On a cold January night in 2005, two Marines knocked on the door of David and Joanne Fuller and told them that their son, First Lt. Travis Fuller, had died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. A numbness took over Joanne's body. She sat at the kitchen table next to David, who was crying. She didn't cry, and doesn't remember speaking. Nothing in her life has even come close to that feeling.

Joanne couldn't see Travis's body because it had been so badly damaged, so she slipped her hand inside and touched him. At the funeral, the full force of her loss hit her. Travis was gone. So was his future wife, and their future children. She was no longer numb. She was angry. "I just didn't know why he had to sacrifice his life... What was it for? What were we, as a people, gaining?"

Travis Fuller was from Granville, Mass., a tiny farming community. He was a long-distance runner who overcame being born prematurely. His endurance was legendary—he would run six miles to his girlfriend's house and once ran miles into town to buy a beer for a fellow hiker he'd met on the Appalachian Trail.

Travis was a sophomore at Massachusetts Maritime Academy when he told his family he would spend the next four years in the Navy, working toward a career in logistics. He wanted to support his family financially and believed serving his country was the right thing to do. The nation will soon mark the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and commemorate its victims. But the day was also important for the series of decisions that came next: the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and then Iraq, choices that would come to define an American era. Travis Fuller was one of more than 7,000 Americans who died in those wars, adding substantially to the 2,977 who died on Sept. 11 itself.

A quarter century after the war on terror began, we are still asking the questions: When is a war worth fighting? And what do you do if your son died in one that you believe was not?