Let’s go. Days are counting. The terrain is rough, but we’ve done it before. Decade ago. Not a very difficult fight. Hell, the Department of Defense said we only had 148 battle deaths, out of the 467,159 who served. Ain’t that bad, we had to upgrade our camouflage and deal with a constant media spotlight, but so be it. We’d just shepherd ’em around in packs, anyhow.

Big desert fires out there, remember? Spewing money out of wells, all the land one great wasted heap of smoke and dead things, the environmentalists went crazy. All that howling oil drowning out the wildlife, outside contractors working on rigs to shut the fires down, good old American boys in the desert with sunburns, making money for saving money.

And that mustached head, big and laughing above an Iraqi business suit, and George Bush coming home with an empty platter. We taught him a lesson though, didn’t we?

This war. This crazy war. That crazy dictator Saddam. Worth $4 billion while his people starve to death just outside Baghdad. He maintains 74 private palaces. In fact, he spent $2.2 billion on rebuilding them after the Gulf War. But the people of Baghdad are lucky to get electricity for half an hour a day.

Let’s talk money. Cheap gasoline in Iraq: .0009 cents a gallon (in 2000). Expensive phone calls to America: $158 a minute. Saddam offers $14,000 to anybody who takes down an American warplane. Educated people make $2 or $3 … a month. The 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act granted $97 million to native forces in opposition to Saddam. Big guns. Big money. Nothing happened.

Saddam means “the stubborn one” and he used to abuse animals as a child. Shot a man at age 14. Married his cousin. Now ponders existence from a 394-foot yacht named Al Mansur while his body double Faoas al-Emari gets shot at downtown. He gets money from illegal oil trade to Jordan and Turkey … but we like those countries. Let it slide.

Pan to Texas (100,000 square miles larger than Iraq) and the grimace of George W. Bush plotting war. Seems fair, seems right, seems justified. Saddam must be taken down. Thorn in our side. Bush wants to avoid another stalemate Cold War. Do they have the bomb? What if they do? Maybe they don’t … will we ever know?

We must strike first, Bush says, we must make the first move. Apply same logic to a bar fight and it doesn’t make sense. Or defensive driving. I hit the man in the Jeep because he wandered over the double-yellow line and I suspected he was going to nail me, officer. Don’t you get it?

Sure Saddam isn’t nice. He doesn’t play fair. And something, if we are to have any moral courage whatsoever, should be done. But even if Bush was putting the suffering people of Iraq at the top of our agenda, even if he was truly invested in spreading freedom to all the fishies in the deep blue sea … our most honorable historic intentions often end up disastrous. Putting our nose where it doesn’t belong, putting our boys in regions where the old rules don’t apply.

But we send troops anyway. They wage war. Generals bark and the President gouges at the UN and Congress and Germany and soothes the American public. Look here, he’ll say, we’re doing what’s right.

And then? Dead troops on televisions. Corpses on the 11 o’clock news. American boys in American body bags. Made in the USA.

War spins round and round. “If you purchase controlled substances,” the commercials whined during Superbowl Sunday, “you are supporting terrorists.” Same if I buy gasoline? Oil? Is Mobil the enemy? Is Exxon trying to kill you? Does the Indy 500 support Osama bin Laden and should we maybe tap that refuge up in Alaska? Trying to update the drug war, make it applicable to the War on Terror. Before it gets lost in the middle … that’s how our wars end, now: with a whimper and not with a bang.

O ye of little faith, they say. We will win. Catch Osama, Saddam, everybody else. Statecraft. Warfare. Infantry. Half a million ground troops, they say. Will our children be drafted to fight this unknown enemy in the desert? Will I?

Not if we win quick, they say. But even most analysts admit this will be a long, drawn-out war. With a bit of luck, though, we will come out the victor without too many deaths.

But I don’t want any American deaths.

Acceptable casualties, they say. Some troops are expendable; you know, if it’s worth it in the long run.

Sure, fine. Just don’t take any of my friends.

Morning prayers as war erupts. God willing. Bless our troops. Under God, indivisible. Under God, one. My god is bigger than your god. Too many people and too many gods.

Too many people and too many lessons from the past that we turn a silent ear to. Fighting and losing my friends and my enemies and people I’ve never met and never had anything against. Pawns in the international arena. War is hell, Vietnam told us. War sucks; a walk in the valley of the shadow of death. Love and hate tattooed across knuckles. Born to lose.