01:00 AM EST on Friday, April 2, 2004

A man from Rhode Island called Don Imus' radio show in New York yesterday to complain about a picture on the front page of The Journal. It seems a roundabout way to register a complaint. We are always ready and willing to accept comments, favorable or scathing, right here where the paper is put together.

The man who chose to call long distance instead of locally was upset by the picture of the charred bodies of two Americans hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah, Iraq. He said the picture had no place in the newspaper.

Charles McCord, Imus' radio sidekick, disagreed. He said we need to see such pictures. And we do. We can't filter out the mad, barbaric stuff just because it somehow upsets our comfy, privileged American lives.

We can't hide from the things this war has produced because we are all in this insanity together. It is not something somebody else will take care of.

Already, this war has been far too sanitized. In its early days, and right up to the point where President Bush's advance team hung that Mission Accomplished banner on the aircraft carrier, the practice of "embedding" reporters with specific combat units meant that those reporters could not move as they might have wanted to. They could not hang back after the troops had passed through and assess the local damage. They could not wander, as reporters in Vietnam did, and discover the war's small personal horrors.

We seem to have a strange detachment from this war in Iraq. We work hard to keep it at a distance, to deny its possible consequences. We stay more occupied with the pathetic mishaps of celebrities than the daily nightmare of soldiers and Marines who have no safe place to go.

And now that we have this searing image of unspeakable human savagery to remind us how terribly wrong we were about the place we invaded, some people would have it censored, removed from view. It is too uncomfortable.

The man who called Don Imus yesterday was not the only one who complained that the picture should not have been in The Journal. Others chose to stay local and call the newspaper's city desk to complain that it was wrong to print it.

But if we don't see it, we don't learn from it. We don't wonder why the hatred runs so deep and why the differences make simple solutions impossible.

There have been few images of this war that will stay with us as this one will, few that speak so gruesomely and powerfully to the fact that this war has no easily identified enemy and no limits on brutality. .

Looking back at another war that was marked by a total failure to understand the enemy, the one image that stands out is one of similar inhumanity. It is of a young girl running down a highway in Vietnam, her clothes burned off and her skin scalded by an American napalm strike.

It wasn't personal that time. It was a mistake, in fact. The girl wasn't the target. She was just in the wrong place when the napalm was dropped.

I'm sure there were people then who thought that picture was over the line, that we didn't need to see it.

But that girl ran right at us in that picture, the look on her face an undeniable indictment of a terrible mistake. She would stay with us, a fragile but incredibly strong reminder of how the innocent so often pay the heaviest price.

So we have to see these pictures. We have to deal with what our wars create. Otherwise, we just close ourselves up with our 50-inch TVs and turn stupid and let the same mistakes happen again.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr [at] projo.com