Mr. Rushing is heading back to Iraq today, roughly four years after his last trip, and nearly three years after his big-screen debut in the documentary Control Room—Jehane Noujaim’s surprise hit that explored Al-Jazeera and the dynamics of the media war during the chaotic early days of the Iraq invasion. His star turn made blue-state audiences swoon and marked him as a matinee idol for the nervous new century: a U.S. Marine, clean-cut, thoughtful, culturally sensitive.

These days, the blue eyes and Texas drawl are the same, but the new vest won’t be the only change from his last trip to a war zone. His hair is longer now; the combat boots are long gone. And this week, when Mr. Rushing joins a team of American military advisors headed to northern Iraq to help train the Iraqi Army’s Second Infantry Division, he will be an embedded observer, not an officer. “This is my first time ever to enter a combat zone not armed, and not with other Marines, and that—it feels like going to prom in your tighty-whities,” he said. “It feels very naked for me.”

Mr. Rushing, 34, is making his way across uncharted terrain, as one of only a handful of Americans—and the only former military officer—to go to work for the controversial, Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera. Still, he seems so confident in his new path—so at ease with his choice—it’s easy to forget that he initially debuted as an unwitting, and unwilling, media star. He first heard of his role in Control Room via a voicemail from an anonymous stranger shortly after the movie’s film-festival debut: “You don’t know me, but I just saw your movie at Sundance, and I wanted to say thanks.” The veteran public-affairs officer hadn’t signed a release to appear in the documentary; he barely remembered chatting, just once, with a few film students from the American University in Cairo during a single afternoon at CENTCOM. Heart thudding, he headed for the Web. “I Googled ‘Sundance’ and ‘Josh Rushing,’ and there I was,” he said.

Even for a veteran flack like Mr. Rushing, the media learning curve that followed was breathtakingly steep. As his story made its way from the entertainment section to the front page, he found himself muzzled by the Pentagon, his 14-year military career essentially over. As it happened, Mr. Rushing had already started to imagine life outside uniform. “I left [the military] because it occurred to me that I finally had a platform to say something that only I could say,” he said as he perched on the edge of his chair, sleeves rolled up, just a few feet from the buzzing Al-Jazeera newsroom. The bureau is housed on several floors of a nondescript K Street building just a few blocks from the White House; Mr. Rushing’s sunny office is dominated by Longhorns paraphernalia and family snapshots. “Only I could—because I was the only one who had that vantage point. And also, I had the right background where I could go onto Bill O’Reilly’s show and tell him that he should reconsider Al-Jazeera, and he couldn’t dismiss me as some lefty from somewhere.”

Now Al-Jazeera English has given Mr. Rushing a permanent platform—albeit one that’s still virtually unavailable on U.S. cable systems (“Thank God for YouTube,” he said). The network went live less than five months ago, but Mr. Rushing has already churned out an impressive stream of investigative pieces—reports on rural America and foreign child soldiers, the mechanics of military training and Hollywood’s portrayal of Arab characters; soon after he gets back from his embed, he’ll be heading to Moscow to report on a special on the weapon of revolution, the AK-47. “Josh is a natural,” said Joanne Levine, an AJE executive producer and Nightline vet, who puts Mr. Rushing in the same category as other high-profile news personalities she’s worked with, like Peter Jennings and Bob Woodruff. “He has that charisma—a presence that pops just off of the screen.”

BUT MR. RUSHING'S APPEAL AND APPROACH aren’t quite that of the traditional broadcast newsman; his method seems inextricably linked with the audience’s perception of his persona and story—the political as personal as political. One of his early projects for the network was Spin: The Art of Selling War—a mea culpa of sorts, where he systematically debunked talking points he’d spouted in his former career (the special featured a parallel penitent appearance by a regret-wracked Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff). After an innovative, extended series of cuts from press-conference footage of President George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to eerily similar Gulf of Tonkin–era remarks by Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Rushing steered the special to unusual territory for a foreign-policy piece: the reporter himself. As a result, the broadcast—a scathing j’accuse directed at administration policy—wound up in a place far more raw than traditional, objective journalism, with Mr. Rushing as a sort of Al-Jazeera Anderson Cooper: the same earnest emotiveness, the same blue-eyed magnetism. The production values were top-of-the-line, the reporting rock-solid—but clearly, for good or ill, 60 Minutes this wasn’t.

In an early draft of his upcoming book, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World (coming later this spring from Palgrave Macmillan), Mr. Rushing keeps up that balancing act, trying to reconcile the advocate he was and the journalist he’s become into some crusading combination of the two. “This is a strange time for America. Everywhere it seems people are seeing things through a prism of their own fears and stereotypes,” Mr. Rushing wrote, adding that he was “trying to practice a form of journalism that is skeptical and challenging in a news environment that seems increasingly less so.” The book chronicles his journey from a teenage Marine out of small-town Texas to the public face of Al-Jazeera English, including a behind-the-scenes look at CENTCOM’s press operation during the early days of the conflict, and a bracingly candid account of his growing disillusionment with the war on terror. “I [often] find myself traversing the battle lines of American’s struggle with the worst of itself,” he wrote. There have been no terror attacks since 9/11, but “reports from the front lines of America’s greater jihad—the struggle for our soul, for what is best in us—are much more grim.”

For the past few months, Mr. Rushing has been edging his way back to the battlefield, feeling around the margins of the story that helped define Al-Jazeera: the Iraq War. If Mr. Rushing is his network’s own Anderson Cooper, then this is his return to the Big Easy. “I feel personally responsible for what’s going on there [in Iraq],” he said last week. “Not that I did all of it, but anyone, I think, who was involved in the beginning and believed in the reasons we were doing it and thought we were creating a better situation for these people—now, clearly, it’s not a better situation—has to feel some sense of personal responsibility and desire to some way be involved in trying to make that right. And if my way of making that right involves asking the right questions, the tough questions, and examining what we’re doing there, then that’s what I’ll do.”

Mr. Rushing’s wife Paige, he says, is “nervous as hell” about his embed. He pauses. “Um, I don’t blame her …. I think there was some sense she had that when I got out of the Marine Corps, she was like, ‘Whew, we made it through; we’re done.’ And now the fact I’m going back—she thought she was done with that, and, of course, we’re not. We’re not done with that.” His son Luke is nearly 15; baby Ethan Coltrane is getting close to his first birthday. Meanwhile, back in Lone Star, Tex.—where his father is a volunteer firefighter and his mom works for the city council—his supportive parents are already dealing with the fallout from their son’s new line of work. “I feel for them in many ways, more than anyone, because—it’s easy for me being in Washington and taking the heat. But they have to explain to their friends on the fire force … to their friends at church, who—it’s not the same kind of international crowd as here,” he said quietly. “And it shouldn’t necessarily be their burden to have to explain. But, of course, they do. So I really feel for them, because in many ways they have the tougher fight to fight than I do.”

This resistance to Mr. Rushing—less to the man himself than to the ideas and ethos he has come to represent—has, at times, gotten in the way of his reporting. His recent attempt to join U.S. forces in Iraq wasn’t his first try at an embed slot. In the months before Al-Jazeera English’s official launch, he made a futile bid to join U.S. forces in Iraq—but, he says, U.S. officials in Baghdad told him that military policy prohibited Al-Jazeera from participating in the embed program. (Actually, the Arabic-language network was given permission to embed in the early days of the war, before its relationship with the Pentagon soured completely.)

