COAL TOWNSHIP — Robert Fisher’s mind was wandering Thursday night, two days after his son, Army Pfc. James Yohn, was killed in Iraq.

“This makes you think,” Mr. Fisher said, as he sat on his living room couch, sipping an iced tea and smoking a cigarette.

He wondered aloud about the state of the country, of the world, about how human lives these days seem to be worth less than dollars and cents. But mostly, he thought about his 25-year-old son, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Mosul Tuesday.

“Jimmy was one that always pitched in. Always had a smile on his face,” Mr. Fisher said. “He loved life.”

Yohn was a volunteer firefighter with the Highspire Fire Company in Dauphin County. His wife, Amber, is about to give birth to the couple’s first son — James Yohn Jr. — in a few weeks, Mr. Fisher said.

Yohn was supposed to return home to Highspire in February, his father said.

“He’s not coming home now,” Fisher said.

Mr. Fisher and his wife, Julia Ann, reminisced about Yohn. He was a great cook, they said, and an even better eater. He loved to fish and hunt. Mrs. Fisher recalled, with a smile, the time she pulled his baggy pants down at a family gathering just to embarrass him.

“Jimmy was from the ’hood,” his father said. “He wore the turkey pants hanging down.”

For a while, when he was younger, “Jimmy had a rough life,” Mr. Fisher said. “He straightened his life out through the military.”

Yohn enlisted in the Army out of a sense of civic responsibility, but also out of a deep, abiding faith in God, Mr. Fisher said. “He believed in a good and loving God, and I’m sure he’s OK. We’re still here to deal with it. He died doing what he loved.”

The Fishers aren’t angry though. Thursday night they seemed, if anything, just tired and sad.

“I feel sorry for every mother, wife, child, who’s lost someone in this stinking war,” said Mrs. Fisher, who worries about her eldest son, Tracy, suffering the same fate if he returns to Iraq.

“I do try to block it out,” she said. “I still think about it every day, because I know (he) is going to go back.”

Mr. Fisher said he has bad dreams too. But one thought comforts him.