THE CASUALTY.

Dan Baum talks about the pains of war

From 1942, the diary of a sergeant wounded in the Second World War

From 1943, Philip Hamburger visits a veterans' hospital

When people talk about the Army being good for a certain kind of young man, it's boys like Michael Cain they have in mind. Tall and lean, with a sweet smile and doll's eyes, Michael spent his high-school years searching fitfully for the disciplined achiever within him. His home, a converted schoolhouse that his parents rented amid the dairy pastures and cornfields outside Berlin, Wisconsin, was a loving if unruly place, noisy with two little sisters and cluttered with the winter coats, boots, and other items it takes to keep a family going in the rural Midwest. Michael's mother, Charlene, a sturdy woman with a broad, pretty face, earned most of the family income as a clerk in a Winnebago County mental-health clinic, forty-five minutes away. His father, Kenneth, a heavyset former machinist disabled by back pain, kept llamas in the back yard as a hobby. Michael loafed through school in his early teens, playing sousaphone in the marching band and clowning around in class. He liked to watch professional wrestling on TV. In his junior year, though, he found himself thinking that Berlin, population fifty-three hundred, looked small. Envisioning a career in computers, he bore down on his schoolwork and got decent grades, but then he seemed to lose interest in the prospect of going to college.

Graduation, in 1999, marooned him. Having no clear idea what to do, Michael took a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. Within months, the thrill of adulthood had faded to a dreary routine of unpacking boxes under fluorescent lights and, after hours, gazing into the PlayStation 2 upstairs in his bedroom. In May of 2000, Michael drove forty minutes to an Army recruiting station in the Oshkosh City Center shopping mall and got the paperwork to sign up for a four-year hitch. Charlene first heard of her son's plans when he came home that night and asked for his birth certificate.

Charlene thought the military would be too tough for her easygoing son. "You hate having people tell you what to do," she told him. Though Michael was nineteen and parental consent wasn't required, the recruiter drove out to the Cains' house to sit at the kitchen table among the canned goods and wrestling magazines and show her on his laptop the range of Army opportunities. "Are you sure you want to do this?" Charlene kept asking Michael as the recruiter, in crisp dress greens, sat stiffly between them. The laptop glowed with images of men flying helicopters and driving tanks. Less than a week later, Michael Cain was at the induction center in Milwaukee with a gym bag in his hand.

To Charlene's amazement, Michael thrived under military discipline. The unity of purpose, the clarity of authority, and the hard physical work all gave him hope of becoming the man he wanted to be--serious, competent, respected. His biggest gripe in calls home was that other soldiers were insufficiently respectful to the drill sergeant--a complaint that left his mother speechless. His score on the Army entrance exam wasn't high enough to get him into electronics, but it qualified him to be an "eighty-eight mike"--a truck driver. For Private Cain, barrelling along in a thirty-eight-thousand-pound transport at highway speeds was more fun than arranging displays of toaster ovens. He twice wrote to his recruiter, describing how he was getting his "ass kicked" so hard he'd lost twenty-eight pounds, but also to thank him for helping him "fulfill a life long dream, being an american soldier!!!" After basic, he was sent to Vicenza, Italy, and spent two years driving trucks and taking parachute training in order to get his jump wings. The Army worked its traditional alchemy. Michael rose smoothly to the rank of specialist and was sent to Fort Hood, Texas. He met an attractive woman named Leslie Lantz, who worked at a Denny's restaurant in the nearby town of Killeen, and they began seeing each other. On April 1st of last year, Cain departed for Kuwait, and left in her care his most precious possession--a new Dodge Ram pickup.