IN THE IRAQ WAR'S EARLY DAYS, relations between the administration and the Arabic-language network famously fractured over the latter’s editorial leanings. Now, new leadership in military public affairs is trying to change the way the coalition deals with Al-Jazeera and the rest of the Arab media. (This reassessment of existing policy extends to American reporters as well—recently, a Defense Department representative embarked on an informal listening tour of major broadcast bureaus in New York and Washington, sounding out producers and correspondents on ways the military might alter the evolving embed program, among other issues.) It’s still a work in progress, but the changing attitudes are part of what made Mr. Rushing’s journey possible.

Meanwhile, although the Marine Corps may not have come around (“The Marine Corps [and I are] a bit like a bad relationship,” Mr. Rushing said. “They haven’t quite gotten over the breakup. ”), large swaths of the officer corps in the other services have quietly embraced the former captain. At least once or twice a month, Mr. Rushing is invited to address large military gatherings on bases nationwide. He’s made repeat appearances at West Point and Annapolis—including the former’s counterterrorism training center—and spoken at the commencement ceremonies of most of the military’s freshly minted public-affairs officers. In the months before he left for Iraq, he addressed the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, as well as the National Defense University. “There’s a sense, if you’re doing the right thing, that you have nothing to hide and you want everyone to see it—particularly those who accuse you of not doing the right thing,” Mr. Rushing said. “So I think [military officers] see in Al-Jazeera an audience that they would very much like to see what they’re doing here, because they believe in what they’re doing.”

He understands the military’s mission, he said, and he supports it. But he no longer views it as his own. “I’m at a point in my life where the questions are more important than the answers,” he said. “It’s a new way of approaching things for me …. I started out with all the answers, and now I’ve worked my way back to the questions.”

Then again, Full Metal Jacket was a belated blast at our long involvement in the Vietnam War, with its wide media coverage, whereas Jarhead is concerned with the heavily censored and barely covered (on the ground, at least) first Gulf War in 1991, which ended disconcertingly, almost as soon as it began, with the forces of Saddam Hussein in full retreat after having invaded and occupied neighboring Kuwait. On this occasion, the first President Bush declined the option of pursuing Saddam’s forces to Baghdad and deposing the Iraqi dictator, for fear that the resultant instability in Iraq would tempt Iran to intervene.

The comparative ease with which the first Gulf War was fought and won, mostly from the air, may have led the second Bush administration to underestimate the difficulties of actually occupying Iraq after its regular armed forces had been vanquished. Still, Jarhead manages to be as much about the second Gulf War as the first, particularly when the Marines deployed in Saudi Arabia get their first glimpses of sabotaged oil wells blazing into the sky. Even back then, there were people who argued that we had gone into the Persian Gulf in the first place only because so many of our sources of oil were located there. But what Mr. Swofford’s book and Mr. Mendes’ movie reveal to us, as if for the first time, is the sheer hell of desert warfare, which is immensely different from the jungle warfare that the U.S. military had waged in Vietnam. There is thus inescapably a touch of absurdism in Jarhead, achieved by the grotesque contrast between the temporal brevity of the conflict and the emotional intensity with which it was fought.

In one scene, the Marines are energized and inspired by watching a screening of the Wagnerian helicopter flights in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Walter Murch, the editor of Jarhead, was also the editor of the Coppola classic. Ironically, then, Apocalypse Now—with its intended anti–Vietnam War message—eventually served to make a later generation of Marines more warlike and bloodthirsty. So much for the benign, pacificism-enhancing effects on audiences of violent war movies.

Yet even in terms of its war-is-hell subgenre, Jarhead is less about the dubious “issues” involved than the powerful feelings generated by male camaraderie. When Swoff is teamed up with Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) in a two-man sniper unit, in which one man scouts and the other shoots, he comes to realize that despite Troy’s criminal record as a drug dealer, he is the only politically sophisticated member of the platoon. Troy keeps asking his comrades why they’re fighting this war, and he’s the only one who refuses to take the experimental drugs issued by the U.S. military as anti-biological-warfare agents because they’ve never been adequately tested, and he doesn’t relish the thought of becoming a guinea pig, thank you. Mr. Sarsgaard brings his accustomed charismatic conviction to the role from the first moment we spot him in the group. I found myself wondering why he hasn’t been cast as the leading man long ago. Perhaps that extra “a” in his name makes it seem too eccentric for star billing, or perhaps it’s too close to that of the excellent Swedish actor, Stellan Scarsgård. Then, too, perhaps it’s the authority he brings to serious, even villainous parts that makes him seem too valuable an acting resource to be wasted on vapid lead characters.

Not that Mr. Gyllenhaal is chopped liver in his own role as the unusually introspective Marine with a fondness for reading Camus (and he, too, is afflicted with an extra “a” in his name, as is his marvelously talented and sexy sister, Maggie). There is something almost perpetually anonymous about Mr. Gyllenhaal’s face that makes him the perfect Everyman for projects like Jarhead. Between the two of them, Mr. Gyllenhaal’s Swoff and Mr. Sarsgaard’s Troy manage to climb the highest emotional peaks of male bonding, all the way to the grave.

Jarhead is the first war movie—and perhaps even the first movie, period—to present masturbation as the consuming activity it is for young males, in or out of the service. The problem for Swoff and his fellow Marines is exacerbated in the sexually barren sands of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. For the first time ever, we see our “boys” so inflamed with paranoid sexual fantasies about the girlfriends they left behind and what they’re doing in their spare time that they become fanatical worshippers of any girlie photo or porno film they can obtain from their buddies back home. In one scene, we’re shown a graphic sexual scene involving the wife of one of the Marines and a strange man. I got the impression that the wife may have sent the homemade porno flick to her husband as an elaborate “Dear John” letter, inasmuch as she slithers in for a close-up at the end of her video performance. Despite his anguished humiliation, the Marine insists on looking at the porno flick again and finally has to be dragged away from the tormenting spectacle.

For his part, Swoff gets a more sedate “Dear John” missive from his girlfriend, and he is devastated by all the code words in the letter signaling betrayal. It remains to be seen how receptive civilian audiences will be to these revolutionary images of sexually vulnerable servicemen and their serious discussions of whether one gets the best result by using his left hand or right hand to achieve orgasmic release. In traditional war movies, our boys tend to be stoically sexless. But since World War II—the last war perceived by all as a just war—there has been a left-wing backlash against the alleged carnal abuse of Third World women, especially in Vietnam, by our oversexed troops. Even during World War II, there was circulating in England an unflattering phrase for the American troops stationed there for the eventual invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe: “Overpaid, oversexed and over here.”

The real-life Anthony Swofford was a 20-year-old third-generation enlistee when he was sent to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to fight in the first Gulf War. He writes: “Like most good and great Marines, I hated the Corps. I hated being a Marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be—smart, famous, oversexed, drunk, fucked, high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy—more than all of those things, I was a Marine. A jarhead.”

The title of the book comes from the slang term for the shape of a Marine’s head after he has received a military haircut. The process was shown at greater length in Full Metal Jacket, but again the emphasis in that film was on the group and not the individual, whereas in Jarhead it is on the individual writer-to-be seeking his new identity within the group. What he finds instead is a palpable fear that insulates him from the others at first, but later solidifies his ties with them. All in all, there is much more inaction than action in the film, and this too may not go over too well with violence junkies. However, this is what war is and always has been—not the feature-length spectacles of more efficient but less realistic screenplays.

There is more than a little sadism involved in the unit’s rites of initiation, and the film also acknowledges the many dissenting voices of minorities grateful to the Marine Corps for the opportunity it has given them. Most prominent among the latter is Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx), who loves the corps for the life and purpose it has given him. Yet there’s also a somewhat hidden subtext to the film in the self-serving cynicism of commanders like Lieutenant Colonel Kazinski (Chris Cooper). In all respects, Jarhead is straight from the horse’s mouth. See it.

