Instantly, the news from Pakistan became a local story

It's at times like this you realize that freedom is not free. -- Bill Harkey, Cape Girardeau, retired Army lieutenant colonel and father-in-law of a Marine pilot who died in Pakistan this week.

Someone a lot smarter than I am said: All news is local.

That's not always easy to understand.

Take the story this week from Istanbul about a prison hunger strike.

Or the story from Harrisburg, Pa., about chickens with flu.

Am I really interested?

And who honestly can tell me the difference between Bosnia and Serbia? And haven't I read those stories about Israel and Palestine before? About 30 years ago?

Then there was Thursday's story at the top of the front page about the military plane crash in Pakistan.

The plane, a KC-130, was involved in the ongoing U.S. effort to eradicate terrorist strongholds in Afghanistan.

Throughout the day Thursday, I saw news flashes from The Associated Press about the plane crash. But I didn't pay a lot of attention. In wartime, planes crash. Soldiers die.

But, then, neither of my sons wears a military uniform. And although both of them are far from home -- one for work, the other for pleasure -- I knew they were also far from the bombing and fighting in Afghanistan. As a father, I took some comfort from that knowledge.

Another father, elsewhere in Cape Girardeau, could not share my sense of family safety.

As the father-in-law of a 29-year-old Marine pilot serving with the U.S. anti-terrorism forces overseas, Bill Harkey had every reason to worry and wonder as news of the plane crash reached our fair city. Last May, Harkey's daughter, Jennifer, married Daniel McCollum -- "as fine a man as I could have hoped my daughter would marry." Jennifer is expecting the couple's first child on the Fourth of July.

Sadly, Harkey's daughter received notification from the Marines that her husband's plane had gone down. Late Wednesday night, the Pentagon released official word about the seven dead Marines who had been identified. Daniel McCollum was one of them.

When I saw the story in Thursday's paper, a military plane crash thousands of miles away suddenly became local news.

More than that, I was among those fathers who felt the pain that stabs your heart when you think about losing a son. Your children are supposed to take care of your funeral arrangements. Not the other way around.

Daniel McCollum was born a year before our younger son, the one who lives in Ireland and whose job sends him all over Europe and Asia, sometimes to countries I consider as inhospitable as Afghanistan. And McCollum, a Marine captain, was born three years after our older son, who is in Holland for several weeks visiting friends.

My wife worries all the time about her boys. After all, she's a mother. In their young lives, both sons have learned to tell their mother of their exotic and sometimes harrowing adventures around the globe after they are safely home. But mothers aren't easily fooled. She was suspicious -- as well as worried -- several years ago when our older son stayed in Borneo for several weeks. "What can you do in Borneo that takes so long?" she would ask. Recover from a devastating intestinal illness, as it turns out. And she was suspicious -- and worried -- a year or two later when his trek across Kenya lasted several weeks too long. This time it was malaria.

But my wife does not worry so much that her sons will die at the hands of Afghan terrorists who are fighting to the bitter end over a cause for which they are willing to give their lives and who care little about how many other lives, including those of the innocent, they destroy.

She doesn't have that worry, nor do I, because young men like Daniel McCollum have volunteered to defend us and to place their own lives in harm's way.

I do not know Bill and Jenny Harkey.

But I share the anguish of their loss and the sorrow they and their daughter must now endure.

This is one local news story I wish I had never had to read.

Freedom is not free.

And all news is local. To somebody.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.