On a sunny July afternoon in 2010, I stood among a solemn crowd gathered in the intense California heat. Some were dressed in suits and ties, others in casual attire; a few had come in military uniforms. There were some somber words, a three-volley salute. And then Jamie Henry’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

I came back to the same spot early the next day, alone, contemplating the freshly turned mound of earth in the morning stillness, and my thoughts ran back to the first time I had met Jamie, almost five years prior. We had arranged a visit at his home, a cozy house with a white post-and-rail fence around it, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Arriving, I knew that I’d found the right place: Jamie had hung a fluorescent pink ribbon from a tree in his front yard to catch my eye. But when he opened the door, I was shocked. I had expected him to be much larger. Larger than life, actually.

That’s what happens, I suppose, when you live with an oversize idea of someone for years before meeting him. The idea of a rare man with the courage to ignore threats and put names to murderers, the courage to stand up for women and children gunned down in a hamlet halfway across the planet, a distant place to which no Americans had ever given a thought unless they’d walked through with a weapon in hand.