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BAGHDAD — On the past martial exploits of your correspondent

I was riding one of the buses from the Baghdad airport toward the Green Zone yesterday when a solider in the seat behind me said, "You don't recognize me, do you?"

I turned, saw a big face and didn't place it.

"It's Geese-ler, or something, right?" he said. "I was your battle buddy."

Then, of course, I did recognize him, and repaid his good memory with a botched pronunciation of his own name.

Good old Lindley, or something.

The main thing I remember about my battle buddy from basic training eight years ago is his hometown. Possum's Kingdom, South Carolina. I mentioned this to him as the bus bumped along and he corrected me, smiling slightly, probably feeling I had only remembered the name Possum's Kingdom in a spirit of mockery.

It was just someplace we used to go sometimes, he said.

A battle buddy is a fairly glorified term when you aren't actually in battle. What it meant for us at Ft. Knox in the spring of 1999 was that we bunked next to each other and had to stick together for any exercise that required two people.

Although we got off to a somewhat rough start, we won accolades for our performance in the move-and-shoot drill. But then things turned sour. Mainly because, in my boredom with the interminable 16 week training, I took to baiting him mercilessly about the Civil War.

"South Carolina was conceived in infamy, behaved with ignominy and deserved to be wiped from the map for eternity," I liked to declare, or something to that effect.

"Thank God for brave Massachusetts, else the western continent might still..."

Et cetera.

Although ridiculous, such expressions, pushed with enough fervor, still carry the power to inflame, because the sons of the south are ever-proud. God bless them.

At any rate, my former battle buddy, after four year in the National Guard, had spent the last four on active duty. This was his second tour in Iraq.

"A lovely country," I said as we drove past a ubiquitous row of blast walls and some spindly trees seeming unnaturally autumnal in the still considerable swelter of October.

"It really is, in parts," he said.

Now a staff sergeant, battle buddy spoke with affection about the town near Baghdad where his cavalry unit was stationed.

"If you give them a dollar, they will give you a big bag of bread. They really stuff it full, and it's good bread," he said. He had never been one to miss a meal. Neither had I, for that matter.

My own military career, I used to like to say, was Lincolnesque. In other words, more or less totally lacking in distinction.

I come from a family without an extensive military tradition. Most of my forbears were farmers and thus exempt from service. The only martial story I ever heard was from a great uncle who said he was personally yelled at by Patton during the Italian campaign for wandering around without helmet or rifle.

I joined the Army in 1999 for no good reason, enlisting as a cavalry scout -- the eyes and ears of the Army, the recruiting video reassured me. I was not terribly well suited for this task, being very absent minded and having an absolutely terrible sense of direction, but I soldiered on through the endless weeks in Kentucky and finally arrived at Fort Polk, La., a simmering hell-hole widely considered the worst posting in the military.

A few months later, I suffered a moderate head injury while serving in a fake war against a fake breakaway Russian republic in California (and, imagine, we weren't ready to fight an insurgency in Iraq,) but returned triumphantly to my regiment to serve out the remainder of my two-year enlistment.

In the end, I did all right. I compensated for my inability to draw maps in my head by learning to memorize complex acronyms that would lead me along the dirt paths through the Louisiana scrub jungle, driving an outdated Humvee. At any rate, Louisiana did not fall, and I left the service with a pair of medals and a nice plaque.

"I hope the world is everything you think it is," one sergeant wrote on the back of the plaque, "the world" being the term for civilian life.

I also served a year in the Massachusetts National Guard, of which little can be said other than that I attended, and then only usually. (Actually, I can say this. One weekend our zealous sergeant brought in a box of overripe eggplants and several dozen hard-boiled eggs. One soldier was instructed to hold an eggplant and an egg at the throat and eye level of another soldier, while a third attacked, "ripping out the throat and gouging out the eye" of the hapless victim. Needless to say, we left that drill in glory, the parking lot scattered with foodstuffs.)

But I digress.

That was a very different Army, firm in its traditions and rigorous in its way but enlivened by no particular sense of purpose that I could see. After all, the greatest enemy we could then conjure to fill in the blanks of our marching cadences was the soon-to-be shackled dictator of some piddling country most of us had never heard of.

"Milosevic, Milosevic, raging mad ... never understood the power we had.

It all seemed like quite the dog and pony show, to use one of my favorite military expressions, carried out with absurd seriousness in a horrendous climate and with far too little sleep.

One of my clearest memories is of running in formation at the crack of dawn down the post's main drag, past the bowling alley, which had one of those digital clocks that shows the temperature.

It read: 5800 degrees.

Life in the Army was about to change, but I was gone by then.

My old battle buddy, incidentally, has married and has two kids. He's bought some land in Wyoming and doesn't get back to South Carolina very much anymore.