On Veterans Day, Remembering David Weir

Remembering: It is December 2005, and I am the editor of a weekly newspaper in Cleveland, Tennessee. As Christmas approaches,I sit in the newspaper’s office and talk with a young woman and the parents of her husband, to whom she has been married for a year. As we talk, her 10-month-old son plays with the son of the paper’s designer.

The boy’s father is not present. He is in Iraq, and will miss his son’s first Christmas. He enlisted two years ago, at the age of 21, knowi...