On a windy afternoon in late July, a mother and a father stood on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, watching as soldiers carried a flag-draped case down the ramp of a cargo plane. Stephen and Shari Feehan’s only child, 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, was inside.

Feehan died July 18, when Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, where he had been deployed for a year as an air defense artillery officer, was hit by a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones. He was 25 years old.

President Donald Trump traveled to Dover to attend the dignified transfer of Feehan and three other soldiers who were killed overseas. During a private meeting with the Feehans, Trump mentioned that he was headed to a political event in Cobb County, Georgia. Stephen Feehan told the president he had grown up there. The president offered the grieving couple a lift aboard the new Air Force One, a Boeing luxury jet donated by the Qataris.

Inside one of the plane’s cream-and-brown-and-gold private areas, military valets had laid out lunch and put a place card for Tyler Feehan on an empty seat. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary at the time, kept the Feehans company before Trump came in and sat down. The president had questions about their son: What were his goals? What was he like? How tall was he?

Shari Feehan said that the Air Force One trip was a surreal and welcome distraction from the anguish that she and her husband were feeling. They did not tell Trump about the toll the war had taken on their family. She said they did not have to.

“He talked to me as a mother who lost her son,” she said. “He saw the devastation. He witnessed that, and so he knows.”

The promise Trump made to the American people when he was running for a second term was that he would not lead the country to war. Then, in late February, he assured Americans that an excursion into Iran would be over within weeks. Four-and-a-half months after that, enemy missiles lit up the sky over Muwaffaq Salti.

Now Trump is in a strategic cul-de-sac: “We do intermittent strikes,” he told reporters Friday, despite concerns that munitions are running low, despite polls showing a majority of Americans are against the war, and despite the risk that more soldiers could die in a conflict that administration officials have refused to call a war.

“A lot of people don’t call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing,” Trump said. “And this we lost 18 people, and in Vietnam you lost 100,000 people, and in other conflicts you lost tens of thousands of people.” (According to the National Archives, 58,220 U.S. service members died during the Vietnam War.)

The Feehans, who are Republicans, say they do not have an opinion about how Trump is managing this conflict, this war — whatever anyone wants to call it. They are too consumed by the cost of losing one life.

“We used to watch the news all the time, every day, and we just haven’t even been able to turn it on or watch it, and so we have no idea,” Shari Feehan said.

But Stephen Feehan, who served multiple tours in Iraq during a 26-year career of active duty in the Army before retiring as a major, said that he understood that presidents changed every four or eight years. They come and go and sometimes they come back again. Feehan said that his son would have felt the same way: “He didn’t care about the politics of it. He cared about the people that he was working with.”

The surreal distraction of their ride on Air Force One, as welcome as it was, has given way to a new reality. The couple goes on long walks in Vicenza, Italy, where they had moved so that Stephen Feehan, 48, could continue civilian work for the Army. And they have stayed in close touch with their son’s fiancee, Claire Fletcher, whom he was supposed to marry right after returning from an extended deployment to Jordan. Fletcher, who shared a home with Tyler Feehan in North Carolina near Fort Bragg, where he was stationed, is currently visiting them in Italy.

“He was supposed to be done,” Stephen Feehan said, adding that his son’s deployment had been extended because the Army’s Air Defense Artillery Branch had overextended personnel across the theater.

Two other soldiers were killed during the attack that killed Feehan: Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, a 19-year-old from Texas; and Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, from New York. At the dignified transfer in Dover, the body of Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, who was killed while disposing of an Iranian drone in Iraq, was also returned to his family.

The Pentagon has so far shared limited information about the attack in Jordan, and the Feehans say they are still waiting for the results of an investigation that could tell them more about how their son died. Maj. Travis Shaw, an Army spokesperson, said that the matter was still under investigation.

Fallen soldiers always become part of a nameless larger number to illustrate a conflict’s toll. But to his loved ones, Feehan was an ambitious kid who, like his father, believed in the promise of military service as a way to see the world, get educated and protect a country he loved.

He had collected two master’s degrees and was applying to law school. He spent his spare time investing in the stock market, researching finances and prodding soldiers in his platoon to pursue higher education, because the military gives back to those who serve. “You’re gonna be in it,” he would tell his soldiers about enrolling in college. “‘That’s one of the benefits.’”

Stephen Feehan referred to his son as a “mini me” who was interested in finance and adventure. They engaged in playful competition with each other, comparing lists of countries they had visited. He and his son had planned to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, continuing a tradition of taking on some of the world’s highest mountains together, from the Andes in South America to the southern base camp of Mount Everest in Nepal. They measured their heights against each other. In family photos, Tyler Feehan, who was 6 foot, 4 inches tall, would always stand on his tiptoes to just slightly best his father, who stands an inch taller.

Shari Feehan described her son as a “natural-born leader” who was passionate about the goals he set for himself.

“He was a go-getter,” she said. “He loved life.”

The Feehans say they took their son all over the world — to 40 countries — because they wanted him to understand that not all countries are like the United States, a land they believe is one of opportunity. He was raised to understand that American democratic liberties had come at a great cost, and that military service was a way to protect those freedoms.

Is the price they have paid to ensure those freedoms worth it?

“I think on the whole, I would say yes, but it’s a terribly high cost,” said Shari Feehan, 49. “And I know there are so many other families who’ve experienced that high cost that nobody should have to experience. But we love our country and love our military.”

Her voice was thick and breaking as she spoke: “But it’s a really high cost.”