S called me this morning, a relief. I assumed he had been out on missions and I was right. Hopefully he'll be able to call again in the next couple of days, but so much is uncertain that he could call again tomorrow or not again until next week. We talked about the absence of news from Afghanistan (and Iraq, for that matter) and how this makes me worry more because I'm never sure if the violence has occurred in his province or not. He hadn't heard about the UK soldier killed in Masar-e-Sharif yesterday, a town he'd heard was completely safe. We are living in this time of nanopods and laptop computers, yet there is still such a basic lack of information when it comes to this war.

And then there is Iraq. On Tuesday the nation mourned the 2,000th American soldier killed. Since then another eighteen have died. Eighty-five this month. We have become numb to it, clearly, and remain disinterested. I can't help but think this is a product of our abstraction of the war and the men and women who are fighting it. But then, perhaps it's even more banal, a simple reflection of our preference for meaningless, shiny fictions and their matching accessories available at our local Target stores. Libby may go down but it won't matter if we're still waging this war with no plan. He'll be just another crony caught for a moment only to be released back into the world with his own Fox TV show or Clear Channel radio program. I imagine he'll meet our other infamous traitors, Ollie North and Liddy, to compare show notes on Monday mornings at the corner deli, or perhaps via conference call while they're served their heart healthy oatmeal and black coffee by their loyal trophy wives.

It is all the more offensive after seeing Operation: Dreamland last night, a more pointed and direct film than Gunner Palace. The film follows one squad from the 82nd Airborne based in Falluja in the spring of 2004 before the Marines retreated then invaded again and flattened the city. The plan is nowhere, not on the ground with the squad, not in the officers' planning room. At one point we see the squad's leaders sitting around reviewing the past missions and the captain giving the presentation asks the group what exactly the squad is securing on these missions. Someone suggests the government, and the captain asks if they really are securing the mosques and the local leaders, and if so why since they aren't in any danger anyway. Then he asks if they are merely keeping themselves secure, and if that's not it, then what was the purpose of these missions. No one could answer him, and finally he answers it himself: "I don't know."

No one knows what the hell is going on. That sums up the agonizing truth in the film. The raids seem pointless, the missions without end. When we saw the planning room captain say he didn't know what the purpose of the missions his men were risking their lives to perform was, the entire theater let out a "humph" sigh, a resignation tinged with anger over the futility of it all. This futility wasn't lost on the men, of course, though most were steady in their assertion that they were "doing the job" and would continue to until they were out of the army. Getting out is no easy matter, as S and I can attest to. They coerce like crazy and then lay on the guilt. In one scene we see a room full of exhausted, fed-up soldiers while an officer stands in front of them making the pitch for reenlistment. He begins by asking who had already told their commanders they wouldn't sign back up and nearly the entire room raised their hands. Then he asked them if they had jobs lined up when they got home, whether they had paid off all their loans and car payments, whether they had a place to live or if they had to move back into their mama's house, and whether the same bad kids were still in their neighborhood, the neighborhood they escaped when they joined the military. Nearly everyone raised there hands again, a cue for a second officer to step up and continue the pitch. Afterwards Sgt. Pacheco, a medic from Chicago (who was at the earlier screening last night for Q&A -- unfortunately we missed him), said he was sick of the officers hounding them every day, making them go to meeting after meeting (with the ubiquitous, amateurish PowerPoint presentations S has told me about), when they'd already made up their minds to get the hell out. Yes, it is a "voluntary army" (except those stop-lossed soldiers who are included in the reenlistment numbers), but the amount of coercion is as prodigious as the number of lies told to soldiers to get them to reenlist, let alone to enlist the first time.

The film is unbelievably depressing. We see the escalating violence and distrust of the Iraqis during the film and aren't surprised when the ending credits tell us the city burst open in the months afterwards, the insurgency taking hold of the community and erupting in unbelievable violence. (The story of how we took the city back will be told one day, I suspect, and it may be another story that is impossible to find pride in even if its outcome was inevitable.) The men the film follows are outspoken politically and about as divided on the war as the nation is overall. Most of them came to the army because they didn't know what else to do with themselves and were worried that they'd end up in jail or worse. And all of the men in the squad were under thirty.

This is Chicago's national public radio station's fall fund drive so yesterday they had a "three hour marathon" of This American Life. One of the stories was about the Johns Hopkins study published in Lancet and released days before the election last year that estimated the number of civilian deaths since the invasion in 2003. The researchers, led by Les Roberts, estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war and that the vast majority of violent deaths were caused by coalition bombs and bullets. Because of the timing of the study's release, and the fact that Roberts was outspoken against the war, the study was discredited in the press and given little coverage. The study was said to be deeply flawed because the methodology was corrupt and the samples weren't random, but as the This American Life story demonstrates, the study's methodology was sound and the samples were completely random. In fact, Roberts is the world's leading researcher on war-caused civilian deaths and his studies of Congo and Kosovo are widely cited across the political spectrum (and by the government). It is only his Iraq study, which used identical techniques as his others, that is flawed, a curious coincidence given how "we don't do body counts."

