WASHINGTON (MCT) — Few words were spoken between President Barack Obama and a grieving Steve Weston, but their predawn meeting at Dover Air Force base early Thursday came at a critical moment in Obama’s presidency.

For the first time since he became commander in chief nine months ago, Obama flew nearly 100 miles by helicopter early Thursday morning to see 18 Americans returning in caskets from the war in Afghanistan. Fifteen were soldiers. Three, including Weston’s son Michael, were Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

The president met with families in the chapel building, where family members sat in groups of three. A military representative introduced each group in turn, and aides could see the president in quiet conversation as he clasped women by the hand or laid his hand on men’s shoulders.

“It was the saddest room I’ve ever been in; grieving families from all walks of life,” Weston, of Lake Arrowhead, Calif., said in an interview. “It hurt so badly, and here he is, trying to offer comfort. And I respect him for that.”

“I think the president is in a very difficult position, and I don’t know if there are any right answers,” said Weston of Obama’s upcoming decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. “It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

For the past six weeks, Obama has conducted a review of the war strategy in Afghanistan that has taken place mostly around conference tables. He has held three-hour meetings in the war room, prodding military and diplomatic advisers until they run out of answers and have to go get more. But the visit to Dover was an effort to get a far more personal perspective on the war, and to honor its dead, aides said.

The challenge for any wartime president is to send U.S. troops into harm’s way while still reassuring Americans of his compassion for them and their families. The balance is delicate and the risk is great; the nation’s faith in the commander-in-chief and in the war effort are at stake.

President George W. Bush never went to Dover. He conveyed his message by meeting elsewhere with the parents, spouses and children of the war dead — events that were quiet and private, but frequent enough that word of them became a consistent part of the public story about Iraq.

Obama has also paid less-publicized visits to family members. The Dover moment was different, in part because Bush never did it and because the “dignified transfer” ceremonies had until recently been off-limits to the media by Pentagon rule for almost two decades. Thousands of fallen troops have returned to their families via C-17 plane over the course of the last eight years.

Weston’s son Michael, 37, wasn’t serving as a soldier when he was killed in a helicopter crash on Monday; he was one of three Drug Enforcement Administration agents deployed with troops on a drug raid near Herat in the southern part of the country.

Their deaths, which Obama honored by making his first appearance at a ceremony at the base, marked the first time any DEA agents fell in the line of duty in a war that is now front and center on the president’s agenda. For Obama, they were also a sobering reminder the war in Afghanistan is one in which an armed insurgency is so intertwined with an explosion of heroin production and trafficking it cannot be won by military force alone.

Accompanying Obama were some senior military officials, the acting head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who oversees the DEA as the nation’s top law enforcement officials. They met first with each family, and then Obama followed suit shortly afterward.