I'm rarely at a loss for words.

Yet, there I was at the start of an interview, suffering what poet/essayist Wendell Berry calls "the deaf and dumb of speech."

I had good reason for my clumsy articulation, I guess, since I was talking to a man who had just lost his son. I've faced similar situations in the past 30 years or so of news work and rarely found words of sympathy or support that seemed even close to adequate.

So I tend to babble.

"I'm so sorry for your loss. … I can only imagine your pain. … You have my deepest sympathies."

I was wrestling with those inarticulate offerings when I was saved, ever so gently, by Rex Rolfing.

"I know," he said. And after a pause, again: "I know."

He does, at an excruciating level that I'm fortunate to not truly understand, at least on a personal level. His 29-year-old son, Robb, sergeant in the Army's Special Forces, died of gunshot wounds while searching a home in southern Baghdad nine days ago.

Now Rex Rolfing, his wife, Margie, and their other kids, T.J. and Tiffany, are learning to live with the kind of loss most of us only know in nightmares. The Rolfings are living theirs.

"It's a tough, tough thing, I'll tell you," Rex said. "We just pray for Robb, and for the other families."

He means, of course, the other families who have lost a child to war, or those who will. That point could bring up the questions of foreign policy, the war on terror, the Bush administration and its decision to invade.

But it won't. Rex Rolfing, a Rapid City native who has long lived in Sioux Falls, keeps that subject off limits.

"We won't talk about that," he said.

But he will talk about his son's love and commitment for his Special Forces job, and the good he believed he was doing in Iraq.

"With Robb, it was always: 'We're doing a good job here. It's just that the word doesn't get out in the reports. People tell us they want us here, because they feel safer when we're around,'" Rex Rolfing said. "And the kids especially. He loved the kids."

That seems natural. It wasn't all that long ago that Robb Rolfing was a kid himself.

I remember him vaguely as a talented soccer player who also handled kicking duties for the football team at Sioux Falls O'Gorman, where my kids went to school. But O'Gorman coach Steve Kueter remembered him well.

"This is a tough one," Kueter said. "Robb was just a hard worker, a real steady kid. You could always count on him."

Knowing that, Kueter was not more surprised than Rolfing's parents when Robb turned down a chance to use his astrophysics degree from Vassar College in New York to get a job in the space industry. There were two reasons for that: He didn't like office work. And terrorists attacked his country.

"9-11 is what did it," Rex said. "Yep, yep, that was the tipping point."

Within months of the attacks, Robb was in the Army, working his way toward a position in the Special Forces. Nobody was surprised that he got there.

"When he made it with the Green Berets, we were all so proud of him. You just knew he'd be good at it," Kueter said. "Now we all have this feeling of loss, yet he was a hero. It doesn't bring him back, but there's an admiration all across the community for what he did. And I think it will grow."

Robb Rolfing's loved ones take comfort in that public commemoration of their son and his sacrifice, as they remember the exceptional amount of life he packed into 29 years.

A sports highlight was the year Robb led Vassar's soccer team to the school's first NCAA post-season tournament.

"That had to be his biggest thrill in athletics," his dad said. "He was captain of the team, and scored the two goals that got them past the first round."

Rex also remembers a kid with a "MacGyver"-like sense for problem solving, who carried a roll of duct tape throughout his formative years, in case he had to wrap-up a problem. And he remembers a tough Special Forces sergeant, on his second Iraq tour of duty, who loved Iraqi kids and left photographic images for his family to cherish.

"We have a picture of him on his first tour of duty with a little Iraqi kid in a Minnesota Vikings shirt," Rex said. "Robb loved the Vikings. He couldn't believe he was halfway around the world, and here's this kid with a Vikings shirt."

Rex Rolfing chuckled as he thought of that picture, and of his oldest son's purple football passions. And for a moment he was lost in a joyful past. But then he caught his breath, as the grief returned.

It always returns. It always will.

Time will dull the pain, of course. But the ache will never leave.

I'm sure there are words to express so profound a loss. I just can't imagine what they are.

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com