A time to mourn

America, October, 2004

"NO YOUNG MAN BELIEVES he shall ever die," said William Hazlitt, the 19th-century British essayist. That shrewd observation is contradicted in times of war. A 22-year-old machine gunner with a French battalion in Korea in the 1950's wrote to his father: "In our time, when you look around for the faces of the dead, they are all 20 years old. Young death is no longer an aristocracy."

Nor is it today when more than 1,000 young men and women in the U.S. military forces have already been killed in the Iraq war and when that number grows every week.

Psychologists are fond of a classic simile that compares the course of every life to the trajectory of an arrow shot into the air. Once launched, it mounts ever higher and then levels off, until its are declines and...