When he was working in Afghanistan, Jeremy called home often and made the adventure sound like a vacation. He talked about the food, the hotels — not the danger.
"He wouldn't tell me anything about it because he didn't want me to worry," his sister, Heather, said.
The risk became real at the end of 2009, when the Wise parents were celebrating the birth of Ben's baby boy in Washington state. Amid the celebration, word came from overseas: A suicide bomber had killed Jeremy at a CIA base in Afghanistan.
His family met his remains in Dover, Del. It was a cold, gray day and the family waited inside a bus that felt like a funeral parlor, Heather recalled. Ben took Heather's hand in his and they whispered memories about their brother.
Deployments were harder after that.
Ben and Beau headed back overseas not long after the funeral. The war started wearing on Ben, a medic who repaired the wounds that men inflict on each other. He worried about his younger brother serving in another part of Afghanistan.
"(Beau's) heading home here in the next few days, which is a huge load off my mind," Ben wrote in a Facebook message to a friend.
He waited for his own homecoming. During his final deployment, Ben would tell his sister stories about his son, Luke. Then he would cut himself off, unable to talk about the baby boy he couldn't hold in his arms.
"The pain comes in when you have to think about home, think about the people you love and then just try to block it out ... for your family and for your fellow soldiers," Heather recalled him saying.
He prayed. He had faith that he would come home. So much faith that he turned down a friend's offer to ship him a care package in December, telling him that he would be packing up by the time it arrived.
The next month, an insurgent shot Ben after he and his fellow soldiers saved a number of women and children in Afghanistan. A medic unto the end, he helped tend to his own wounds before he was flown to a hospital in Germany.
Beau caught a flight and accompanied Ben's wife to the hospital, where she saw her husband for the last time before becoming a widow. Ben fought to stay alive, even after doctors cut off his legs, even as his body failed, even as his organs started shutting down. He died on Jan. 15, shortly before his parents arrived to say goodbye.
Beau called Heather.
"We were crying and I said, 'It's just you and me now, bro,'" she said. "Just us two."
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Again, the family found themselves in the same chapel, the same veterans cemetery, to say goodbye.
They moved Jeremy's grave so that the brothers could lie side by side in Suffolk, Va.
"To lose Jeremy was devastating," his widow, Dana, said. "To lose Ben was just ... you throw your hands up in the air."
Each brother's tombstone cites part of the Bible. Jeremy's points to a chapter that's often read at happier times: 1 Corinthians 13. Part of it reads: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me."
The family still calls them boys.
The youngest, Beau, is planning to move closer to Ben's family. Later this year, his mother says, he'll transfer from his base in Hawaii to one on the mainland. He'll remain in the military, at least for now.
He will not deploy for war again.
Though the Marines will not talk specifically about Beau's case, the military has policies in place to protect surviving sons like Beau and families like the Wises. It's rare for brothers to die in the same war, but not unheard of. One of the most famous cases of siblings dying in war is the five Sullivan brothers, who died together at sea during a battle in World War II.
Mary Wise says the military assured her that Beau won't be sent into conflict again.
Their family has sacrificed enough. More than enough.
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