The Women

Rodrigo García’s Nine Lives, from his own screenplay, unfolds as a remarkable tour de force consisting of nine intermittently related stories of women in crisis. What makes the project truly prodigious is the writer-director’s collaboration with his cinematographer, Xavier Pérez Grobet, and a closely knit production team to render each of the nine stories in one single, unbroken take, without a single scenic detour or cutaway shot for its own sake.

The nine stories are far from being equally compelling, but the cumulative effect of the rigorously controlled and purposive camera style adds up in the end to a collective portrait of womankind that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Curiously, the film begins with an overly familiar note of special pleading, with inmate Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) mopping seemingly endless prison corridors with absurdist futility as she fends off the advances of a corrupt prison guard. Sandra lives only for the visits of her child, but on the one visit we witness, the phone connection is dead, and she must communicate mutely through the soundproof glass. This drives her berserk, and Sandra is forced back into her cell with a cruel indifference to her feelings. There seems to be no point to this one-sided tale of persecution beyond the opportunity for exhibitionist camera work that those Kafkaesque prison corridors present.

After this problematic opening, the second story, of Diana (Robin Wright Penn), turns out to be the strongest and most tantalizing of the nine. It takes place entirely in a supermarket, where Diana catches a glimpse of an old lover and then maneuvers her cart so that she can bump into him “accidentally.” Though they’ve both been married to other people for a long time, and though Diana is visibly pregnant, the romantic sparks still fly between them as they recall what was and what might have been.

Holly (Lisa Gay Hamilton) introduces an element of interracial mystery in her confrontation with a stepfather who was possibly abusive. Like the first episode, this third story doesn’t give us enough information to understand the nature of Holly’s grievances. Sonia (Holly Hunter) recoils from her boyfriend when he reveals a painfully personal secret to their closest friends, who are clearly doing better than they. Teenager Samantha (Amanda Seyfreid) tries to keep the peace between her combative parents—and in the process of flitting back and forth between them, she gives the camera ample opportunity to vary its angles and focal lengths.

Lorna (Amy Brenneman) attends the funeral of her ex-husband’s wife, who has committed suicide. While comforting her ex in a secluded room in the funeral parlor, she allows herself to be seduced by him. What is odd and original about the seduction is that it’s achieved through sign language by the husband, who is clearly handicapped (though Lorna is not), opening up all sorts of speculation about their prior relationship. I can’t remember ever seeing sign language used in this manner, except possibly in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). As it is, this is the only sex act consummated in the film.

Meanwhile, Ruth (Sissy Spacek) comes close to committing adultery in a motel room. When the police suddenly arrive to arrest a woman in the neighboring cabin, Ruth watches the events unfold and then decides, when her own partner returns to their cabin, not to go through with her escapade. Camille (Kathy Baker) faces the dire reality of a mastectomy while her husband tries manfully to console and reassure her; hers is a one-take performance with a vengeance. Finally, we see Maggie (Glenn Close) taking her young daughter (the omnipresent Dakota Fanning) to what looks like a picnic in a cemetery as the film comes to an end morbidly, resignedly, but still hopefully.

The actresses embodying the nine titular lives perform beyond the call of duty, but the men—played by Stephen Dillane, William Fichtner, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Ian McShane, Aidan Quinn and Miguel Sandoval—are hardly mere appendages. The excellent cast also includes Molly Parker, Mary Kay Place and Sydney Tamiia Poitier.

As uneven as the film itself is, Nine Lives reverberates far beyond its self-imposed boundaries to provide morally and artistically stimulating entertainment for the thoughtful moviegoer. There are certainly limitations to the single-take strategy, but Mr. García has avoided most of its pitfalls by not spelling out all the details of his characters’ motivations, though he occasionally pays a price in vagueness and uncertainty.

Mizoguchi!

BAMcinématek at the Brooklyn Academy of Music will present A Moving Camera: Kenji Mizoguchi from Oct. 31 to Nov. 22. The series includes seven features by the much-praised Japanese director: Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Osaka Elegy (1936), The Life of Oharu (1952), Sisters of the Gion (1936), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) and Street of Shame (1956).

In his three decades as a director, Mizoguchi made more than 80 films. He died in 1956. Call 718-636-4100 for more details on the screenings.

She and her son are not alone in such opinions. This year, the Army will fail to make its recruiting goals even though it’s dangling ever more goodies—like college tuition and chunks of cash—in front of the teenagers it hopes to enlist. Now there’s talk of accepting spry persons over 40 years of age to risk life and limb pro gloria dei and, I guess, patriae, too.

One of the Army’s problems is that it gets harder to find gullible galoots who believe the promises. Bitter veterans abound with angry stories about care withheld or the quality of the care offered men and women once they leave the services. Nor does it help that potential enlistees are shy of signing up because they fear they may never get out once they are in. The government has broken its word too often. So sing the National Anthem twice at the ball game and put another “I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” sticker on one or even all of the family cars. Hey, it ain’t my war, ain’t my kid.

Many people could care less about President George W. Bush’s war to protect freedom. They were free enough, in their own estimation, before this President and his six predecessors embarked on the current set of policies in the Middle East. Now they have to wonder if, whether they go abroad or stay home, they will be murdered by a Muslim. It ain’t our war, but it is occurring to some of us that Mr. Bush could get a lot of us killed or maimed—which might be worse than death, since many of us don’t have adequate health insurance. Imagine surviving having your legs blown off by an Islamo-terro-guerrillo-fanatico bombardier and then being hounded to death by hospital bill collectors.

Successive administrations have provoked, intruded on, aggressed against, irritated and invaded Arab nations and interests, and now the present administration has gotten us into a frightful shadow war against whom we don’t quite know. It is destroying our peace of mind and, step by step, doing the same to our personal liberty.

In what he styles his war against terrorism, Mr. Bush’s single accomplishment has been to extend the war against Arabs to include non-Arab Muslims. This is what he has accomplished through his invasion of Iraq, where democracy reigns and the enemy is always on the verge of extinction. It is an opinion not shared by all. The New York Times recently noted that “the guerrillas and terrorists battling the American-backed enterprise [in Iraq] appear to be growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever.” Further down in this story, these disconcerting words appear: “ … Americans acknowledge that they are no closer to understanding the inner workings of the insurgency or stemming the flow of foreign fighters, who are believed to be conducting a vast majority of suicide attacks.” Moreover, if Americans don’t want to fight in Baghdad, plenty of Iraqis do. The other side is experiencing little trouble in recruiting suicide bombers and other sorts of fighters.

The rationale for persisting in this stalemated, if not lost, military effort offered by Mr. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of our stout-hearted, stay-at-home politicians is that if we don’t fight them in Iraq, we will have to fight them here or in England. Duh? With every passing month since the enemy destroyed the Twin Towers and killed thousands of people, the other side has demonstrated that there is no place it cannot reach with homicidal effect. Every month, more guards, more searches, more intrusions, more cops, more sirens, more cameras, more stopping of people, more dress rehearsals for disaster, more fright, more clamping down, more boots on the ground—not in Iraq, but in New York.

Whatever they may have said about confining the terror to Iraq, land of smoking ruins and wailing orphans, the actions of the men and women running this country betray their fear and impotence. By their actions, they are telling us that they cannot make good on their promise to protect us. The record bears them out. In the years since the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, terror and/or the fear of it has come to our communities, places of work and homes. It has become the water-cooler and dinner-table talk of an American nation whose elected officials can hardly speak of anything else.

