Our Quote of the Day comes from the blog The Partition. It’s a post called “The Death of a Foreign Service Officer”:
When I heard the initial reports that a State Department employee had been killed in Afghanistan, I sighed. And when I read the name and what I felt was a thoughtful message from the Secretary, I did what I suspect many of us do these days: I looked up the officer’s name on Facebook, guessing that someone young and in a place like Afghanistan was bound to have an account, a presence, through which she would share her experiences with her friends. I clicked on her name, saw her face, and realized that I knew her.
Or perhaps I didn’t know her, but only knew that I had seen her before. Seen her in the half-remembered days in-between my own assignments overseas. Seen her somewhere in the District or in Arlington at a ritualistic gathering of FSOs in a rented corporate apartment, drinks scattered on poorly made tables of blond wood or on pool furniture badly in need of new paint. Seen her from time among bottles of continually passed-on wine and bags of snacks from Trader Joe’s and vegetable dips from Whole Foods, or standing in line in cafeterias. What I knew as well were the rhythms of her life as a Foreign Service Officer, that we had likely shared the same locations (airports, baggage carousels, shuttle buses) and dislocations (first nights in strange lands, language struggles, loneliness).
That is what I think I recognized. What I am certain I recognized was the smile, the aura of the under-30 crowd, the disarming ordinariness (as opposed to banality) and eagerness of our newest public servants. That aura seems to me the norm now at Foggy Bottom, and in much of the country, and it’s probably a sign of my age as much as an indication of the lure of Washington itself.
The truth is I didn’t know her…
GO TO THE LINK to read the rest.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.