We are daily reassuring ourselves that we stand unscathed or scathed, but unstoppable. But there, in the seat of power of the most powerful nation in the world, I saw the true war that we now fight.

At 2:45 p.m., it was calm — beautiful really. At 2:47 p.m. a Secret Service carrier lumbered by, booming its way over the Supreme Court, a black hulk next to the white of the Virginia marble Halls. When I drew my eyes away from that plane — as big as any 767 — I watched the children hugging their parents' legs. As the plane veered south by southeast to follow the course of the Potomac, I heard a young boy 20 yards from me cry out, "It's coming this way!"

In that instant, as the plane had shifted course just a few hundred yards overhead, I had felt that same terror move me.

What is the possibility that they could get an Secret Service plane?

"They" the unnameable and unnamed. This war is a war with no sovereign enemies and can have no clear victor. By 3 p.m., the lawn was silent, the sky no longer littered with kites nor the ground with baubles. It looked like the streets of Kabul, empty without the light of children.

Just dejected and cowed heads running off to somewhere else, where the planes won't fly overhead.

We fight so as not to "look up into the sky waiting to die" as do the people of Afghanistan.