports. The Hubbards, from California, buried two brothers who died in Iraq, one in a 2004 roadside-bomb explosion and the other in a 2007 helicopter crash. The Westbrooks, from New Mexico, lost one son to a bomb in Iraq in 2005 and another to insurgent fire in Afghanistan in 2009. The Velezes, from Texas, mourned one son killed by enemy fire in Iraq in 2004 and another who shot himself in Afghanistan in 2006.

After Ben’s death, Panetta called Mary and added a personal note to the Pentagon’s formal letter: “I am so very lost in the emotion of losing another son of yours to combat. As the father of 3 sons, I cannot imagine the pain you must be feeling. And yet, I know that like Jeremy, Ben was doing what he wanted — to fight for all of us. He is a true American hero and patriot. God bless him and you.”

‘He’s done with combat’

Beau practically had the 747 to himself.

It was late January, and Beau was on his way to a familiar place: Dover Air Force Base. He left the plane’s upper level to scan the hollowed-out fuselage below, its floor lined with tracks securing seven metal cases draped in U.S. flags. One held Ben’s body. The others belonged to six Marines who had been killed in a helicopter crash.

Seven cases — the same number as when Jeremy’s body had been brought home two years earlier.

At about 1:45 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2012, the 747 touched down in Delaware. Beau joined his parents and, to his surprise, the commandant of the Marine Corps. Amos and his wife had traveled to Dover to salute the six Marines killed. They also wanted to offer their condolences to the Wise family.

Beau grew nervous about meeting his boss. He hadn’t shaved and was wearing the wrong attire, his desert camouflage uniform. Plus, he dreaded what promises Amos might give his parents about his future deployments.

Amos, wracked from having just spoken with the grieving families of the six Marines, approached Mary and just held her. “I am very, very sorry,” he remembers telling her. He thanked Beau for his service, and then looked at his mother.

“He’s done with combat,” Amos vowed to Mary.

She was grateful for his words; Beau was not. “My heart sank a little,” he says. He’d become what the military calls a sole survivor, a World War II-era designation popularized in recent years by the Steven Spielberg movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

Beau recoils when people compare him to the movie’s title character, a young soldier whose three brothers have been killed in World War II and whose rescue has been ordered by Gen. George C. Marshall.

“This isn’t World War II. We weren’t drafted,” he says. “Ben and Jeremy would be furious [at the reference]. We enlisted. We all knew what we were doing, and we were told many times not to. But we all wanted it.”

This was especially true for Beau, who thrilled to the percussive sound of machine-gun fire, who found pleasure in disassembling and re-assembling his .50 caliber weapon each day, who embraced his fellow Marines as if they were another set of brothers.

At 5:15 a.m., Beau, Mary and Jean took their places on the tarmac at Dover in almost the same place they’d stood two years and 19 days earlier. Ben’s remains were the last to come off the plane.

Seven white-gloved members of an Army “carry team” approached the plane, their steps growing louder and louder. Ben’s case was lowered on a mechanical ramp. Senior military leaders and a chaplain approached, bowing their heads for 75 seconds in prayer. Then the case was marched 33 steps to a box truck, whose blue interior lights cast a glow on the flag.

Beau says he watched the ritual with one thought: “Really, God? Really? Again?”

The 30-year-old sergeant has spent much of the past two years working as a clerk at the base’s Leatherneck Lounge. There, in a yellow-walled snack shop where Marines eat, watch TV and have their pick of energy drinks, Beau signs off on food deliveries and keeps track of the cash. Some days, he leads training sessions in martial arts and marksmanship.

At home, he brews his own beer, storing the barley and hops in an R2-D2 soda chiller, an homage to the “Star Wars” movies he and Ben watched obsessively as kids. His wife custom-orders bottle labels that read, “Wise Ass Honey Badger Ale.”

Beau tries not to complain or dwell on what he’s lost. His parents, he says, have lost more. “I still have my wife and parents. But how does a mother lose two sons? How does a father?”

Jean, 68, and Mary, 63, rely on their faith that Jeremy and Ben have been reunited. “I can visualize it,” says Jean, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. He imagines them in heaven, teasing each other and wrestling as they did when they were boys.

In November, the Wises gathered on a hilltop overlooking El Dorado, where two granite benches were being unveiled on Veterans Day, one engraved with Jeremy’s name and the other with Ben’s.

Before the ceremony, Beau and his parents stood by the benches, still draped in black cloth, greeting old friends. The bleachers on the south lawn of the community college, which is home to the town’s Sept. 11 memorial, filled with veterans who wanted to pay tribute to the family’s sacrifice. One of them, a woman who had served in the Navy and once belonged to the same church as the Wises, approached Beau.

“I am sorry about your brothers,” she said, before echoing the words Ben had once spoken about Jeremy.

“You’ll see them again,” she promised.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the Marine.