A town. A war. The class of '07

BEDFORD -- For the past decade, this suburb of 12,500 has feted its high school seniors with the annual Prom Stroll across the common the evening of the big dance . It is a quintessentially small-town event, held with young couples stepping through a white trellis to clicking cameras and children climbing a purple beech, seemingly far removed from Iraq, where US forces have fought the entire four years the class of 2007 was in high school. Only the Vietnam War engaged American troops longer.

Yet the conflict is closer than it appears. Bedford shares with Swampscott and Pembroke the tragic distinction of being the only Massachusetts towns to have lost two young fighters in Iraq. Plaques in the Bedford High lobby memorialize John Hart, a 20-year-old soldier killed outside Kirkuk in 2003, and Travis Desiato, a 19-year-old Marine killed in Fallujah in 2004. They're the first Bedford residents to die in combat since World War II. Their younger sisters attend the school.

Nearly one-fifth of the school's 740 students live at Hanscom Air Force Base, and at least a dozen have parents who are or were deployed to Iraq. Retired military personnel have settled here, as have employees of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and other nearby defense contractors. The white clapboard Unitarian church that faces the common once displayed a banner proclaiming "Speak Out for Peace," and Bedford Citizens for Peace plans a vigil today.

Thus the war brushes the young men and women promenading before their neighbors. "Everybody has some obscure connection," says Eliza Rosenberry. "I had Travis's sister in camp. I was her counselor." Much as these connections make the war real, even to students without family in the military, the conflict does not define their generation as World War II -- with its consumer shortages and enormous scale -- and Vietnam -- with its draft -- did previous generations.

These students enter a world where the war competes with global warming as a crisis deserving their attention. The uneasiness of the times, when polls find only one-quarter of Americans surveyed think the country is headed in the right direction, competes with their youthful optimism. They gravitate more to community service than political activity, but they belong to a generation whose voting has surged. They'll listen, at graduation two days later , to a classmate call for "interpersonal understanding in a world of global conflict."

Football co-captain Woody Carter, striking in his white pin-stripe tux, saw his father off to Iraq after the season's first game and welcomed him home three weeks before graduation. Rosenberry, her V-necked blue gown falling softly to her feet, loves "The Kite Runner" and "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and other books about the Middle East, and wants to study Arabic. Her boyfriend, Luke Jarvis, doesn't recall current events before Sept. 11, 2001.

"As long as I can remember there's something going on," Jarvis says. "It doesn't affect you directly, but you're always aware of its presence."

Leafy, middle-class Bedford abuts the more affluent Lexington, Lincoln, Concord, and Carlisle. Its housing stock ranges from the spacious colonial where Ashley Theodore invited 40 classmates to gather before the prom to the modest Cape where Marianna Ballou's father has posted the Unitarian-Universalist principles in the kitchen.

Theodore registered to vote when she turned 18. She thinks there's so much chaos in Iraq that pulling out won't make matters worse. "When I couldn't vote I basically couldn't care less about the war," she says. "Now that I can vote and I have a voice, it's really important to me."

Before the war, Ballou, who attributes her "strong human rights convictions" to her Unitarian upbringing, held a sign saying "No blood for oil" at a protest at a local strip mall. Her mother still attends peace vigils, but Ballou doesn't. "I don't know what the best course of action is," Ballou says. "I need to figure out something before the election."

Many of the 162 graduates have enjoyed the stability of living here all or most of their lives. Others -- "base kids" from Hanscom -- don cap and gown having known the sacrifices required of military families who move from city to city, country to country, a contrast between protected and protector made starker by a war that strains a volunteer military.

Jarvis has always had the same friends. "Yesterday was my last baseball game," he says. "Afterward you could talk about your baseball team in second grade when it was coach-pitched. We've all traveled the same course. Every story I have, three other people can tell."

The day yearbooks were distributed, a senior from Hanscom, her mascara smudged -- from crying, one staffer suggested -- complained the wrong picture accompanied her name. None of the four students in the yearbook room knew her. The day caps and gowns were distributed Harold Ruben had no papers saved for him from fifth grade in his packet .

