Where do we find such men?

We don’t spend much time examining the underpinnings on which our lives rest. We remember the cops and firefighters and EMTs when we need them—and when we need them, we really need them—but otherwise, we’ve got things to do, or think about doing, or get out of doing. We may volunteer to do some work for our church or political party or civic club. Or maybe not. We may vote, or not.

We sit in classrooms listening to another lecture. Or maybe even giving one. We take the kids to school on the way to work. Or climb in the truck for another day at the construction site. We stay busy or, what’s much harder, try to look busy. We go on about our business or tend to everybody else’s, whatever’s our pleasure in a free country.

We sit in comfortable, well-lit offices and add rows of figures, or go to sales meetings. Maybe we worry about the stock market, or just wonder how our team will do next weekend. Some of us make a full-time job of feeling sorry for ourselves, others are too busy helping folks, bless them.

Maybe once a year, on Veterans Day, we may see the pictures in the paper about graveyard ceremonies, and a president lays a wreath. For most of us, thank God, it’s all pretty abstract. Because somebody else is doing the fighting and dying so we can stick to our routines. Peace, freedom security . . . . It’s a great thing when they’re routine. And can be taken for granted with pat phrases like “Thank you for your service.”

Afghanistan, Iraq, they’re far away. There used to be a phrase in the editorial-writing business, Afghanistanism, to sum up the kind of opinion piece about some far-away place or abstract idea (“Whither NATO?”) that was sure to bore readers. Thumbsuckers, they were called in the trade. The kind of thing Thomas Friedman can churn out by the yard from any place on the globe for the grayer sections of the New York Times.

You don’t hear references to Afghanistanism any more. Because these days Afghanistan has become all too close to our lives, all too real. It’s no longer some remote abstraction. But most of us still don’t spend much time thinking about it—till we have to. Then on some weekday morning a headline in the Arkansas section catches our eye: “Family suffers death of second brother in Afghanistan violence.”

His name was Benjamin Wise, a graduate of West Side Christian School in El Dorado. Age 34, Sgt. First Class Wise died last year at a military hospital in Germany of wounds received when his outfit ran into small-arms fire somewhere in Balkh Province. He was a medic himself, and had volunteered for the Special Forces back in 2005.

He’d joined the Army as an infantryman in November of 2000 and had served in Iraq, twice. This was his second deployment to Afghanistan. He left behind a 2-yearold son, 12-year-old stepson and 10-year-old stepdaughter.

He had come home in 2009 for a funeral—that of his broth-