Has it really been only four years? Maybe it just seems longer. I still see the faces of the soldiers I met in my two trips to the war, some who died, some who were horribly disfigured. I still feel the ever-present sorrow of their mothers, wives and siblings who sometimes write, even now.

Almost four years later, I remember the tent from our first trip to Iraq in 2003. Mostly I do because the other day I pulled my notebooks from that time from a cabinet in the garage. Looking back, what happened there in the desert seems a sure-fire, canary-in-the- coal-mine predictor of how things would play out to this day.

The tent was huge, a stark white rectangle the U.S. Army had erected in a far corner of the base stuck in the sand in the middle of nowhere Anbar Province, which over time would prove to be one of the most problematic regions of the country.

It took a Humvee ride to get to the tent from the main part of the base, which I thought then was exactly how the Army must have wanted it. No one, truth be told, really trusted any Iraqi.

The inside of the tent on most mornings resembled a kindergarten class before the bell rang. Only these were grown Iraqi men, soon-to-be soldiers, who with only minutes left before formation were hopping on each other's backs, throwing shoes, tickling ears, laughing.

Admittedly, this was early on, and things were more hopeful then than they would soon turn out to be.

But having watched this every day for a week, I suspected even then that the odds were great against American soldiers being able to pack up any time soon - a common belief in those heady "mission accomplished" days - and leave supervision of the teetering country to these raw recruits.

They were about to become the first graduates of an "academy" the U.S. military formed in the fall of 2003, one of its first attempts at reconstituting an Iraqi army. It had disbanded the standing army only months before.

The military loved the idea of dispatching a reporter and a photographer to the tent area, so we sat there, mostly staring back at men who we could not understand, who could not understand us.

And then there were others, less jovial, people like Humaila Gmoc. At least that is how he wrote it in my notebook, one of those I found the other day in the garage.

He even wrote down his Yahoo.com address. I fired off an e-mail to find out if he was still in the army. He has not yet written back.

He was 23 years old then, a Kurd raised in Baghdad. He had graduated two years earlier with a degree in computer systems, but during Saddam's reign, the rules said he could not be hired.

"So I sat," Humaila said. "I cooked, cleaned and just sat in my parents' house. I could not do anything."

When Saddam was toppled, he was eager to join when the call went out for soldiers. There was no computer work. And the soldiers were being paid the equivalent of $20 a week.

It was personal, too. His father, he said, had been tortured three times by the regime over the years, a Kurdish man suspected of opposition activities.

"He can no longer move his hands," Humaila said, "and he has some problems in his head."

His brother was executed for refusing a request in 1991 to join the Baath Party.

"They sent us back just his leg and his arm. He was 22 years old.

"So because of my brother and my father, and my own suffering personally as a Kurdish man, I join the army. My father, he took me by my hand and led me to these soldiers."

Days later, Ermad, a 46-year-old former Iraqi Army engineer walked up. He spoke perfect English.

"I studied in England," he explained.

He complained that the American media were not providing an accurate picture of what was occurring then in Iraq.

"It is not going all in one bad direction," he complained, "and that is not fair to the families who send their boys here."

Only reluctantly would he acknowledge the then-growing number of kidnappings and bombings occurring in Baghdad. He did so only because he had two daughters there.

"I worry about them. I worry about their future," he said. "It is being done by men trying to implement their thoughts through weapons.

"We have been through so much, through too many wars. People just want a simple life. The Iraqis are sick of this. If we resort only to death and blood, the whole cause could be for nothing again."

The Americans trained these Iraqis at the "academy" for only two weeks. It seems like they were mostly marching.

On their last day, they loaded all of the men in the tent into trucks.

I remember asking a U.S. airman, a cook who was assigned to lead parts of the training, if the recruits would eventually get a weapon.

"Oh, they'll get one, once we drop them at the border and leave," he responded.

Four years on, we're paying dearly for mistakes made early. One of those mistakes, however obscure, is that we didn't train these Iraqi "soldiers" to do the job they were being asked to do.

I wonder how many of them are in uniform today, how many still alive.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.

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