Then the other day it dawned on me: It was Sgt. Poohaw.

Sgt. Poohaw and I met for the first time during World War II under an odd set of circumstances in Fort Meade, Md. Our meeting came about because I was an infantry private replacement and Sgt. Poohaw was an infantry sergeant replacement.

The Army, in its inscrutable and infinite wisdom, had shoved us together along with a regiment of replacement privates, privates first class and noncommissioned officers and was sending us overseas to fill the gaps in the front line left by death and injury.

Sgt. Poohaw had come from a division different from mine, one on the West Coast. I had arrived from one in Virginia. But for at least three weeks we were going to be together—in the same platoon, as it turned out. After that it was anybody's guess what would happen.

Sgt. Poohaw was born and grew up somewhere around Chicago. He was of average height, of minimal intelligence (or so I thought, anyway, although I never told him that) and he was loud and profane.

For a good part of each day he stalked about, bellowing about how many Germans he was going to kill, with his "bare hands" if necessary. He kept this up all during our stay in Fort Meade, on the train to Camp Shanks, N.Y., and aboard the Ile de France, the troopship that carried us across the Atlantic, through Scotland and England, across the British Channel and into France.

The closer we got to the front, the louder and more profane became his ambition. It got to be so common that most of us gradually tuned it out. But on the ride to the front, a two-day trip in the back of an Army truck, it became more insistent and frequent and impossible to ignore. Our whole platoon was jammed into the truck body like a pack of sardines. It became a litany for the trip, one that did nothing to make it any more pleasant.

Finally, we reached our goal, the division to which we had been assigned. And as luck or fate or whatever would have it, Sgt. Poohaw and I, along with two dozen others, were sent to our division rear command post in the woods of the Huertgen Forest.

There we discovered the company to which we had been assigned had been ambushed the day before and reduced to half its strength. Huddled in a ravine on the way up a muddy road in the rain, we were told we would be walking the rest of the way.

Then it occurred to me that I hadn't heard Sgt. Poohaw for awhile. I looked around to see him crouched on the ground, his face paler than I had ever seen it, absolutely silent.

That's the last time I ever saw Sgt. Poohaw. He never made it to the front, never killed any Germans that I know of with his bare hands and apparently never fought anyone. He had been overcome by fear.

Sgt. Poohaw was, I am afraid, an all-too-typical bully. He talked a good fight, but when it came right down to it, all his bluster and threat was meant to cover the fear that finally overwhelmed him.

I'm not sure that's true of our (perhaps) elected leader, but he sounds an awful lot like Sgt. Poohaw, issuing constant threats, warning of new and constant but not very specific dangers and lambasting, at least verbally, another bully and tyrant.

If words will do the trick, I think we are probably pretty well equipped, but somehow the way in which this has all come about still reminds me of Sgt. Poohaw and his fate.

There's no doubt that Saddam and company are a nasty and dangerous bunch of boys. For a decade or more they have been trying their best to find ways to threaten, kill or at the least inconvenience most of the Middle East, and since the Gulf War they have unrelentingly been trying to get even for being defeated.

And for a decade, without benefit of a declared war, we have been flying over their skies, firing missiles at their antiaircraft capabilities and trying to figure out why the present government doesn't collapse.

Now, for no real apparent reason, the administration has decided the time has come to get really tough with Iraq. Or if there is an apparent reason, the administration has failed to make it very apparent.

Instead, we have been subjected to a war of words and to the demand that we issue our (perhaps) leader a sort of blank check.

"War is not imminent, but just in case it is ... "

It all bothers me, although I am not so sure how many other Americans it bothers. Not enough, apparently, to make their elected representatives do anything except write the blank check.

Still, that old memory of Sgt. Poohaw and World War II keeps haunting me.