Senior Laura Burling met Michael Cifuentes at a band formal her first year at Miami University, staying up late with him in the hotel room and talking for hours. It was one of those accidental intersections of two lives that, by pure chance, led to an enduring friendship.

Burling liked him because of his exuberance, his smile and his interest in helping people.

After he graduated from Miami, Cifuentes would frequently return to help out with the band service organization while training for the Marines. He was deployed to Iraq in the winter of 2005.

"I got an e-mail from the band director with just Mike's name in the subject heading," Burling said. "I knew right then, and I just started to bawl."

Cifuentes had only been in Iraq for six months when an improvised explosive device ripped through his amphibious assault vehicle, killing him and 13 others. Cifuentes was 25 years old at the time.

Often the war in Iraq has the feeling of a movie you haven't gotten around to seeing yet. The action is distant, consisting of images on a screen or statistics on a page. The reality of war is out of sight and out of mind for a large portion of the population of the country that is waging it.

For Miami students, that reality may be even farther out of reach.

"In a way, it makes sense because the recruiting demographics of the United State's military have followed the shift in population to the South and West," political science professor Patrick Haney said. "This is where people are moving and where the recruits are largely coming from rather than the Midwest."

According to Haney, the conventional wisdom about who Miami students are might also have something to do with the disconnect. Since the best recruiting grounds for Miami are from high schools that send the vast majority of their students onto college, it is less likely Miami will draw students who are either in the military or close to someone overseas.

"In general terms, we're talking about different worlds," Haney said.

Professor Laura Neack agreed.

"It's not fair to say that everyone is isolated from this, but the bubble that people talk about is real," she said.

Neack's nephew fought in the initial invasion of Baghdad before being reassigned to patrol near Mosul on the Syrian border. In June of 2003, he was severely injured while on a night patrol, shattering his hip. He is now considered permanently disabled and, although he can walk, will likely need a hip replacement in the future.

"It's something a lot of people don't think about," Neack said. "There a lot of soldiers coming back with severe injuries."

As of the publication of this article, there were approximately 16,420 non-fatal casualties throughout the entire war.

According to Neack, this is largely due to advances in field medical technology that can save the life of a wounded soldier when years ago that life would have been lost.

"One of the reasons fatalities are relatively low is because these advances save the lives of the severely wounded who otherwise would have died," she said. "It's not something that occurs to people, though. It's not something you think about if the war isn't real to you."

For senior Mark Loughry, however, the war is all too real.

His brother, Daniel, serves in the Army as a paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne. He has served three tours of duty since 2001, one in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, where he is currently deployed along the Afgan-Pakistan border.

"It's one of those things where every time you see something's happened over there - one soldier killed, two soldiers killed - you're thinking about it," Loughry said.

Loughry's views of the war have shifted over the past few years because of Daniel.

"He's sick of it," Loughry said of his brother. "My parents are sick of it. His wife is sick of it. At this point, we just want him home."

Loughry said he gets phone calls where his brother will tell him that he's going out on a mission and will be out of contact for three or four days.

"He'll say something like, 'This is gonna be a bad one,' and I'll have to go to three days of classes with that on my mind," he said. "Then, he's on the phone joking with me about hitting a roadside bomb the next week. That just gives you a different perspective of what's going on over there."

One of the primary reasons for this difference of perspective is that the Bush administration has consciously designed the current conflict so that the country can fight a war without an interruption of civil life.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the first protracted, long-term military operations done with an all-volunteer military.

"There's an entire section of society that did not volunteer," Haney said. "And for them, this war is different than for the people who did or have loved ones who did. That first section hasn't been asked to participate, and in fact, has even seen tax cuts."

Neack worded her opinion a little more strongly.

"Supporting the troops is not putting a yellow ribbon on your car," she said. "It's using our military wisely - picking the right battles."

Senior Kevin Mullins has first-hand experience with the disconnect Haney and Neack speak of. As a machine gunner for the Marine Corps reserves, he served in Iraq from March to October of 2005, doing sweeps for insurgents in the Anbar province, up and down the Euphrates River.

He remembers being in a bar one night not long after returning home, watching the people around him, all of whom were kids his age.

"It was strange to think that they didn't know," he said. "I had just gotten back and it was the only time I felt angry about it. It just didn't seem like anyone really noticed or cared. But I had just gotten back, so it was all still fresh in my mind. I don't feel that way any more because it's not their fault, and I realize that. This is just the way it is."

Mullins was a friend of Cifuentes. They served in the same company, and in a strange coincidence, lived two streets away as children. They were deployed and stationed together in Iraq. When the roadside explosive killed Cifuentes, Mullins was two Humvees in front of him. His vehicle had traveled over the device without detonating it.

"When it went off," Mullins said, his eyes focused on the carpet of his apartment, his thumbnail digging into the wood of his coffee table, "I could feel the heat on the back of my neck."

He shook his head as if sifting the dust from a memory.

"I didn't pray too much over there, but that night I did," he said.

For many Miami students - and many Americans - this is the Iraq war; an article in a newspaper. They know the stories, but what they do not know is the visceral terror of knowing someone who could be in that burning Humvee on the news.

Burling knows, however, and she feels it has changed her.

"I was on an airplane flying back to school this past month and the captain came on with an announcement that there were soldiers on board just getting back from Iraq, and everybody on the plane started clapping," she said. "I couldn't help it - I just started tearing up."

For his part, Loughry is more introspective about the change his brother's service has wrought on their lives and their friendship. Growing up, he and Daniel were close, playing on their high school soccer team together, and traveling in similar groups of friends.

"I've had two beers with my brother since I turned 21," Loughry said. "He's been gone for pretty much this entire time, this whole period when we were both still just kids, but now he has a wife and a life he has to start when he gets back."

Mullins is on his way to starting his life. He will graduate from Miami in May, and plans to pursue either a degree in criminology or a career in law enforcement. With his time in Iraq over, he has the rest of his life to reflect on the experience.

"I'm glad I was a part of it," he said. "I think in the long run we can help a lot of people over there."

Still, he seems to separate that aspect of the war from the one he carries with him from day to day - the aspect that includes Cifuentes.

"Me and Mike would be on post together and we'd talk about the things we'd do together when we got home," he said. "He'd talk about double dating, going down to the Hofbrauhaus in Cincinnati or wearing T-shirts that said 'Back from Iraq.'"

Mullins paused for a moment before adding "about going to his wedding."

As the war in Iraq marches on, the white-hot debate might only grow in intensity. It seems as if no politician or pundit truly knows what would be the best step to next take; however, with the implications of the conflict reaching farther and farther into the lives of average Americans, touching people like Laura Burling who otherwise had no connection to something so distant, a reckoning seems inevitable.

Until then, a generation of children who reached some crude form of adulthood when they watched the World Trade Center towers collapse will, like Mullins and Cifuentes, continue to either fight this war or, like Loughry, live with it in their hearts every day and night. They'll know it and fight it, unsure if they are doing so for the living, for the dead or for nothing.