Vets For Democrats.(The Talk of the Town)(Jon Kuniholm)

Last Wednesday, on the morning of Securing America's Future day at the Democratic National Convention, Jon Kuniholm stood in the lobby of the Pepsi Center--a big man with the face of a studious boy, filling up every inch of a conservative gray suit whose right sleeve ended in a gleaming prosthetic hook. A former Marine captain, Kuniholm still cuts his hair military style, shaved on the sides and short on top. "It makes the conversation shorter," he said. "Instead of asking, 'How'd you lose your arm?' people just say, 'Iraq?' "

On New Year's Day, 2005, Kuniholm's right arm below the elbow was shredded by a homemade bomb packed into a can of olive oil, near the Sunni town of Haditha. At the time, he was serving as a platoon leader in a battalion of as few as six hundred and fifty marines, who had been given the impossible mission of trying to control an insurgent-ridden area the size of three counties in his native North Carolina.

Wednesday was Kuniholm's thirty-seventh birthday, and he was in Denver to vouch for Barack Obama. He and a small group of young men sporting "Veterans for Obama" buttons went out drinking at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. One of them was Richard Smith, a twenty-three-year-old from Florida, with a receding hairline and an air of angry excitement. "Four months ago, I was a buck sergeant in Afghanistan," Smith said over a pitcher of porter and the noise of a bar band. "And I stood on the stage of the Democratic National Convention tonight? It's ridiculous." He was staying at a Motel 6, paying his expenses out of his only source of income, the G.I. Bill--the new version of which, he pointed out, Obama worked hard to pass, while McCain didn't bother to show up for the vote on it. The subject of a bracelet that Obama wears on his wrist came up. It was given to him by the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. "Here's the thing--have you heard Obama say that?" Smith said. "Every time John McCain appears before a veterans' group, he makes a point of noting that he wears the bracelet of an Iraq veteran who was killed."

Smith grew up ...