The reasons given out for the growing power of the other side vary. For a while, it was a sinister network of evil finance paying for the terrorists. Currency controls were put in place, making it easier for the government to know your business, if not the terrorists’. Talk of financing terrorism has given way to the claim that outsiders have inundated Iraq, not only to kill us there but to be trained to kill us here.

In the past few months, Mr. Bush has begun to speak of our fight against an “ideology” based in no state, of no national identity. That’s new. But what does he mean when he uses the word? Is “ideology” a code word for religion? Is this struggle being quietly redefined as a Muslim-Christian battle, with those who do not belong to the strident elements in either religion being left in the dark about it?

At one point, the enemy seemed to have come out of a kind of pan-Arabism, but now it is way beyond Arabs. It is Pakistanis, it is native-born Englishmen, it is any Muslim—regardless of where he hails from—who goes into one of those madrassahs where war against us is taught. On our own side, there are reports that the U.S. Air Force Academy has been converted into a kind of Christian madrassah. Are crazed fractions of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish populations infiltrating, penetrating and preparing to use any means they think necessary to murder the rest of us?

The Bush-Blair strategy of fighting them over there so we do not have to fight here is a failure. The oceans, so long a protection for America against foreign enemies, cannot defend us. Our armies overseas cannot defend us. We must fall back on Homeland Security, which has roused itself in the last couple of weeks and has begun searching the belongings of subway passengers.

Politically, that may make sense. It appeases the growing anxieties of a public, which is beginning to take seriously the warnings about terrorists getting hold of unguarded Russian nuclear material and other horrible chemical and biological possibilities for mass killings.

But if politics is behind starting the subway searches, politics all but guarantees that nobody of interest will be caught. Politics prohibits racial profiling, even though we know that most terrorists—so far, at least—have an Arab or South Asian background. Politics demands that all are treated equally, which means that ancient ladies of Japanese ancestry and bouncy-jouncy Swedish girls will have to be searched, thereby diverting the cops from going after subjects who at least fit the stereotype.

If random searches of people in the subways are being done for anything except political effect, it’s nonsense. The decision to search is a confession of helplessness. It is saying that the police and Homeland Security don’t know who the enemy is, so maybe they can get lucky and spot one among the thousands racing to catch the A train.

Analyze it: The chances of seizing a terrorist in the middle of rush hour are almost zero. If the authorities had any idea who the would-be terrorists are or where they’re lurking or what kind of terror weapon they intend to use, they would grab them and clap them onto an airplane for “rendition” to some far-off place where the ACLU cannot get at them.

The Patriot Act, the bewildering reorganizations of the various federal police and intelligence organizations, the billions spent on electronic claptrap, the studies, reports and surveys by the commissions, committees and agencies have netted us next to nothing in the way of enhanced safety.

In the present atmosphere, the suggestion that there may be a disconcertingly large quotient of stumblebums, lazy bums and crooked bums handling our homeland security is treated as little short of sedition. That fact, coupled with the conviction that criticism of the war which is being waged but not won is unpatriotic, leaves us with but one course of action: to go on doing the same things.

(Nicholas von Hoffman’s latest book, “A Devil’s Dictionary of Business,” has just been published by Nation Books.)

He was right. But the bottom line isn’t the only line. The first American battlefield casualty of the war was Sgt. Hamilton Fish, of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, or the Rough Riders, the regiment in which Roosevelt served as lieutenant-colonel. Spain’s inferior force managed to kill Fish and 15 other Americans at the Battle of Las Guacimas (literally, “the hog-nut trees”), shortly after the Americans landed in Cuba. Fish and his fallen comrades were buried quickly so that their bodies wouldn’t be eaten by buzzards and land crabs. Roosevelt took care to memorialize him in The Rough Riders, his war memoir.

Dwight Eisenhower had similar considerations in mind on the eve of D-Day. “He made certain,” wrote Stephen Ambrose, “that every soldier who was to go ashore on D-Day had the opportunity to at least look at the man who was sending him into battle; he managed to talk to hundreds personally.” Since thousands would die on the first day alone, hundreds was a fraction. But each man has only one life to give; it was worthwhile, Eisenhower knew, to speak to as many of them as he could.

Stateside journalists do not fight wars, but they write about them. My former managing editor at National Review, Priscilla Buckley, covered World War II for U.P. Radio, where she learned a lesson that she passed on to the interns and associates who later came under her eye: Never use “only” as a modifier in a discussion of casualties. Some bombing runs lost three-quarters of their planes; some lost one. Yet each of the airmen in the downed plane was a continent to his family.

Twenty Marines from the Third Battalion, 25th Marines, Fourth Marine Division, died in Iraq last week. In the aggregate—the Henry Adams view—they were indistinguishable from the previous 20 Americans to die in Iraq, or the next. But the concentration in time and place—most of the Third Battalion hails from Ohio, where it is based—makes them stand out, both as individuals and as symbols. Some of them came from Ohio cities everyone has heard of—Cincinnati, Columbus; some came from towns with all-American names (that is, names that might be found anywhere in America)—West Chesterfield, Grove City; some came from towns with the eclectic monikers of the Midwest—Dresden, Delaware. Their surnames were also an assortment. Some were the base coat of America’s linguistic paint—Bell, Hull, Reed; others were heartland Germanic—Bernholtz, Schroeder; one appeared to come from a more recent wave of immigration—Cifuentes. The New York Times recorded the reactions of the bereaved. “My son was the last of the John Waynes, but tougher,” said Timothy Bell, the father of Lance Cpl. Timothy M. Bell Jr. “We want people to see Augie’s picture and say, ‘Damn, that could have been my kid,’” said Rosemary Palmer, the mother of Lance Cpl. Edward A. Schroeder II. I have no kids, but an old friend of mine has a son serving in Iraq, while a young friend of mine is serving there herself. Both, as it happens, are Marines.

Political junkies, grabbing for their needles, note the eerie political importance of Ohio, the state that gave George W. Bush his Electoral College margin last year (his stolen margin, say the tinfoil hats). Ohio was also the site of this month’s special Congressional election, in which Republican Jean Schmidt beat Democrat Paul Hackett in the Second Congressional District (southernmost Ohio). Mr. Hackett, a lawyer and a Marine Reserve major, was an Iraq war veteran who blasted the Iraq war. Was the race a Republican victory because the Republican won? Or was it a Democratic victory because Mr. Hackett held Ms. Schmidt to 52 percent of the vote in a district that Mr. Bush carried by 64 percent nine months ago? The poll watchers, little Henry Adamses all—minus, of course, the genius—run their projections and await the next battle (of blogs and ballots, not bullets).

In October 1983, 241 Marines and sailors were killed in one day in the bombing of their barracks at the Beirut airport. America was trying to prop up a Lebanese government that would be independent of the Syrians, the Iranians and the P.L.O. We were not acting alone: Britain, France and Italy also sent troops. But the ghastly toll, and the seeming marginality of the mission, in a world in which much else was happening (the 82nd Airborne landed in Grenada simultaneously) made the Lebanon venture seem pointless. That was the conclusion of Colin Powell, who was then serving at the Pentagon as an assistant to the Secretary of Defense: “lives must not be risked,” Powell wrote, “until we can face a parent or a spouse or a child with a clear answer to the question of why a member of that family had to die.” It was also, for what it’s worth, the conclusion of a thirtysomething journalist in his first book: “Lebanon was murky, distant, and difficult,” I wrote. “After sixteen months the Marines went home, not a life too soon.”

