Last night, we got word that Ben, a kid from our neighborhood, was killed in Afghanistan this past week.

          Perhaps, at 32, he was not technically a kid, but knowing him in the context of the neighborhood, in the context of his family, somehow lends him kid status, as does- heartbreakingly- the fact he still had his whole life ahead of him.

          Ben’s death forced me to take a good hard look at my own assumptions about those who serve. Unlike the Vietnam years, when family members and friends were drafted according to their lottery number, having an all-volunteer military has changed the face of the typical serviceman/woman. I was guilty of assuming that soldiers came from military or disadvantaged backgrounds, with internally or externally limited options. I was guilty of assuming soldiers didn’t come from places like our tree-lined neighborhood. Unlike Ben, with his master’s degree from Tufts, I was guilty of assuming soldiers aren’t highly educated, nor avid humanitarians like Ben, who’d founded Clearwater Initiative, a non-profit agency dedicated to providing clean water to refugees and other at-risk populations. But all of these ways in which Ben did not fit my woefully narrow preconceptions doesn’t matter at all, because when he was on the ground in Afghanistan, he was not an anomaly. He was a soldier.

          Ben’s death, for me, stripped away the comfortable emotional distance I’d created. When a combat death occurred, I felt my sorrow in the abstract, as it involved a stranger’s son or daughter, in some other neighborhood far away. It has come as a terrible shock to realize the truth-that the face of this war is our own.