We have to think about the Marine major now, and the Army captain. They will be the ones to catch the hard duty. They will be the ones who will have to keep their uniforms well laundered for those trips to third-floor tenements, trailer parks and housing projects.

There will be no posh digs on this assignment, none of those seven-figure mega-mansions with solariums and indoor lap pools. The major and the captain will work the humble side of the country, where there are framed pictures of a man or woman in uniform on the wall and a hard acceptance of the fact that the opportunities offered by the military come with a deadly downside.

And when the officers pull up in their government cars, they will know that the message they bring will precede them. There is only one reason for them to be there, and the people who see them coming know exactly what it is.

And sometimes those people - mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters — will try to hold back the truth by refusing to open the door. They will scream and sob and hold each other.

But, finally, they will open the door. And the Marine major or the Army captain will try to convince them that their loved one died for a good reason.

It will be up to those officers to explain war in a way President Bush will never have to. They will have to look into the faces of the families who sent off one of their own to serve and maybe get a leg up on a better life. And they will have to tell them why it all went so terribly wrong and a young American life ended in a side street in some desert city they've never heard of.

For this is what it all comes down to. It all comes down to an officer at the door and a family having its collective breath sucked out of it by the news of death in a far-off place.

They are crudely called the death squad, these officers chosen to deliver the news of an American killed in war. And if we expand our assault on Iraq into a full-scale war, they will again be called on to break the news and try to put some stamp of national purpose on a 19-year-old getting blown away.

It won't be easy. We keep waiting for some eloquent statement of national purpose, even some solid piece of evidence that justifies sending young Americans to die in Iraq.

It hasn't come. President Bush, who found his way to the Texas National Guard and not Vietnam during his war-eligible years, certainly won't provide it. He barely approaches coherence, let alone eloquence.

So far, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the bogus piece of work used to justify our buildup in Vietnam, sounds like a ringing call to arms compared with the reasons we've been offered for an invasion of Iraq.

So maybe, if the war our president seems to want so badly actually happens, the officers of the death squad will be sent out with a simple message for the bereaved families:

"You'll just have to trust us on this."

It won't be enough, of course. And some angry mother, filled with crushing loss and a deep sense of betrayal, will pound on the uniformed chest of the messenger and demand more.

But the Marine major or the Army captain really can't say much more. They can't say the country went a little crazy and lost its way. They can't say we have become a fearful, uninformed people easily led into mad foreign adventures. They can't say we have learned nothing from Vietnam.

They are good officers and they will say what they are ordered to say. Then they will drive away in their government car and leave a family to wonder how the good guys suddenly became the bad guys.