Other days, other disasters. Lebanon certainly looked murky when the Soviet Union still had ICBM’s pointed at every major American city, and ours were pointed at theirs. In the context of the time, President Reagan was perhaps right to pull in his horns and focus on the main task at hand. Yet Middle Eastern fascists and Islamists took his prudence, and the prudence of President Clinton 10 years later when he withdrew from Somalia, as a sign that America would never fight, and therefore could be attacked at will. For all their ICBM’s, the Soviets never managed to kill a single American in all the cities they targeted. With only box cutters, the Islamofascists managed to kill almost 3,000.

In retrospect, their war against us has been long; ours against them will be equally long. The C.I.A. recently reported that Iran won’t have atomic weapons for another 10 years. Let us hope that the C.I.A., for once, is right; that will give us time to develop a political strategy for regime change in Iran, if anyone at the C.I.A. would care to do his job. In the meantime, the Iranian mullahs will be able to kill Americans only by supplying Iraqi terrorists with extra-strength anti-vehicle bombs. Better, in the Henry Adams view, than incinerating Cincinnati. Little different, from a parent’s view in West Chesterfield.

The war we are in is political, ideological and emotional: a war of incentives, trends, hearts and minds. But at crucial times, it comes down to warriors. The dead have not died in vain.

"The expression was meant to deliver the message that it's hard here: 'It's like swimming in a sea of sharks, but I am not giving up,'" said Mr. Gavriel's mother, Penelope Gavriel, 55. What her son meant, Ms. Gavriel insisted, was that working in these conditions was a badge of honor.

"It's only going to make me a better man," Ms. Gavriel said her son told her.

It was that same love of a challenge-combined with a fiery patriotism and a desire to take action after the death of two friends on Sept. 11, 2001-that prompted Mr. Gavriel to enlist in the Marines in October 2003. Last Thursday, Nov. 18, Lance Cpl. Dimitrios Gavriel was killed during a battle in Falluja. His family said he was awarded two Purple Hearts on Tuesday, Nov. 23.

Corporal Gavriel did not fit the image of the prototypical U.S. soldier in Iraq: the baby-faced teen from red-state America, looking for a ticket out of small-town life. "Dimmy," as his friends and family called him, grew up in several different places, but spent his high-school career at Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, N.H. His father, an aerospace engineer, and his mother, a corporate quality-control manager for Dunkin' Donuts, immigrated from Greece in the 1970's. (He had one younger sister, Christina, 27.)

Mr. Gavriel attended Brown University, where he concentrated in organizational behavior-the closest area of study to a business major at the artsy school. He also wrestled in the heavyweight division for the school, developing a close circle of athletic friends and fraternity brothers.

He went on, as many young men with certain socioeconomic aspirations do, to enter an analyst program at the investment bank PaineWebber after graduating in 1998, where he became an equity analyst in the real-estate department. From there he joined the research department at J.P. Morgan, then bounced with his research team to Credit Suisse First Boston and finally Banc of America, where he put in 16-hour days crunching numbers and writing research reports until he was laid off in 2002. It was then that Mr. Gavriel made the decision to join the Marines.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Mr. Gavriel's life and the circumstances of his death is the mystery of why he went to Iraq, considering the other options he had and the certain ugliness of the war. And it's not as though he was suffering from permanent unemployment woes; in fact, the day before he left to start training, he was offered another finance job, after months of looking.

"He was deeply affected by 9/11, but that was a small part of why he went," said Matt McClelland, 30, Mr. Gavriel's best friend and fraternity brother from Brown. "It wasn't about revenge and payback. He supported the war but wasn't happy with how they were handling it. I think the way he looked at it was, no matter what side of the aisle you stand on, that's the most important place in the world right now, there's no way to turn back and we had to succeed, and he wanted to be a part of that."

That rationale for volunteering to fight-for wanting to be a part of something important, something unexpected-was very much part of the way Mr. Gavriel envisioned his life and his own abilities. His mother, in compiling a printed eulogy for her son's memorial service, included these telling excerpts from Mr. Gavriel's diary, under the title "An American Hero … Our Hero": "I have heard that Great Men often kept journals-I'd like to be great …. They assure me that whatever the situation or circumstance-Honesty-Discipline-Character-Humility-Timing and Luck will lead to a comfortable situation. This belief put me into College-an Ivy League education-It helped me in sports where I held my own against the best in Division 1 Wrestling-it put me in the capital of the world-New York City-and placed me in the water with sharks-Wall Street. When I was younger-each one of these worlds was a magical place, a myth-I have broken into these worlds however-called them home and sanity."

Conversations with Mr. Gavriel's friends, family members and former colleagues yield a portrait of a man who chose his friends carefully, but who chose them for the long term; who valued loyalty and the idea of brotherhood; who immersed himself wholeheartedly in whatever he did; who was an oddball prankster; who loved sports, fishing and working and living in New York City. And in some ways he was like every other young banker: toiling day and night on Wall Street, crowding the bars of Murray Hill and the Upper West Side on weekends, and courting the occasional girlfriend.

He spent the majority of his four years in New York living in a small studio on 72nd and Columbus, which he referred to as "a box." It was filled with antiques his parents bought for him at New England yard sales, an acoustic guitar he was teaching himself how to play and group shots from the weddings he had attended.

"I'd never seen someone in so many wedding parties," said Anthony Farinha, 29, a house mate from Brown. When his college friends came to town, he'd host them all at his place, and they'd hit the Upper West Side dive bar Yogi's, his favorite haunt. They'd play Johnny Cash on the juke box, toss peanut shells on the floor. His drink of choice? Jim Beam.

Mr. Gavriel rode his royal blue BMW 1150 motorcycle to work, and occasionally wore his biker boots to the office. "He didn't show up in a navy blue pinstriped suit and Hermès tie, because every other banker in the world did," said Alexis Hughes, 31, a former colleague from Wall Street. "He showed up at meetings with his motorcycle helmet. And I think that's something to respect."

This tiny form of uniform rebellion might have represented Mr. Gavriel's deeper ambivalence about his white-collar world. Prior to being laid off, in fact, Mr. Gavriel had been reconsidering his options. The Henry Blodget–era scandals on Wall Street discouraged him, piercing a hole in his own sense of self-worth.

In his last months at Banc of America, he'd begun to call it a "jobby-job," which his mother described as his version of a nine-to-five job. He wasn't satisfied.

"Ordinary, everyday man's expectations-he wasn't that," she said proudly. Joining the Marines was a way to grow personally and professionally. "He was looking primarily for leadership skills, integrity, honor. It was a good package deal for him. He felt that the military-specifically the Marines-with the regimen and the strict discipline they have, was the best place that he could learn new skills and hone the ones that he had to allow him to become a new leader."

Lee Schalop, his boss at J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse and Banc of America, remembered Mr. Gavriel as a tireless, motivated worker, but also said he could tell banking wasn't his ideal fit.

"It's clear he didn't love it the way other people did," Mr. Schalop explained. "I just thought, That is so perfect for him. He was a tough, quiet guy and to me … he sort of represented what the Marines were."

To prepare for the Marines, Mr. Gavriel trained for a year-mostly near a friend's house in New Jersey, where he loved to go fishing-running 10 miles a day and eventually losing more than 40 pounds. But the Marines initially rejected him, citing lingering knee injuries left over from his wrestling career. He lobbied for the Marines to accept him, and eventually shipped off to boot camp last fall.

So when Mr. Gavriel was offered another finance job the day before he left for training (after a year of not working), by then his decision was firm.

"My wife and I went to see him off to boot camp, in Haverhill, Mass., and he said that he felt it was fate playing with him, that he would have been miserable had he not gone [to boot camp]," said Mr. McClelland.

