At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we are meant to honor those who protect and defend our country, our freedoms, our rights. So it is on this day as it has been since before even my parents were glimmers in the eyes of their parents.

Last night, 14 hours before we were scheduled as a nation to observe this solemn moment, the Commonwealth of Virginia injected a lethal dose of chemicals into John Allen Muhammad, and a grateful nation ended the life of one of its soldiers who brought his conditioning to kill onto his home soil.

For those not aware, in 2002, John Allen Muhammad and his then 17-year-old accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo were known as the Beltway Snipers. They killed 10 people in the D.C. metropolitan area throughout the month of October. Further investigation determined that they killed numerous others during a cross-country trip that zig-zagged from Washington State to Arizona to Alabama to the D.C. area. Muhammad trained Malvo using the sniper skills he acquired from his military service, which included deployment during Operation Desert Storm.

Even after more than 7 years, I can still tap into a fear that I thought unfathomable before that October. The year prior, our entire country felt fear injected through our universal veins. But it was still a disconnected fear, even for those of us who work and live so close to the Pentagon, who have family and friends who worked there, or in the Twin Towers. Yes, it touched our lives. Yes, I knew people who lost loved ones in the attacks. But it touched me in the way that any such violence touches us: with distant whispers that, yes, such things happen…but not directly to me.

Muhammad and Malvo brought the whispers close to our ears, ominous threats breathed down our necks with icy intimacy. It was the frustrating randomness of it all that crippled us. People doing everyday tasks…pumping gas, vacuuming their cars, shopping for groceries, waiting for a bus. We took these tasks for granted until the day we realized that someone out there could at any moment end our very existence simply because we needed a gallon of milk or to top off our tank before we headed home.

Why?

What in Muhammad’s life brought him to these acts? Reports after the fact indicated that he showed signs of disturbance during his service time. But in war there is little time for coddling or concern. And then they are processed out at the end of their service…and then what?

We send these soldiers out into battle. We train them to kill and we ask of them the greatest sacrifice that any human is able to offer, that of their own life. And they do it, because it is their job. Their duty.

They come home and what then becomes of them? The suicide rate among soldiers is at an alarming high right now. We weren’t even sending those with physical wounds and scars to decent treatment centers for a while, so is it any surprise that those with internal scars should completely fall through the cracks?

Of course, all of this is speculation on my part. Maybe Muhammad was deeply damaged prior to his service. If true, though, it begs the question of how he was able to pass through the ranks undetected as insufficient for military duty, especially duty that would train him to be a sniper. Maybe his military time had nothing or little to do with his actions in 2002. Then again, life is not a series of perfectly separated incidents. Our lives are tapestries, woven together in complex, overlapping patterns. Tug one thread and a thousand begin to unravel. Even soldiers not yet deployed to combat zones can crumble under stresses unseen or unknown until it’s too late. The recent events at Fort Hood stand as proof of this.

Only when it is too late do we finally respond with a resounding call to “make them pay” for their crimes.

The United States has executed more than 1,000 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. We claim that states with the death penalty option see fewer crimes deemed punishable by death. Crimes still occur…just not ones bad enough to qualify for death. Some view this as justification for government-sanctioned murder. The system works!

Some will undoubtedly call me naive and a bleeding heart. They’ll accuse me of not understanding because I have never lost someone to the crimes of another. And that’s very true. I cannot say what that would do to me, how that would change my opinion. But I do not know for certain and, to be honest, I do not ever want to know.

So in my naivete I grapple with these questions. When is murder right? When we sanction it with yellow ribbon magnets on our cars and Veterans Day sales on camcorders and iPods? When we obfuscate it with words like “justice”? Will humanity ever reach a point in which we no longer feel entitled to kill each other for our differences, our prejudices, our possessions, our beliefs? Or are we simply too defined by genetic programming that trickles down through the millennia to the time we burbled up from the primordial ooze? Are we nothing more than animals who learned to make laws we will inevitably break? Or can we aspire to become more? Become better?

I don’t know. Maybe, though, that’s the best place to start.