Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

But my real purpose visiting his grave site and the others at Arlington is to confront the dictatorship of chance, which compounds the cruelty of loss by allocating it for no clear reason at all. To die taking a hill is one thing, but a soldier hit by an IED is basically the victim of an assassination. Like an assassin, the bomber is out to destroy a symbol, who happens to be a human being, without really knowing or caring about the most important qualities of his victim.