Still, it wasn't a blind decision. "We all expressed our reservations and hesitations; he knew what the risks were," said Mr. Farinha.

Once in Iraq, his parents were often unsure about what was happening to their son, clinging to the promise Mr. Gavriel had once made: "They have better use for me than having me run around with a gun," he had told his mother. "His biggest worry was that his mother would find out and worry about him," said Mr. McClelland.

But, in fact, Mr. Gavriel was serving as a rifleman in Iraq. According to Mr. McClelland, he heard from Mr. Gavriel not so long ago, after he had caught a clump of shrapnel in his leg from a grenade explosion. About a week later, they were short men for a mission. Though still limping, Mr. Gavriel went into battle in Falluja.

"There's no way that I would have conceived that this would have been the outcome," said Mr. Farinha. "He was too talented, too strong, too cunning to ever get hurt."

Mr. Gavriel's funeral will be held Tuesday, Nov. 30, at Holy Apostles Church in Haverhill, Mass. His burial will take place at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, at Arlington National Cemetery.

The initiative was aimed at curtailing the carnival of plunder that is the all-too-liberated Iraqi capital; a place that is growing bitterly used to the sight of black smoke curling into the sky and the popping-corn sound of AK-47's, and where every third car is so laden with loot that it swerves. Contrary to some accounts, the people of Baghdad are not too euphoric to notice that their city is going to hell in a handbasket, and many are angrily mystified as to why the U.S.-with its high ideals and higher profile here at the moment-has not done more at least to slow the trip.

As described by U.S. Marine Major Andrew Petrucci, assistant operations officer of Regimental Combat Team 7, now that the U.S. military can "transition from combat to stabilization operations," it was beginning to do just that.

"The analogy that we're using is that of a large boulder sitting on top of a hill," the major said on the morning of Monday, April 14. He was standing in the parking lot of the police academy, where the U.S. forces had, mostly by word of mouth, urged Iraqi police officers to gather. The boulder in the analogy was the weight of the Iraqi civil services returning to their normal functions, initially with the endorsement and protection of the U.S. military. Then, as the boulder started to roll and gather momentum, the Americans would become less and less necessary until, toward the bottom of the hill, they fell away altogether.

Toward that end, the day's plan was to send convoys of cooperation-two Humvees to one Iraqi police car-gently forth into the streets of Baghdad. Every so often, the convoys were to stop, authority figures Iraqi and American were to mingle with the citizenry, and Iraqis were thus to be injected with the sense that the rule of law and order, by and for Iraqis, was briskly on its way.

Then the convoys pulled out of the parking lot.

What followed was such a skirmish between intention and implementation, such a reminder of the invisible tangle of variables that runs through even the simplest project here, that it was hard not to see the afternoon as America's Iraq dilemma in a nutshell-emphasis on nuts.

Things started predictably enough. Cpl. Shane Weeks, 21, was positioned as the gunner, looking out from over the roof of the vehicle and calling out directions to Cpl. Alex Gutierrez, 20, who was driving. The Iraqi contingent of three significantly older, olive-suited, black-bereted officers in an incongruously shiny squad car was led by Capt. Ahmed Saleh.

The first stop was in front of a few food shops. The Iraqis in the area seemed interested in the convoy, but not passionately so. Shopkeepers came out of their shops, and onlookers looked on. But no one cheered, and no one jeered. Everything was O.K., but just O.K.

Soon, however, Mr. Saleh began to make clear his desire to take the exercise beyond public relations. (His colleagues on other convoys, I later learned, were taking the exercise way beyond, into the realm of shooting at, and beating, looters they caught in the act.) He wanted to check the cars on the street to see whether they had been stolen.

Given that one hears the phrase "Ali Baba," the local term for stolen goods, only somewhat less often than one hears salaam alaikum, the term for "hello," Mr. Saleh's suggestion was not unreasonable. Given that the purpose of the outing was, however, to make ordinary Iraqis feel confident in, rather than fearful of, the police, Cpl. Weeks did not like that idea, but agreed to radio a superior to check it out. Meanwhile, a large green and white bus pulled up and stopped at the intersection, and the sidewalk began to buzz with the rumor that it had been Ali Baba'd from the old Ministry of Trade. On the bus were a number of women and children whom the Iraqi police officers seemed eager to order onto the street for questioning. Cpl. Weeks did not like this idea at all. But it was soon established without incident that the bus was not, in fact, Ali Baba, and so all seemed well.

Then, all of a sudden, Cpl. Weeks ordered the Humvee to go, go, go. It was as if the vehicle were being fired upon, or an approaching suicide bomber had been spotted, but neither was the case. The case was that someone had told the police that a van passing by was Ali Baba, and the police had, without a word to their American partners in community policing, taken off hell for leather, siren wailing.

Cpl. Weeks' voice, not hysterical but energetically irritated, came from above.

"I am not a police officer, damn it! I am a fucking Marine!" he exclaimed. "Stop driving crazy. Jesus Christ, what are these people doing? Stop! Go, go, go, go, go, go! These motherfuckers!"

Cpl. Gutierrez, who hails from Los Angeles and could definitely establish himself there as a stunt driver, maneuvered through side streets at a very good clip. Among the things he did not hit were an old man on a bicycle, a fully covered Shiite woman and any number of parked cars. Ultimately, the Humvee cornered the squad car at the alley corner where the squad car had cornered the van-which was not, in the end, Ali Baba.

I sat in the Humvee, waiting for Cpl. Weeks to straighten things out with Mr. Saleh. An Iraqi man wandering by stopped, practically stuck his head in my window and stated matter-of-factly, "I love you Bush." (There is a lot of this, particularly-and perhaps, if hope is not soon rewarded, ominously-in the poorest areas. "You have rescued us from hellfire to paradise," an old man walked up to me and said in one such area. A Shiite girl, just old enough to be covered, caught my eye and said "Saddam," then spit on the ground and smiled.)

Mr. Saleh next suggested a search for some fedayeen . These, of course, are the notoriously ruthless sub-subgroup of Iraqi forces who remain fanatically loyal to Saddam, and who are presumed, in whatever form or forms they remain, to be making and planning much violent mischief.

Initially, this sounded promising. The police led the Marines to a bearded man in a striped shirt, who apparently could point out a nest of these domestic terrorists. It soon developed, however, that all the suspects were suspected of was being Palestinian and having guns. It further developed that there was some question as to just where the nest was located.

"They haven't done anything wrong," Cpl. Weeks told Mr. Saleh. "I don't know why you want to go after them."

"They came from five days ago," said Mr. Saleh, whose English was barely serviceable, but far better than the Arabic of his American partners, which was nonexistent.

"We can't go after them just because they're Palestinians," said Cpl. Weeks. "They haven't shot anybody yet."

"Now we don't know-Palestinians, Syrians, we don't know," Mr. Saleh countered, sort of.

"Wait here," said Cpl. Weeks. "We'll talk to the lieutenant."

Meanwhile, a twentyish local man in a rugby shirt, who seemed to know the Marines, was drafted to do a little ad hoc translating.

"Tell them when they drive real fast, we can't keep up," requested Cpl. Weeks.

The translator did so, and in turn mentioned on behalf of the police that they would prefer, for the sake of effectiveness, not to be wearing their uniforms. Cpl. Weeks tried to explain that since the point was to restore public confidence in a public way, going undercover might defeat the purpose.

"You are Marines or police?" asked Mr. Saleh, who seemed honestly unsure.

"We are Marines," said Cpl. Weeks. "We cannot attack every building. We have to know the exact location."

