Surveying the carnage below him and clinging with his one good arm to the rigging, the Marine sighed and said, "Some guys just never do get The Word."

The Word--the real meaning of things, how things really are, no matter what that may be--sometimes never seems to get passed on to those in power.

I remember from my own personal experience a similar situation. The day I was wounded in World War II, Jan. 1, 1945, my company spent all day trying to oust an enemy strongpoint from a low wooded hill on the Belgian-German border without ever seeing it, without knowing why we were doing what we were doing, with frequent stops and starts, long immobile stays in the snow, losing men (33 wounded and seven dead), waiting for The Word.

When it finally came, it was to retreat to the safety of our own lines.

That was it. There wasn't anything else--no reason, no explanation and no reason to ask.

I never deciphered The Word then and I haven't today. Nor, I think, have many others.

And so now as then we soldier on convinced that whoever is in charge knows more than we do about what's going on, what ought to be done, when to change course, when to regroup and when to try new tactics.

But what of the alternative?

What if those in charge don't know more than we do about The Word? What's even more frightening, what if they know even less?

It's this dilemma we face these days. It's backed by the conflict in Iraq. It grinds on with its daily carnage of one sort or another--suicide bombings, car bombings, roadside bombings, indiscriminate and deadly, without reason, their only purpose to terrorize and to kill.

It's hard to call it a war. The war was supposed to be over when we captured Baghdad. But certainly, war or not, the strife continues.

For lack of a better word the military calls it an insurgency. I'm not sure what the difference among insurgency, revolt, revolution and civil war may be. What's happening appears to be all of these.

Whatever it is, it continues to cost lives: American, British, Iraqi, and now and then others of the "coalition."

The daily toll has become so ordinary it has moved off the front pages of our newspapers and out of the nightly television news broadcasts. It is fast becoming as meaningless as the body count of Viet Cong casualties in the Vietnam War.

Those in charge have advanced a variety of reasons for starting the war, for its goals and for its continuance. Over the past two years these have changed from time to time until they have been reduced to the maxim of that snowy day in the Belgian forest: stay the course.

Now and then this has become mixed with the never-ending search for Osama Bin Laden and his ilk, even though they probably are in Pakistan and not Iraq.

What's becoming increasingly evident is that we really don't know why we are in Iraq and, now that we are, we also don't know how to get out.

Getting out once seemed easy, but the longer we stay the more difficult that seems to have become. For it is not simply a matter of leaving. It also is a matter of how we leave and what we leave behind.

Now and then what we are supposed to leave as our gift is democracy, a kind of transplanted democracy of our invention.

But it seems doubtful if the Iraqis appreciate this much or even if they want to accept it.

But having committed ourselves to it or at least to something like it, we can't depart without appearing to having accomplished it.

Is that The Word? Or are there other words we should leave? We're not sure.

Like the Marine on the Bon Homme Richard, we don't know what we have gotten into and so we don't know how to get out of it.

But then we have not yet received The Word.