In this presidential election season, the Iraq war seems to come and go and come back again as the central issue separating the parties. The big question: Does America plan on getting out, and if so, how fast? The Democrats -- Sens. Obama and Clinton -- argue for disengagement with all deliberate speed. Republican Sen. McCain argues for steadfast involvement, at least until some form of stability in Iraq is reached.

Before we leave for good any comment about the number of American deaths in Iraq -- the much-cited 4,000 -- I thought I'd direct you to a U.S. fighting man's take on the hubbub surrounding the toll. It's an intensely personal view that is not so much a reflection on the larger number, as it is a sense of grieving over specific losses -- those of friends and comrades. He wrote an essay for Time.

Read it here.

Recently the media noted that according to a survey, a relatively small number of Americans knew that the death toll among U.S. servicemembers in Iraq was, at that point, approaching 4,000. As we all know, that number was reached this week. It was, in words appearing in 1,821 separate journalistic entries found on Google News, a "grim milestone."

In a single New York Times article it was not only called a grim milestone, but a "dire water mark," a "sober moment," a "somber development," "heartbreaking news," and a "grim new toll." It was all those things, of course, but one wonders if the very repetition tends toward numbness.

For a couple of years now, two Stars and Stripes reporters have impressed some talented high school students with stories about covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The students were "Free Spirit Journalism Scholars." Such youngsters are selected annually by the nonprofit Freedom Forum for a scholarship and a week in Washington, D.C.

There was some distressing news the other day about how much, or how little, the American people were paying attention to the war in Iraq. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted a poll to find out what people knew of various political, economic and military situations.

Turns out only 28 per cent of respondents could say how many U.S. servicemembers had died in Iraq. The answer was about 4,000. Last August, 54 per cent had the correct answer -- then about 3,500. In other aspects too, the public is simply less aware of what is happening in the war zone. (I include Afghanistan, even though, regrettably, it wasn't dealt with in the Pew poll.)

Pity the poor sports desk. Any sports desk, not just Stars and Stripes'. The space it has to work with is never enough, even in a relatively quiet period like now, when football is over and baseball hasn't yet officially begun.

What has begun, and requires quite a few column inches, is the runup to the NCAA college basketball tournament. Make that tournaments, plural. There's one for men and one for women. There's the rub.

In a letter to Stars and Stripes, reader Frank Leitnaker, of Miesau, Germany, urges the ombudsman to "weigh in" on an opinion column he hated. The column appeared March 6 and was written by Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. (The column came to Stripes from a press syndicate.)

The Marines on Okinawa and mainland Japan have been going through a difficult time. The alleged rape of a 14-year-old Okinawan girl by a staff sergeant set off an uproar. The Japanese protested bitterly to U.S. authorities.