Illustration by Arnulfo Bermudez

There is an entertaining exercise that we all have played from time to time out of sheer boredom, if not for fun. Sometimes I sit around, mired in ennui, and think of a famous person before beginning this little game.

Six degrees of separation.

The world is not such a large place after all. Whenever tragedies, such as Sept. 11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, occur, we all have some tie to them. Whether it's a friend of a friend of a friend's something or other or somebody we know directly, a part of us dies whenever our country experiences a tumultuous event.

Bill Wetzel

The same way, we find a weird satisfaction in discovering we are only a few degrees separated from Michael Jordan or JFK. Sports stars. Actors. Historical figures. We all cross the same path at one time or other.

So this brings me to war.

This brings me to Army Private First Class Lori Piestewa of Tuba City, Arizona. By now most of us know that Lori Piestewa was a mother, a daughter, a sister and the first American Indian woman killed in combat in a foreign war. What you don't know is that, in Indian communities, the concept of six degrees of separation takes on a totally different meaning.

Indians do not have friends and relatives, they have brothers and sisters. They do not have aunts and uncles, but several mothers and fathers. Our lives are centered on community and family, and even tribes on opposite sides of the country have a certain bond with each other. This is how it is. This is how we are.

What you don't know is Lori Piestewa is mourned by a whole nation of people as if she were our mother, our daughter or our sister.

In Montana, Piestewa has an aunt who lives on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, which happens to be the reservation where I am from. This week, memorial services were held in her honor at Blackfeet headquarters. This was not for simply being a hero, a trailblazer, or for that one degree of separation she has from our tribe. It's because she is one of our own, part of our tiny community. As of now, there are 96 people from my county of 12,500 people serving in the military. I know all of them in some way, shape or form. A loss of any of them would shake our tight-knit group to its foundation.

So this brings me to the Vietnam War.

I used to work with a Vietnam veteran. Everyday I would talk to him and listen to stories he would tell. A born-again Christian, he would talk of the demons he has battled for over half of his lifetime. He once told me that he had flashbacks so intense that he couldn't even sleep in the same bed as his wife.

Several times he woke to find himself with his hands around her neck, choking the life out of her as if she were an enemy in a far away jungle. He told me of how he spent nearly two decades of drinking, fighting and wasting his life until he lost his friends, family and everything that mattered to him. Only then did he start to gather himself. This was another person in the small world that I live in.

So this brings me to the U.S.-Mexican Border.

One of my best friends is a veteran of the conflict in Bosnia that dropped the hammer on Slobodan Milosevic and ethnic cleansing (I will keep him nameless because of his job.) Today, as I write this, he is roaming the border along the Tohono O'odham reservation as a member of an elite American Indian U.S. Customs unit known as the "Shadow Wolves." Primarily, their job is to fight drug trafficking, but in an age of terrorism, pre-emptive warfare and anti-American hatred, one of their major concerns is to make sure our border is secure. Every day I pray for him. Every day I worry. This is not a friend of a friend. This is not someone who tells me stories of long ago. For the first time I feel no separation.

There is no escaping the terror that once happened in other times and places.