To be as fair as possible, Roberts didn't include numbers from Falluja, though they had surveyed that city. The numbers of civilians killed during the seige were so high Roberts feared they would have inaccurately skewed the other results, so they only averaged the deaths in the thirty-one other communities they surveyed. Watching Operation:Dreamland I thought about those high numbers. I thought about how so many Iraqi families were torn apart, and how so many soldiers came home with their minds impossibly heavy with nightmares of the civilians they had killed. Of the 100,000 dead, more than 50% were women and children.

It's not that the Pentagon intends to kill civilians. They just don't much care when they do. Marc Galasco, one of the people in the This American Life story, had helped the Defense Department come up with its "high-value targeting" in Iraq before the start of the war, their attempt to lower the number of civilian deaths and increase the disruption to military infrastructure. Galasco was amazed that the Pentagon had no interest in counting the number of civilian deaths seeing that it was the surest way to test whether their "high-value targeting" had worked. Now Galasco works for Human Rights Watch in Iraq tracking down how many civilians have died there, which just shows that fiction has nothing on real life.

We're still in the foggy days of these wars, when we're desperate to document what is going on as it happens, unable to process it all because it's just too soon. Some day the stories, the truths, shuffling beneath these documentations will be told. I wonder, what will our children say about these wars? Or will we still be fighting them twenty years from now?

Anyone with a loved one fighting in our wars will tell you the silent days are the worst.

I'd gotten spoiled, really, getting to talk to S nearly every day since he left me four weeks ago. First he was in Kabul doing paperwork for days, giving him enough time to call me and email me. Then when he first returned to his fire base he was again doing the administrative things that drive him nuts but also give him the time to call me and email me. Those days are over, clearly, because I haven't talked to him for several days.

When the worry comes, it wells up from my belly, fills my chest and my face and makes the back of my skull tingle. It is the same sensation as when you feel you've done something horribly wrong that can never be corrected.

Not hearing from S for days wouldn't be a problem except that there has been a marked increase in violence these past few days too, with several coalition soldiers killed and a number of others injured. This morning, when again he hadn't called, I checked icasualties.org to see if there had been anyone hurt or killed in Afghanistan and that's when I found them: a story about a soldier killed near the Pakistan border and another story about several soldiers injured, again near the Pakistan border. Neither listed names (of course), and because these stories of violence were about Afghanistan, the War Our Nation Forgot, they might as well have been about violence on Mars. Place names mean little when they aren't on any maps.

In the news release of the soldier who was killed, "near Lwara," they mentioned FOB Salerno and nothing more. I googled "Lwara" first and found some mention of the Pakistan Border, then I googled FOB Salerno and found a blurb about it on globalsecurity.org where they said it was in Khowst Province, a province I knew was south of where S is stationed.  I felt that selfish relief of knowing it wasn't S, and then this arching sadness for the wife or girlfriend or mother or daughter who was not as lucky as me, who would get a rap on the door in the next few days and have her heart torn out of her right there at the threshold of her home. I did the same sort of search of the places where soldiers were injured, and I was assured, again, that they weren't in S's province, though they were no farther away from him than I am from Springfield. I know he is too busy to call, but perhaps he is still safe. That's good enough these days.

I think of them as forgotten places in our forgotten war, these FOBs and towns and border areas nestled in unnamed provinces and all in the "southeast" or "northeast" and nearly all "along the Pakistan Border." There is no geography of these forgotten places. When I read about another explosion of death, injury, I turn to the one map I've found on the web that has all of the provinces and a number of cities marked and I search for the stripped-down names mentioned in the news release. Rarely do I find them. They are too remote or the map is too old, or the spellings are wrong because the translations are as misguided as our actions in our twin wars. The descriptions "southeast Afghanistan," "northeast Afghanistan," further complicate matters. I search the bottom of the country, the south, and find nothing, just as when I search the top of the country, the north and find nothing. These descriptions imply quadrants of a country evenly divided up on a map. Instead, they represent a tight spiral shooting out from Kabul in a 200 or so mile radius. Why? Because there are whole provinces where we have no presence at all, coalition forces or ANA. They are not even forgotten since they were never remembered to begin with.

The DoD press releases reflect the forgotten nature of the war, for  "southeast Afghanistan" is just a couple of hundred miles vaguely south, vaguely east from Kabul, just as "northeast Afghanistan" is an equal distance vaguely north. The wars are vague, the orders are vague. What we are doing is vague and in Afghanistan at least, the places are vague too. We're left in this fog and it's maddening.

Some days I follow this trajectory of worry. It arches to a crescendo then comes back down again, spiking up and down like heartbeat readings on a monitor screen and nearly as fast. My heart follows these waves of worry, cresting until I've identified the forgotten place or I've heard from him, then retreating again, only to rise instantly with the next batch of worrisome news. This afternoon after my google searches, after I was certain Lwara was where it was, I went online and used a coupon my mother had given me and bought S new underwear at the Gap. I know he'll need them when he gets home, and for now at least, I'm certain he will come home.

Tonight I went to see Operation:Dreamland with my friends Maria and Ken. I'll write about it the morning and how since my post of several days ago, A Milestone to Regret, another sixteen American soldiers have died in Iraq. Before the families of these dead soldiers were given their heartbreaking news, they had suffered through the same worry that I felt this morning, the same unknowing, for days and sometimes weeks. Instead of getting to come down from that crest, they have been held up there indefinitely, their lives forced into the anti-flux of grief.