"We can do this job," offered Mr. Saleh. "If you want, I will do this. I will enter."

Meanwhile, the bearded man in the striped shirt had gone away. This occasioned a compromise: The police partners would neither kick in every door in the possible neighborhood of the allegedly suspicious Palestinians, nor ignore the allegation completely. Rather, they would go into the possible neighborhood and inquire about the exact address.

Like most neighborhoods in Baghdad these days, this one was blocked off with makeshift roadblocks that citizens had set up to foil any looters who might be en route to Ali Baba their homes. Thus, in order for the Humvee to turn into it, other Marines had to drag away an assortment of upturned metal chairs, capsized oil barrels and semi-crumbled bricks, and untie a sort of white sash that had been strung, for some reason, from one side of the street to the other, as if to make a finish line.

The police questioned a large, fat, shirtless man and then, one street over, a house full of students. The Palestinians, it turned out, had moved.

"We will find more situations," assured Mr. Saleh. "You want to find [Saddam Hussein's son] Uday's house?"

Uday's house had long since been raided, which was fortunate. On the way there, in a narrow lane of extremely modest, dilapidated homes and extremely modest, dilapidated cars, there was a white Toyota four-wheel drive without any license plates. At the sight of it, all thoughts of Uday faded and the Iraqis' mission became one to convince the Marines to tow the Toyota. As the factors involved in doing so-the narrowness of the street, the ownership of the Toyota , the possible local reaction-were weighed, a crowd gathered. At this point, a man from the neighborhood tapped me on the shoulder and raised the issue of the day-an issue that, insofar as achieving stability is a matter of finding Iraqi civil servants who are both experienced and untainted, will be key for many days to come.

"The relationship between the Iraqi people and the police is so weak," 42-year-old Mohammed Al-Hamari observed. He ended the sentence on a note of true revulsion, as if the word "weak" were a gulp of sour milk that he had drunk by mistake.

Meanwhile, a man had rushed out of his house to defend his custody of the white Toyota. He was covered in dirt and paint and had, judging by his breath, consumed a metholated alcoholic beverage at lunchtime.

"No Ali Baba, no Ali Baba, no, no, no, no, no, no!" he cried.

It was decided not to tow the vehicle, but Mr. Saleh had another idea.

"Now we are looking for explosives," said Cpl. Weeks, trudging back to the Humvee.

As the Humvee pulled out, Mr. Al-Hamari trotted beside it until his face was next to mine. Apparently, he was afraid that I had missed the point.

"The Iraqi people," he panted, "will despise the police forever!"

Outside the house allegedly containing the explosives, the Marines and the Iraqis drew their weapons, and Cpl. Weeks instructed the people not living in the house to get away. But as this was a relatively complicated sentence, this caused a hesitation that raised a question: What if something dangerous actually happened, and someone actually had to say something that would be immediately and clearly understood?

Fortunately, nothing did happen. On the third floor, where there were several rooms full of empty wooden crates, there once might have been quite an arsenal. Now, however, there were only several boxes of ammunition suitable for use with an AK-47. Out back, there was a big blue truck that had been Ali Baba'd, and to which the keys were available, so the Marines decided to take that back to the police academy.

There was one more house search that turned up nothing. Then at last, long after the convoy was due back from its little Baghdad meet-and-greet, Cpl. Weeks convinced Mr. Saleh that it was time to call it a day.

"Take a right at the intersection," Cpl. Weeks instructed Cpl. Gutierrez as the Humvee headed back to the police academy. But then, as if on cue, the police car went left, then made a total U-turn and accelerated.

"No, no," Cpl. Weeks corrected himself. "I guess these guys have a different idea."

Western swing music was playing in the Thumbelina-sized kitchen. Ms. Braun hummed along as she applied yellow food coloring with a small brush to a gigantic, nine-layer Styrofoam cake bound for the window of Henri Bendel. Enveloped in a smudged apron, her hair screwed up in a blue bandanna, Ms. Braun is a brown-eyed, fine-boned brunette with freckles that look as if they'd been sprinkled from a nutmeg shaker. For her 39th birthday on Oct. 17, she said, she wants a country fiddle.

Ms. Braun's work space is part apothecary's shop, part curio museum: little green bottles filled with almond and rose oils, small paintings of Madonnas, a tub of Crisco-for molding purposes only-and perhaps two dozen models of the decorator's signature and somewhat psychedelic cakes, which cost from $1,200 to $20,000. "God, I hate saying that," she said.

A 10-year-old white-pawed tabby named Francis (after the saint) was winding its way underfoot. At that moment, Ms. Braun's life seemed ideally suited to the post–Sept. 11 haze that has New Yorkers pausing to reconsider their Type A, fast-track ambitions. She has no storefront, no staff save for the occasional intern ("they basically just scrape chocolate off the walls," she said), and no Web site. Her long but fairly humble résumé includes gigs at Veniero's, the Italian bakery on 11th Street, and a Zen monastery in Yonkers. To finance stretches of art school, she slung eggs, balled melons and filled cannoli.

She met her husband, a psychologist and photographer originally from Texas, in the building. They were neighborly first, then friends. "I remember he told me a 45-minute joke," she said. "It was an airplane joke. No racial overtones, but very inappropriate." They share another apartment on the first floor-when they have fights, Ms. Braun just scampers up a few flights to her studio, which still has a bed-and plan to try for a pregnancy next year.

In the meantime, she has her other "baby": an expensive, gilt-edged book called Cakewalk: Adventures in Sugar with Margaret Braun that purportedly reveals her sleight of hand to the kitchen commoner. But what it reveals more plainly is Ms. Braun's fanciful, slightly loopy character. "When I see something beautiful, I want to eat it," she begins. Later, somewhat Diana Vreeland–ishly: "When in doubt, use polka dots." At one point, Ms. Braun goes on a narrative magic-carpet ride from a Chaucerian table in a brocaded frock, "reaching over steamy bowls of porpoise pye and turnypes, dipping my tassels in kettles of hot wine," to the shores of Pylos, "eating tripe and gnawing on ham bones with Odysseus."

Back in the West Village kitchen, Ms. Braun pried off her wedding ring with her mouth and was now kneading sugar paste and gaily daubing gold leaf. She was asked about Sylvia Weinstock, the other big brand name in New York City cakes. "It's a very different thing," she said. "Bless her heart, but I have such a different take on it. She's really good, she put the cake designer on the map, she's an amazing businesswoman. But it's not the kind of business that I really want to have."

Ms. Weinstock and her somewhat shabbier competitor, the Cupcake Cafe on West 39th Street, are known for their flowers. Ms. Braun isn't really a flower girl. One of her cakes was inspired by the lurid rubber decals of her childhood bathroom in Levittown, N.Y.; another by a pink and orange Miu Miu shoe. She is partial to motifs of sacrifice and flagellation, like The Scarlet Letter and the legend of St. Ursula, which involves the slaughter of 11,000 virgins. Her next big gig is an astronomically themed sugar sculpture for a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke at the Playboy Mansion.

She doesn't like it when clients ask her for replicas of their beloved objects. "My feeling is, about making things literally like another thing-unless it's purely for the camp value, it's not going to look that good," she said. "I like to have things be not quite as literal; I like to make something that's a little bit challenging to the eye. I don't do vehicles, I don't do computers, and I don't do buildings." She doesn't do cupcakes, either.

A few years ago, Ms. Braun went on Oprah and people began calling in the middle of the night. "A little Oprah goes a long way," she said. "Things can get wacky. If I think it's a bad idea, I won't do it. I kind of work alone, and I think it's pretty much going to always be that way. It needs to be enjoyable, because it's my life."

