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"While he was in Iraq, at night I couldn't sleep," Robert Stokely says of his son, Michael.

Sgt. Michael Stokely served in the Georgia Army National Guard. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005.

"I used to look at the moon a lot," Robert Stokely says, "and I told Mike, 'When you see the moon, know that eight hours later I'll see it too, and I'll think about you.' "

On Aug. 8, 2005, Michael called his father, and Robert asked if he would still be coming home in two weeks. "I can't take this anymore," he said.

"[Michael] said, 'I love you, and I'll see you soon.' And those were the last words I heard from him," Robert says.

Michael Stokely, 23, was killed by an improvised explosive device eight days after their conversation. He died on the side of the road.

"I felt guilty I wasn't there to hold him when he died, and comfort him. I felt guilty I wasn't able to protect him," Robert Stokely says. "So, I just had to go there and see what this place looked like. I just wanted to see where my son died. And I couldn't live if I didn't go."

In November 2011, Robert flew to Iraq via Amman, Jordan, with a security team. They stayed in a safe house in Baghdad.

"I sat on the roof for hours, and I just looked at the moon overhead. And I thought, I am 16 miles away. I am so close," he says.

Robert wanted to put an engraved piece of marble at the site of his son's death. The next morning, the group passed through four checkpoints — but couldn't clear the fifth.

"It was just so dangerous they wouldn't let us through, and they turned us back. So we were unable to get there," Stokely says. "I wanted to kneel where Mike fell and touch that spot. I didn't get to do that.

"Maybe God had a reason why I didn't go that last mile and a half, but I did get to ride some of the same roads Mike rode. So rather than feeling sorry that I didn't get there, I'm going to be happy that I got that close. I got close enough."

Audio produced for Weekend Edition Saturday by Yasmina Guerda.

White House economic adviser Alan Krueger took some ribbing from his boss this week. President Obama noted that Krueger will soon be leaving Washington to go back to his old job, teaching economics at Princeton.

"And now that Alan has some free time, he can return to another burning passion of his: 'Rockanomics,' the economics of rock and roll," the president said. "This is something that Alan actually cares about."

In fact, Krueger gave a speech this week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where he said the music business offers valuable lessons about the broader U.S. economy.

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Read Alan Krueger's full speech

If you woke up this morning thinking, "I really need to hear NPR's Linda Wertheimer say the words 'noisily unwrapping her Twizzlers,'" have I got good news for you.

Margot Adler had a story on today's Morning Edition about Broadway audiences and whether they're getting ruder, given recent incidents involving the aforementioned Twizzlers, rude texting, talking and other interruptions. She went to the TKTS line (where you wait for discount Broadway tickets) and asked some of the folks what they thought.

Some offered the usual explanations — say, that we're all used to sitting in our living rooms watching alone, and we don't remember what it's like to use our polite-company manners anymore. One speculated that as theater has gotten more casual (less dressy, drinks allowed), people's behavior has lost its polite formality.

Jan Simpson, the writer of one blog about Broadway, actually calls herself "old-fashioned" for wanting people to sit quietly while watching a show, which I can tell you caused the writer of one blog about popular culture to clutch her metaphorical pearls in horror at the thought that there's something modern about being a disruptive buffoon. Adler acknowledges that in fact, "in Shakespeare's time, they threw food on the stage." Of course, in Shakespeare's time, they died of various things we've cured, so let's not embrace that too eagerly.

What emerges is partly a generational issue setting younger audiences who want to tweet about the show while it's happening (mon dieu!) against older, perhaps more experienced audiences who take a less consumer-oriented and more art-patron-oriented approach to attendance. But surely, a person of any age is capable of doing without Twitter for a couple of hours. I can do without Twitter for a couple of hours, for example, and I've been known to tweet about people clipping their nails on the Metro.

It's a good thing, indeed, to avoid taking theater and making it a cloistered place for elites only (not that ticket prices don't get you a good part of the way there). But it's also a good thing to avoid giving free passes out of Rudeness Jail for everyone who simply prefers not to iron anything except cargo shorts.

OK, OK, I don't really care if you wear cargo shorts. But the pockets should not be stuffed with things that beep, smoke, smell like garlic or tempt you to whisper.

Deal?

As the controversy over the National Security Agency's phone and Internet data gathering reminds us, one of Congress's most challenging assignments is oversight of the nation's intelligence community.

Keeping tabs on that the part of the federal government which constantly invokes national security to justify its opaqueness has its obvious difficulties and frustrations regardless of which party controls the House or Senate.

Those frustrations came through in a conversation I had with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, who has served on the House Intelligence Committee for six years. She's the top Democrat on the Intelligence oversight subcommittee.

How challenging is it for lawmakers to do oversight of the intelligence community given all the secrecy? I asked.

SCHAKOWSKY: "There's a number of challenges for all of us on the Intelligence Committee because all of us, maybe with the exception of the chairman and ranking member who may spend most of their time dealing with the issues of the Intelligence Committee, most of the rest of us are definitely part-timers. We work on other committees.

So the responsibility of oversight of 16 intelligence agencies, including the huge ones of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, it's a tremendous responsibility. And yet the cards are stacked against us in many ways, in terms of doing a really good job, particularly for the rank and file.

"Often it's just the chairman and ranking member on both the House and the Senate intelligence committees that are fully read into all the classified information and the covert operations. So we're not always fully up to date and fully briefed on everything."