WORD FROM SEAL TEAM SIX

                                              Two pictures, two raids, two sets of consequences for any number of lives in a long set of wars. On Saturday, the White House released a photograph, above, of President Barack Obama on the phone, being briefed on the crash of a Chinook in Afghanistan, in which some thirty Navy SEALs and seven Afghan commandos were killed. According to the White House’s caption, the voices on the other end of the line belonged to Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense; Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Tom Donilon, the national-security advisor; Bill Daley, the Chief of Staff; and other members of the national-security staff. That recalls the cast assembled around the President in the much-examined picture, below, from the day of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden (with the role of Secretary of Defense filled, instead, by Robert Gates). A helicopter crashed that day, too, though with lesser consequences. If that operation had failed, what picture would we have seen, if any? It is a lonelier scene when things go fatally wrong.

The Taliban says that it shot the helicopter down; that may be true, though it is still being sorted out. Our government has confirmed that some of the troops were members of SEAL Team Six, the unit that was sent after bin Laden, through apparently not the same men. They died in the Tangi Valley, in Wardak province. “Their death is a reminder of the extraordinary sacrifice made by the men and women of our military and their families,” President Obama said. There are many ways and places a helicopter trip, a war, and too many lives, can end.