Fathers and Sons

The Times photo Monday by Yuri Kozyrev looks sufficiently routine for these days--an adult man wearing a turban and beard, squatting on the floor overseeing the lessons of his 14-year-old foster son. Possibly a warm moment. But the chilling lesson underway involves properly reassembling a combat rifle.

While American 14-year-olds step off athletic fields nowadays to plot their costumes for wringing one more year’s candy haul out of Halloween, 12 time zones away in Afghanistan a 14-year-old war orphan named Alauddin dons boots and prays that the Americans will leave at least two Taliban soldiers alive so he can kill them to avenge his father’s death.

Could there be a starker contrast in parallel lives on the same planet? A surrogate father teaching the business of war to a boy sent to the front by a widowed mother who thought it safer than her occupied village.

Is there a more poignant or powerful lesson in appreciation for the comfortable, relatively safe lives we occupy in this land, where fathers are more likely to coach the intricacies of corner kicks, hip checks or brush blocks? And a more compelling reminder in one photo of what’s at risk in these new, dangerous times? Yes, there was violence and sadness in our society before the inconceivable events of Sept. 11 force-focused our collective attention on a distant land that seems like a national haunted house full of unimaginable real horrors. Our new awareness creates a gnawing daily unease in many stomachs. But more important, it enhances an appreciation for what we have. Maybe family hugs last a moment longer now. Maybe moms and dads listen a tad more attentively at dinner to those incoherent playground sagas. Or read an extra chapter at bedtime.

Then, in a peaceful living room we realize with a shudder that the child soldier on Page 1 is smiling. In the midst of a hellish, generation-long war on a dusty lunar landscape where hate and double crosses flourish, this shy boy dressed up as a soldier in October is actually smiling. Any parent can spot the intensity and depth of such a genuine juvenile smile. In our world these smiles appear sheepishly after goals or successful band concerts. They’re contagious and they prompt pats. Around the world the same smile comes to one of thousands of war orphans while he assembles a gun.

Fortunately for hope, childish smiles can be mysterious as well as incongruous. Is the smiling Alauddin imagining killing his father’s killer? Or is he, just maybe, imagining a time when his father was alive?