Ruben lived in Milwaukee, Chicago , and California before moving to Hanscom in 11th grade. "I'm used to adapting to new places, but when I came here it was harder. It's East Coast," Ruben says. "We have no family out here. It's just us."

Ronyelle Turner, whose father, a retired Marine, spent much of her junior year in Iraq, finds a home in the school's Air Force Junior ROTC. She's lived in North Carolina, California, and Okinawa. While ROTC enrollment nationwide has been relatively stable since 2004, here it's dropped from 63 students to 49. A plaque memorializing Hart, a former cadet, hangs in the ROTC room.

"When you're in here, it's like you're on the base. You know nobody's going to hurt you in here. We've all got each other's backs. We've turned into a very large family," Turner says. "When my father was gone I'd come to school knowing I had ROTC that day."

Though her father has been to the Middle East before, this was the first time he was in the midst of war. "I've been so stressed. As soon as my dad left, I haven't been able to focus and school is so hard. My dad came back and he wasn't really talking. He always seemed on edge," Turner says. "It was always walking on eggshells, and any eggshell we stepped on would set off a different mood."

Carter, who earned a football scholarship to Northeastern University, knows better than most what Turner's been through. His father, assigned to Air Force security, followed his last season of high school football via DVDs sent to Iraq. As strong as Carter's season was -- his 21 touchdowns broke the school record -- he struggled off the field as his relationship with his stepmother deteriorated during his father's absence. "It was my last year of high school. It would have been nice to have him around for my ups and downs," Carter says. "It's more relaxed now. Everybody's not on their toes from him being gone."

The Class of 2007 sends 77 percent of its members to four-year colleges, 13 percent to two-year schools, 8 percent to jobs or trade school or a year off, and 2 percent to the military -- one to the Air Force Academy, one to the Air Force and two, Ryan Pruitt and Carter's friend Ruben, to the Army. Pruitt wants to open an auto repair shop, and Ruben dreams of studying cooking and business so he can open his own restaurant. Both are enlisting for the education benefits. If Pruitt could qualify for a branch that deploys fewer to Iraq, he'd join it; Ruben hopes to become an Army cook.

"I'm hoping they don't send me to Iraq, because I'm my mother's only son. If they do, I'd rather it be me than someone with a kid," Ruben says. "I don't see killing people stopping people at all. That's why I'm not going to infantry. That's why I'm cooking. If I killed somebody I couldn't live with that."

To "Pomp and Circumstance," the Class of 2007 enters the football field, boys in blue caps and gowns, and girls in white, many of the latter having decorated their mortarboards with "07" or polka dots or "Thank you Mom & Dad."

In marches Alex Arruda, class vice president, YouTube auteur, literary magazine staffer, creator of "eggplant babies" utilizing real vegetables. "There's this sort of climate of fear around all things that seem out of the ordinary or strange," he says. "That's personally bothersome, because I think one way to really reshape people's worlds and help shake them out of apathy is to sort of do small, vaguely subversive things."

James Pooley -- recycler, consumer of fair trade products -- is more interested in environmental issues than faraway wars, and Ivana Serret of Roslindale -- cheerleader, Metco student since second grade -- focuses on promoting tolerance. "I think more about events where you can make a personal effort for change," Pooley says. Kendra Collins, active in a Relay for Life that raised more than $70,000 for cancer research, worked at Hanscom last summer, which is probably why a military recruiter contacted her. "I told him I'm going to college," she says.

Tony Gong, songwriter, aspiring engineer, student graduation speaker, takes the podium. "If we could truly empathize proactively," he tells his classmates, "we might see that the enemy's act of aggression is to them, an act of self-defense."

The sisters of Hart and Desiato present awards in memory of their fallen brothers to two aspiring teachers : the Hart to Sara Hartwell, who'll study special education, and the Desiato to Jeff McGrath, co-captain of the football team, who dreams of teaching in Bedford.

The season after Desiato, himself a Bedford football player, died, McGrath and his teammates played with Desiato's number 86 on their helmets. McGrath's locker this season had an "86" sticker on it. "It's a huge honor," he says, "to be mentioned in the same breath as him."