That is, until a community must welcome a dead soldier home.
So far, 1,980 American fighters have been killed in Afghanistan. A recent surge of insider attacks by Afghan security forces has claimed the lives of 40 allied combatants, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. Americans may have pushed the war from their everyday consciousness. But losing neighbors and classmates, losing a Greg Copes or a Kyle McClain, keeps turning a distant war into an anguished and very personal reality.