When you're not getting shelled or shot at, war can get deadly dull. Fortunately, America's gals in uniform overseas appear to be having a rollicking good time, and no doubt enjoying numerous material perks as a result of being in short supply and high demand, and naked.

The evidence is visible at now that's f**ked up (http://nowthatsfuckedup.com/), an online trading post for amateur porn and grotesque gore pics from the front lines of freedom in Iraq. It's got everything, from soldiers posting photographed sessions with partners in country, or their girlfriends and wives back home, to the most appalling shots of what war looks like when the fragile human body confronts the power of mass, mechanized destruction.

There is one forum open to those who don't trade. For access to the rest, one must post original amateur nudity or porn, or graphic pics of wartime gore. It's all presented as entertainment, all of it lurid, and all of it, whether painful or pleasurable, profoundly intimate.

It might be best not to speculate about why there is such interest among the troops to document and to leer at images of intense feeling. The graphic details of sex, and of traumatic amputation, are not matters that healthy minds share with the wider world. Surely there is some pathology at work here.

And surely, the website will confirm the worst fears of more conservative, religious Iraqis about just what the Americans are bringing to their country. ®

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