Duty and sacrifice. Jaime Lynn Campbell died a soldier, piloting Black Hawk helicopters in Iraq. Her death in a Jan 7 chopper crash in Iraq is one more reminder – and we’ve had more than 2,000 since the 2003 invasion – that war deprives communities of their best and brightest young people. Campbell was an Ephrata native, president of her high school student body, a rodeo queen, a Washington State University graduate in design.

She was a shooting star, her father said Tuesday, a warm, caring, energetic person.

She also was military. Her grandfather fought in World War II. Her father, Jeff Krausse, is an Army master sergeant just returned from Iraq. Her husband, Army Captain Sam Campbell, also just returned from Iraq, coming home this time with his wife’s remains.

History will determine if this is a good war or a bad one. But we don’t need the march of time to know that Jaime Lynn Campbell died a hero, doing her duty and representing her family’s military tradition and her country with great honor.

No place like home. Spokane County’s plans to let some minor offenders go home at night is worth a closely monitored try. Initially, a select test group of 25 will be allowed to work — or obtain work-readiness training — during the day, then sleep at home.

In concept, the program has a lot to recommend it. Inmates would pay something toward the cost of checking up on them. At the least, the program would ease jail crowding, at best it would allow the county to rake in thousands in revenue by lodging federal prisoners in the vacated cells.

The downside, potentially, is a threat to public safety by freeing people whom the criminal justice system determined should be locked up. The idea, of course, is to screen the candidates well enough to minimize the risk.

Still, if the experiment is successful, it will raise a public-policy question that county officials might not have anticipated. If society’s interests can be served by what amounts to community supervision, why lock certain offenders up in the first place?

Generating revenue is appealing, but protecting the public comes first.