When I arrived in North Carolina in September to begin work as a reporter for the Fayetteville Observer, I realized how removed I was from military life.

		April Johnston is a staff writer at the Fayetteville Observer, where this was first published (johnstona@fayobserver.com). Sgt. Thomas Vandling Jr. of Bellevue was buried Friday at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Washington County.

Having Fort Bragg nearby meant, to me, that I could eat at the chain restaurant of my choice and that men were sure to outnumber women at the bar. I really knew just one person serving in Iraq: Sgt. Thomas Edward Vandling Jr. of the 303rd Psychological Operations Company.

But, somehow -- maybe in ignorance, maybe for my own selfish protection -- I had separated Tommy the soldier from Tommy the lifelong friend. Until New Year's Day.

I was sitting in my parents' kitchen in Hampton when the phone rang. It was 1:43. We had just finished lunch. My parents were getting ready to drive me to the airport, ending my five-day visit to Pittsburgh. My brother was watching the second half of the Texas Tech-New Mexico basketball game.

He never saw the end, because my mom screamed. "Oh God, Tom! No!"

Tom -- Tommy's father and my dad's friend since they were in grade school -- called to tell us Tommy was dead. He was driving a Humvee just south of Baghdad when he noticed fresh asphalt, a telltale sign of a roadside bomb. He swerved. The explosion killed him anyway.

"Mother of Christ," my dad yelled over and over, standing in the middle of the kitchen, his hands balled into angry fists.

My youngest brother locked himself in his room to cry. My other brother, one of Tommy's best friends, collapsed to the floor in a shoulder-shaking sob.

I couldn't find words. All I could do was stand with my hand over my mouth, feeling something horrible growing like a tumor in my chest: anger, anguish and total, utter helplessness.

"No," I said to myself again and again. "It can't be true."

Tommy was my first friend in the world.

When we were small, we played cars on the kitchen floor in his parents' house in Bellevue. We swam in the ocean together every summer. And every summer his fair skin burned.

He was the one who told me, in a whisper, that Santa Claus wasn't real. When I was 7, I wanted to marry him. When we were teenagers, I dated his friends instead.

I was there when he earned his black belt in tae kwon do. He was there when I saw my first shooting star.

He picked me up in his Mustang convertible -- a car he paid for with the money he won from the first lottery ticket he ever bought -- to take me for ice cream. I picked him up in my 1997 Nissan Sentra to go gambling in Canada.

Our phone conversations could last for hours and it felt as if we hadn't talked for more than 10 minutes.

I loved his laugh. He loved the look I gave him when I pretended to be angry.

Tommy adored children. He read Nostradamus. He talked about himself in the third person. His tongue was so long he liked to say he could pick his nose with it, if he wanted to. He didn't.

Before Tommy went to boot camp four years ago, he gave me his favorite baseball cap, the red one with the dragon on it that he never washed and that I always loved. He told me to keep it safe until he got back.

I put it in my refrigerator next to a bottle of beer, took a picture of it and mailed it to him. He thought that was hysterical. He told me to keep the hat. It obviously had more fun with me than with him.

I saw him last in September, at my grandfather's funeral, just days before he returned to Iraq for another tour.

"Be safe," I told him.

He laughed at me, palmed my head like a basketball and said, "April, it doesn't matter how safe I am."

I hated those words then, because I knew they were true. I hate them now, because they are reality.

The first thing I did when I finally got back to my apartment in Fayetteville on Jan. 2 was pull out Tommy's hat, the one he never washed, and bury my face inside of it. It still smelled like him.

I thought about his mom, Dee, who, the first time Tommy returned from Iraq, bought the biggest yellow ribbon I've ever seen to tie around their house.

I thought about his dad, Tom, who had to drag that ribbon outside and find a way to keep it attached to the bricks.

I thought about his brother, Jimmy, who simultaneously acted as Tommy's teasing target and sidekick.

I thought about his little brother, Mike, who wanted nothing more than to be just like Tommy.

I thought about his sister, Elizabeth, who hollered every time Tommy flicked her on the forehead -- which was all the time -- but who couldn't stop crying when he left.

And I thought about Fayetteville and all of the Fort Bragg military families living there. I still don't understand the sacrifices they make and the fears they have. But I get the pain.

I get that one more soldier dying means a hundred more people are hurting. I get the questions you ask yourself, even though you know what your soldier's answer would be: Was his death worth it?

Because Tommy's death comes at a time when the war seems endless and the support for it lean, it somehow seems all the more unfair.

Because our parents were friends before Tommy and I were even ideas, losing him hurts as much as if I were losing my own brother.

Because I was born just two months before him, I have no memories of life without Tommy. And more than anything in the world, I hate that I have to make them now.