-Alexandra Jacobs

Army of One

If you're standing on the little island in the middle of 43rd and Broadway, there's all kinds of stuff to do. You can watch the traffic go by on both sides, feel the subway rattling underneath and get off on the energy. You can go see Apocalypse Now Redux. You can buy tickets for the Butthole Surfers at the W.W.F. Cafe or get some makeup at Sephora. Or you can enlist in the military.

That's what Jack Kasy was doing the other day when I met him coming out of the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Station.

"I'm not afraid, you know," Mr. Kasy said. "It's a perfect time to go for me-I want the experience."

Mr. Kasy, who is 18 years old, was dressed like a hip-hop performer, with an oversized white long-sleeved jersey and a Houston Astros baseball cap. He had blue eyes and his head was shaved, and he bore a passing resemblance to Timothy McVeigh.

What branch did he want to be in?

"I want to go to Marines," Mr. Kasy said. "I want to be in there. I want to be right in the Middle East, man."

We walked over to a Pizza Hut to talk some more. Mr. Kasy said he'd always been interested in the military, but after high school, he went to college instead-briefly. After Sept. 11, he decided he had to enlist.

"Part of it, I just wanted to get away from home, you know?" he said. "Maybe, you know, get my mind clear over there. It'll be tough, but if you go through that, you can go through everything."

He didn't sound particularly bloodthirsty.

"I wouldn't like to kill anyone," he said. "I'd just want to see how it is over there, what people go through, how it is, how the families live. What kind of struggle they have over there. See both points of view-how's it over here, and how's it over there."

He said he wasn't terribly worried about getting killed.

"You can't think about dying; you can die any minute," Mr. Kasy said. "It doesn't worry me, not at all. When I picture it, I see bullets going through my body and bombs. You never know-I might be the one who saves the world. Who knows?"

What was the worst thing he thought could happen over there in Afghanistan? "My whole unit getting blown up," he said.

Mr. Kasy said he'd like to be a war hero. "I always dreamt of going into the Marines since I was a little kid," he said. "With that gun and a uniform-on the Desert Storm, something like that. Dropping out of a helicopter. Something different! I don't want to be walking around with a 9-to-5 job, on the train in New York City."

Mr. Kasy sounded like he needed an adventure. He said he didn't have much fun in high school, even when he was hanging out with his friends, or "boys," as he called them.

Mr. Kasy's boys apparently think he's "bananas" for wanting to join the military.

Was he enlisting because of anger?

"Not at all, not at all," Mr. Kasy said. "If I wanted to, I'd go crazy on the streets …. I want to actually see it over there. It's like a free plane ticket over there." He smiled, raised his eyebrows. "That's another thing, you know what I mean?

"I want the training, too. I want to learn all those things, you know? Be prepared for everything," Mr. Kasy said. "Once you come out of the Marines, it's like you're better than the other person-literally. Most people don't know how to put a gun together, this or that, or whatever, save another life … you learn things over there that could be useful."

Mr. Kasy said he had to take an entrance exam, but he'd taken it once before and passed, so he was pretty confident he'd do it a second time.

Where was he off to now?

"Nowhere, pretty much," he said. "Walk around, head home, I guess. Gotta wait for a phone call from the Marines, then I'm going to take that exam …. I'll pass it again. Then I sign the contract-and I'm off."

-George Gurley

it is a date that some of us assume every fresh-faced school child associates

with the war from which there is no escape. Even if the schools believe that

this kind of knowledge is not helpful in the self-esteem-building process, the

kids could hardly not know something about both dates. After all, June 6 and

Dec. 7 are celebrated in movie blockbusters starring the grandchildren of that generation-you know the one. June

6 has its Saving Private Ryan ; Dec. 7

now has its Pearl Harbor. Somewhere

in the last 20 years, we forgot about V-E Day and V-J Day. Those days are for

fogies, young and old, who don't necessarily learn history from Hollywood.

Memorial Day (a barbecue-and-beach holiday originally set

aside for the decorating of soldiers' graves) brought the predictable plethora

of World War II programming on the tube, a staple of which was the shot of the

bowed and graying veteran revisiting the battlefields of his youth: Normandy

and Anzio; Iwo Jima and Okinawa-peaceful places now. Interspersed with these bittersweet

images were black-and-white clips of the fighting and the dying from so long

ago.

The message was pretty clear. Because of these bowed and

graying men, because of the horror they endured, children laugh as they run

along the sands of Northern France; couples share romantic dinners along the

Italian coast; and an economic colossus has risen along the Pacific Rim. That

is, of course, the moral of the World War II literature-America's citizen

soldiers, and their allies (the wise-cracking tommy; the dour Russian; the

haughty Resistance fighter), fought, suffered and died to liberate humankind

from oppression.

Like most other Americans, I believe in and indeed cherish

that story, that legacy of sacrifice. And that may explain why I find the story

of Saipan so appalling-the antithesis o f the story of the good war and its

soldiers of liberation.

The Marines landed on Saipan on June 15, 1944. By the time

they secured the island, 22,000 of Saipan's32,000 Japanese defenders were dead,

and about 4,000 were missing. Fewer than 2,000 were taken prisoner. About 3,000

Marines died and another 10,000 were wounded in some of the most desperate

fighting of the war. The Battle of Saipan was overshadowed by the gigantic

events underway in Normandy, but it was a pivotal moment in the Pacific war.

Americans saw what they would face for the remainder of the conflict-suicidal

Japanese defenders, sometimes charging Marine positions with handmade spears.

Admiral Nagumo, who directed the attack on Pearl Harbor, committed suicide to

inspire his troops to do the same; after the battle, Japanese Prime Minister

Tojo resigned.

Saipan today is at peace, but perhaps next Memorial Day some

creative television producer will invite a Marine back to the battlefield. What

he will see will shock him, and perhaps inspire some decidedly unsentimental

reflections. Saipan is an island sweatshop, a place where, were it not for

liberators of another sort-those much-ridiculed anti-globalists-workers still

would be held in virtual slavery on behalf of some of America's most famous

fashion labels.

Until sweatshop monitors sued the island's garment industry,

the liberated people of Saipan were among the most exploited workers in the

Pacific Rim. This may sound like a variation on a theme: tinpot South Pacific

dictator and crony capitalists colluding in the oppression of the citizenry,

while reaping enormous profits to be spent on golf courses, yachts and shoes.

The problem with this formula is that Saipan is an American territory, freed by

the blood of U.S. Marines, answerable to the Labor Department and various other

bureaucracies charged with the well-being of workers of the several states.

Among the conditions on Saipan cited in the anti-sweatshop

movement's lawsuit were unsanitary company housing; 12-hour work days, seven

days a week; illegal union-busting; and recruitment contracts that made

employees virtual indentured servants of their employers. And because Saipan is

an American territory, garments made under these conditions carry a "Made in the

U.S.A." label.

Since the lawsuits were filed and the public began paying

attention to Saipan, more than a dozen companies, including Calvin Klein Inc.,

Donna Karan International Inc., J. Crew Group Inc. and Tommy Hilfiger U.S.A.

Inc., have settled without admitting wrongdoing. But other brand-name companies

have not, and sweatshop monitors continue to press their case.

The Marines of 1944 stormed the beaches of Saipan to

liberate the island from oppression, not to make it safe for unscrupulous

haberdashers. One wonders if a Marine returning to Saipan would get misty-eyed;

more likely, he would become enraged.

Not something we're likely to see as part of the next

Greatest Generation celebration.