His trademark dreadlocks and imposing stature are typically enough to get Marcus Jones waved on through at the players entrance to Raymond James Stadium but, when bombs are falling in a desolate patch of desert thousands of miles away and smoke still smolders from the twisted rubble of the World Trade Center, no one gets a free pass.

	Jones

And so, just like all the civilians who attended Sunday's game here, the Tampa Bay Bucs left defensive end was stopped and searched. Not surprisingly, Jones waited patiently for the OK to proceed to the Tampa Bay locker room, neither pulling rank nor noting that he had a pregame ritual to which he must attend.

From the perspective of a guy whose father served two hitches in Vietnam, whose brother went off to the Persian Gulf confrontation 10 years ago, due diligence is a small price to pay to ensure that no NFL game ever becomes a real-life version of the movie "Black Sunday." Standing in line for 10 minutes, or permitting the bomb-sniffing dogs to inspect your travel bag, hardly qualifies as inconvenience.

Give credit to Marcus Jones, and guys like him, who realize that what they do on Sunday afternoons is merely a high-profile diversion which pales in comparison to tracking down terrorists or flying through anti-aircraft tracers.

"So, hey, how did things go in the real world today?" Jones asked a media hack after the Bucs had disposed of the visiting Green Bay Packers in a critical, early-season matchup. "I mean, what's going on over there?"

The aforementioned media hack, I met Jones this summer during ESPN.com's tour of the NFL training camp sites. We talked for 45 minutes and, when the interview was finished, Jones looked like he wanted to keep rapping for a while. A neat player, really, one whose career was second in importance to his family.

On Sunday evening, he thanked me for the column I wrote two months ago about how he was the unknown standout on the Tampa Bay defensive front four, and about the reversal of fortune in his career. "Look, it was my pleasure," I said. "Oh, no my pleasure," Jones replied, before asking about what had transpired in Afghanistan during the afternoon.

	“	What we do for a living, what went on out there today, that isn't war, man. Football is a game. War is life and death. No matter how much importance we put on (football), people don't get killed. If we had lost today, it would have been huge, but there wouldn't have been any casualties. ”
		— Marcus Jones

In a locker room where human quote machine Warren Sapp holds court while spitting his tobacco juice into a white towel on the floor, and where the pulse always seems to beat a little slow, Marcus Jones is a fresh breath of reality. He didn't need to prove it again on Sunday evening, but he did, his interest in current events anything but feigned.

Maurice Jones, a career Marine who reared his son with discipline and an occasional rap across the back of the head, raised a pretty good kid. In a Sunday article, Jones told The Tampa Tribune columnist Marty Fennelly about how he used to look through his father's old photograph albums from his stints in Vietnam, would come across a picture of his dad at a show where Bob Hope was entertaining the troops, and think it was pretty neat.

But that, of course, was years ago. These days, when terror on our once-sacred soil now threaten to turn football stadiums into armed fortresses, Marcus Jones never thinks "neat" when he thinks of war. And when he thinks about war, he longer allows himself to think about all the battlefield allusions that have become part of the football lexicon.

Said a fairly somber Jones on Sunday evening: "What we do for a living, what went on out there today, that isn't war, man. Football is a game. War is life and death. No matter how much importance we put on (football), people don't get killed. If we had lost today, it would have been huge, but there wouldn't have been any casualties."

Doubtless there were scores of NFL players who on Sunday shared the same sentiments. But I was only at one game, spoke to just one player about the bombing taking place in a country about which we know little, but was stopped by only one player of the dozen or so veterans I knew well in the Tampa Bay-Green Bay game.

For years, when at parties or cookouts, friends and acquaintances have never failed to ask about the makeup of athletes. And I have characteristically responded that, for the most part, what is often overlooked about the athletes I've met is their humanness. If their kid has the flu, and they've been up all night tending to him, they will be tired and miserable and grouchy, just like everyone else would be. Prick them and they bleed red. Attack the country and they fret, taking on the same insecurities we all feel now, assuming that life as we knew it a month ago has ceased.

Odds are good that Marcus Jones is like a lot of his peers. But after Sunday, I know this: If things get dicey, I want Jones, a player of sense and sensitivity, on my side.

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.