Were They Always This Young?

It’s been a long time since we had to confront this many U.S. military deaths. Not long enough.

Arlington National Cemetery near Washington D.C. October 12, 2014. (photo: Torsten Reimer)

Certain things stand out about the 13 military service men and women who were killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul this week.

There are several proverbs, from all over the world, to describe the sensation many of us are feeling now.

One is, “You can never go home again.” And that’s a hard truth. It means that even if your old childhood home still exists somewhere, preserved in amber and plastic sheeting, with everything just as you left it, you can never really go back to your old childhood bedroom, ever again.

Your childhood bedroom might be exactly the same; but you will be different.

Someone more Zen, and perhaps less fatalistic, might express the same sentiment as: “You can never enter the same river twice.”

This illustration is in many ways more apt. After all, your childhood bedroom, such as it ever was, is probably not frozen in amber somewhere, preserved just as you left it. The river of time has swept on in the years since and swept every particle of that old bedroom along with it.

The river metaphor has a double meaning: You can never enter the same river twice because the river is always moving and will be different- from bedrock to…