Blood sport

Chico Harlan (The Washington Post): MAGUINDANAO, PHILIPPINES - Lt. Col. Benedict Arevalo headed to a ramshackle town hall one afternoon last week to join about 100 local candidates who had gathered to sign an agreement promising not to kill one another in the final days of campaigning before local elections Monday.

About 70 percent of the population owns guns here on the Philippines' main southern island of Mindanao, and politics seems a lot like combat, as candidates from feuding families and clashing religions battle for even the smallest chunks of power.

(What didn't make the paper):

Harlan (The similarity between copperheads and roadside bombs): So let's start with the facts, blameless and final. Let’s start with a road, almost entirely dark, but for the lights of five vehicles: In order, a bulletproof Humvee, a Hyundai SUV, a white minivan, another Hyundai SUV and a KM 450 cargo truck. It was a Thursday. It was 6:25 p.m. I was sitting in the middle row of the white minivan, alongside a youngish Philippine army colonel named Benedict Arevalo. We’d been together all day, and I liked him. I was no longer interviewing him, and my notebook was closed, and he was talking about something I still cannot recall. It is only the things hereafter that I remember with frame-by-frame detail.

-eddie

Four decades of doubt

Henry Allen (The Washington Post): O,the stained souls, the small-hours doubts, the troubled manhood of so many American men who didn't go to Vietnam when they could have -- the strange guilt they seem to feel when they confront Vietnam veterans.

Strange: There were some cheaters and liars, but all that most of them did was exercise their legal rights, in the manner of Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general and Democratic Senate candidate -- five deferments, then a safe stateside slot in the Marine reserves.

They had a right to avoid the draft with academic deferments, occupational deferments and medical deferments obtained from doctors noted for their artistry in taking X-rays of dangerous deformities.

They were entitled to get married and sire a child that could bring them a 3-A hardship deferment. Couldn't these men argue that they had a moral obligation not to fight in an immoral, pointless war? Wasn't it true that "winners go to Harvard, losers go to Vietnam," as the wisecrack had it?

The case can be made that these men -- often upscale and educated, the sort of people who are supposed to lead this country -- acted legally and even honorably in using their social status and intelligence to stay out of Vietnam.

But the stains and doubts linger.

-eddie

What he learned

Mike Sager (SanDiego.com): I am standing in the sheltering front doorframe of my house, watching my newly licensed 16-year-old son drive a two-thousand pound car up the hill, away from me…all by himself.

It’s not his first day of school, but it sure feels like it.

That proud toddling gate up the front sidewalk, one hand each in the grip of mommy and daddy…only this time there’s nobody there to hold his hands—lord knows what those hands spend time doing nowadays.

Until Miles was four, he couldn’t play without a witness. Now the door is so often shut.

-eddie

Paralyzed

Steve Politi (The Star-Ledger): Ben LaSala has coached high school football — lived high school football, really — for nearly 30 years. And he has no idea how he will keep coaching it now.

He thinks about that next meeting with his players. What will he say? He thinks about that next tackling drill at practice. How will he watch? He thinks about his next game at Colonia High.

How will he coach?

“I’ve thought about it a lot the last couple days,” LaSala said. “I don’t even know how I’m going to deal with this. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you see stuff happen that’s part of football.

“But then it happens to one of your own. . ."

-eddie

No one knows

Raphael G. Satter (The Associated Press/Thanks, Caitlin): LONDON — It wasn't love. It could have been adventure. Or maybe she just got lost.

It remains a mystery why a female humpback whale swam thousands of miles from the reefs of Brazil to the African island of Madagascar, which researchers believe is the longest single trip ever undertaken by a mammal — humans excluded.

While humpbacks normally migrate along a north-to-south axis to feed and mate, this one — affectionately called AHWC No. 1363 — made the unusual decision to check out a new continent thousands of miles to the east.

Marine ecologist Peter Stevick says it probably wasn't love that motivated her — whales meet their partners at breeding sites, so it's unlikely that this one was following a potential mate.

"It may be that this is an extreme example of exploration," he said. "Or it could be that the animal got very lost."

-eddie

A lesson in faith

Geoff Calkins (The Commercial Appeal): At just before 5 p.m. in the Elma Roane Fieldhouse, the point guard signals to the head coach and jogs off the court toward the locker room.

She returns in five minutes. She resumes practicing with her Memphis Tiger teammates.

"It's not a big deal, not if you understand what's going on," she says.

Maybe there's a lesson there.

We could apply it to the fracas at ground zero, apply it whenever some lunatic minister wants to strike back by burning a sacred book.

It's not a big deal.

-eddie

'Back to life'

Tommy Tomlinson (The Chilean Miners): It looked like giving birth. The miner rose from the belly of the cave, and came up through the tunnel, and when he finally emerged there were tears, because we had seen a miracle.

And then another came. And then another.

-eddie

Can't lose, can't forget

Amanda Codispoti (The Roanoke Times/Thanks, Meg): Shattered bones. A hollowed skull.

Morgan Harrington's killer reduced the 20-year-old Roanoke County native to this, an image her mother can't shake.

In the year since Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech junior, disappeared at a Metallica concert at the University of Virginia, parents Gil and Dan Harrington have worked to celebrate their daughter's generous spirit and make sure she is remembered as a gorgeous blond with sparking eyes.

"For us, it's kind of trumping evil," Gil Harrington said. Her killer "doesn't win if we can make it into a good thing."

-eddie

Mourning the burrito man

Steve Hendrix (The Washington Post): In the ever-churning universe of a city street corner, Carlos Guardado was that rarest of things: a fixture.

For almost 20 years, he was there, a little guy in a metal cart, selling rice-and-bean burritos at 17th and K streets NW on Farragut Square. He was there in all weather, during uptimes and downturns, a dependable rock in the rapids of life in downtown Washington.

Until suddenly, this week, he wasn't, and a busy neighborhood paused to realize that it was a pretty big man who had been doing that little job.

-eddie

Summer also starts

Mike Royko (Chicago Sun-Times/Thanks, Brady Dennis): The two of them first started spending weekends at the small, quiet Wisconsin lake almost 25 years ago. Some of her relatives let them use a tiny cottage in a wooded hollow a mile or so from the water.

He worked odd hours, so sometimes they wouldn't get there until after midnight on a Friday. But if the mosquitoes weren't out, they'd go to the empty public beach for a moonlight swim, then sit with their backs against a tree and drink wine and talk about their future.

-eddie