Afghanistan

When I got called up by the reserves, five days before I was leaving on a fishing trip to Wyoming, I knew it was a bad sign, and my company commandera thirty-four-year-old block of wood who had somehow managed to graduate college-was gung ho in spades: Captain John "Duke" Moore, a Bible Belt Baptist who believed in God and Jesus and just about everything anyone in authority ever told him. He kept a picture of General Patton on his desk.

There was a problem with my attitude, a real problem, because I wasn't gung ho. I had enlisted between wars, in the spring of 2000, under the vague theory that the U.S. only gets into a serious shooting war about once every twenty years. Suffice to say, 9-11 threw a monkey wrench right in the middle of my plans. No more weekend warrior, no be all you can be, no specialized computer training funded by the government. It was back to Benning for a four-week refresher course on how not to get killed in the line of duty. Goddamn Taliban, goddamn al-Qaida.

So Afghanistan. Have you noticed? How every war has villains, and the villains have derogatory names. In World War I it was the evil Huns, in WWII it was slopeheads and krauts; in Viet Nam they called them gooksnowadays it's rag-heads, and once in a while you'll hear somebody use the ugly term "sand niggers"-but that's generally confined to the hard-core rednecks and racist types. Don't you love the vocabulary of a good war?

A month after Benning I was on a transport with a couple hundred other misfortunates who, aside from their bravado and feather-chested posturing, were every bit as apprehensive as I was. You could sense it in the atmosphere of uncertainty, in their timidities, the misgivings and forced resignations lurking in their eyes.

So southern Afghanistan... a lieutenant colonel and his adjutant, a stocky, red-haired major, met us at the military airfield. The colonel's fifty-something-year-old face was as etched with anal-retentive tightness as any officer I'd ever seen, and his posture was stiffer than an aluminum baseball bat. He was all business, all by the book, spit and polish.

Except for his boots-he wore a pair of two hundred dollar...