Noah Shachtman offers a first-hand anecdotal account of U.S. troop morale in Iraq. That’s one of the questions that yield bipolar answers, depending whose Web site you’re on. Shachtman says what he found “didn’t cling to any neat political storyline.”

Over three weeks in and around Baghdad this July, I spoke to dozens and dozens of soldiers about their views on the conflict. For the most part, morale among these infantrymen and engineers and bomb-disposers was high. Shockingly high, given the fact that they didn’t buy the Bush administration’s rationales for the war.

“Democracy? Here? Are you fucking kidding me?� one sergeant laughed, as we drove near the Abu Ghraib prison. This was from a guy from helped safeguard the January round of elections. He figures the place will collapse into civil war as soon as U.S. troops leave.

But he’s glad he’s in Iraq, regardless. Mostly, because of the insurgents.

The guerillas in Iraq have been brutal, killing way more innocent bystanders than American occupiers or Iraqi collaborators. While I was in Baghdad, a group of soldiers in a nearby neighborhood were handing out candy to bunch of kids. Until a suicide bomber stepped in, and killed 27.

“It boggles my mind, how someone can go into a crowd of kids, and kill them all. I’ll never understand it. But that’s why I’m here,� said Staff Sgt. Mark Palmer, with the 717th Ordnance Disposal Company, an Army bomb squad. “Yeah, it’s still fun to blow stuff up. But it’s not the core thing. Figuring out how this shit [the bomb] works. Stopping it from hurting people. That’s the main thing.�

People completely insulated from the military (which is most Americans, regrettably) probably tend, consciously or not, to work on a Vietnam War model of the U.S. military — absorbed from Oliver Stone movies, perhaps. The modern military is more and more a profession, and a hereditary class. This colors their attitudes toward battlefields and wars. To some degree, they’re eager to be tested in battle.

Their morale also demands a cause, and the White House has been fitfull about offering a good one and sticking to it. As the polls show, most of the faith in any of the causes put forth for toppling Saddam no longer resonate here at home. Shachtman finds this matters much less in Iraq. There, the ugliness of the insurgents gives U.S. troops a monster worth killing, and enough sense of just cause to keep morale up.

The result is a cycle of attack and reprisal that has nothing to do with WMD or drafting constitutions – but can easily drag on for years. Most of the soldiers I spoke with didn’t expect the deadly feedback loop to stop any time this decade. “I’m staying [in the Army] until I retire, which is another ten years,� one non-commissioned officer told me. “So I figure I’ll be back here, what, another five or six times?�

And make no mistake, soldiers are staying. I’d say three in four of the GIs I spoke with were planning to reenlist. The new, fat bonuses are one reason, of course. But another is the sense that there are real-life psychopaths out there that need to be stopped. It may sound corny. It may sound dumb. But that’s what I saw.