Now that the number of body bags containing the corpses of U..S. kids killed in George Bush's war in Iraq and Afghanistan has exceeded 1,864, and the war's once modest popularity here at home has shrunk to an all-time low, it's pretty clear that the U.S. military is currently having one devil of a time "making mission."

"Making mission" is U.S. Army lingo for filling the service's monthly recruitment quotas, as established by some high-paid desk-jockey in Washington, D.C. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq holds pretty steady, from month to month, at 137,000, and that is despite the war's shrinking popularity here at home, and despite the enemy's insistence on showing not only absolutely no sign of being defeated, but rather, of using more sophisticated tactics and showing unbroken resolve and morale.

In fact, there is ample evidence that hardy, gung-ho Arab terrorists from neighboring terrorist countries continue, in increasing numbers, to stream into Iraq, spurred by news films to join their holy war against the Americans. Old terrorists (if such is not an oxymoron) are training new.

It's always a mistake to underestimate your enemy. Just last Tuesday night, on Charlie Rose's TV interview with top-ranking Donald Rumsfeld, for example, I heard Rumsfeld, who is, after all, in charge of our boys in uniform, say there was no doubt our soldiers in Iraq have weapons and air power superior to the Iraqis' own. Now, that assumption, while true, may be just about as flawed and irrelevant as the older American assumption that the Iraqis would welcome the invading Americans with open arms as they got off their ships and transport planes. Our top brass's original assumption that the U.S's clearly superior fire power would quickly bring our enemy to its knees begging for terms at the negotiation table, as it did in their fathers' thinking about our war against the North Vietnamese, has proved flawed. Indeed, the assumption would be foolish, if it were not so tragic.

The superiority of one's weapons depends partly, it seems to me, on the will and resolve of the soldiers who wield them. There will never be any shortage of death-hungry roadside bombers, eager to trade their own lives for the deaths of the "godless" American invaders of their country. And how do you fight an enemy with a mind-set like that? Funny how the "less advanced"our enemy, the harder we find it to fathom his thinking. How long does it take to understand that? George Bush obviously hadn't a clue when he declared this war. And, it seems, Donald Rumsfeld still hasn't a clue.

Heaven protect us all from an enemy whose god rewards him with a lifetime in heaven for the heroic and selfless act of blowing himself to smithereens here on earth.

It reminds you of the death-hungry Japanese soldiers in the Pacific in World War Two. Why can't our war-planners remember that? As the recruiting pool begins drying up, the pressure on Army and Marine recruiters naturally begins to increase, even if it means fudging the information to meet their quotas. In the U. S. armed services, pressure starts at the top and moves on down the line.

"Allegations of recruiting improprieties almost doubled from 2000 to 2004," writes Michael Bronner,"with some 957 last year. Reports of patterns of unethical recruiting have surfaced in the news lately, coinciding with low enlistment and a decline in public support for the war in Iraq." .

There's a kid, Tim Queen, for example, from an impoverished part of North Carolina, who went to join the Marines. When he approached the recruiters, what they saw startled them: "Ever since the ninth grade, Timmy's had a 'twitch,' as his father puts it. . . .

At regular intervals -- every 20 seconds or so -- the muscles in Tim's left arm seem to convulse, sending his arm in a lurch he struggles to suppress. He'll also stutter when the twitch is bad and blink involuntarily." He also suffers pretty badly from claustrophobia.

"His condition has never been formally diagnosed, but it's pronounced enough, especially when he's stressed, that he was not permitted to test for his driver's license." "Tim told [author Michael Bronner] that he talked to the recruiters about all his medical issues . They told him not to worry, he said, that they'd seen this kind of thing before, no problem, he'd get in."

And so he did . . . for 2 days at Parris Island.. "After 25 days (the delay is not explained), the Marine Corps gave Tim Queen $100 and an "Other Than Honorable" (a kind of meaningless compromise between "honorable" and "dishonorable") discharge, and put him on a bus home." It's like cheating in many high schools: nobody talks about it, but nearly everybody does it. "A former Marine recruiter from Dallas put it more bluntly: 'Everybody frauds contracts (cheats on the written contract between the recruit and the government agent). It's just a matter of coaching the kid to keep his mouth shut. Everybody does it. It doesn't matter what service.

"Today's conditions represent the most challenging conditions we have seen in recruiting in my 33 years in this uniform,' Major General Michael Rochelle, the head of the army's recruiting command, said in a recent press conference. He evoked combat imagery --'a very, very intense fight --to convey the urgency of stanching the hemorrhaging of the all-volunteer army." (In May of this year, the Marine Corps stopped making its contracting numbers available to the press.)

"And it's worth remembering that "to 'fraud' a recruit into the Marine Corps is to knowingly enlist someone who doesn't meet the strict physical, moral, and educational standards laid out by the military--a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, punishable by court-martial." Chances are, very few had disabilities as severe as those seizures that visibly plagued Tim Queen, but how many disabilities do you need to endanger your own life in combat and those of your uniformed buddies when confronted by an enemy with fire power and stealth as sharp as your own?

Maybe the would-be recruit has a drug problem?

If so, he is given counseling and medication, by the recruiter, to temporarily conceal his condition. It doesn't solve his problem; it merely hides it from the authorities. And, these days, that seems to be enough.

Where does the recruiter fit in this chain of command? He stands below the head honchos, but above the recruits.

Take Jimmy Massey as an example.

He felt so much pressure to recruit, especially when the war was becoming less and less popular with civilian kids here at home, that he signed up confirmed drug addicts, criminals, asthmatics. He coached illegal drug users how to pass urine tests.

He was investigated, but acquitted, for badgering high school students for their "lack of patriotism."

Another feature of President George's brilliant No Child Left Behind Act is that "Cold-calling high-school kids at home is now a ubiquitous recruiting tactic."

The pressure is on kids to enlist now; not to wait until you can talk it over with your parents and school counselor.

"In November of 2003, Mission Day (the day when the pledged number of recruits comes due_ was the day before Thanksgiving, and the Little Rock Recruiting Station had come up short again. The entire station --five recruiters and the station commander -- was ordered to Dallas. The six men were read a formal reprimand and sent on a punishing five-mile run through the streets of Dallas. They were then turned around and sent home exhausted."

Severe physical punishment is the order of the day for those recruiters who fail to stampede high school kids to sign on the dotted line.

Again, the questions come up: what is our goal in Iraq? And by what logical and half-way humane means do we propose to reach it?

The statistics in this article come from Michael Bronner's documented "The Recruiters' War," in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, pages 303- 318.