MORE DEBATE ON ROTATION AND FORCE STRUCTURE.

A generation ago, soldiers ordered to Vietnam had to stay 12 months. A generation earlier, GIs sent off to the Korean War had to earn their way home by accumulating 36 points -- four points a month for combat, one point for being a rear-area cook.

During the Civil War, many Union troops enlisted -- some for as short as 90 days -- then simply dropped their weapons and walked home when their tours were finished. World War II draftees were in it until the end.

Today's troops in Iraq, however, have no idea when they are coming home.

The Army can't tell them, senior officers say, because amid the increasing demands of the occupation, it is also struggling to fill commitments in Afghanistan, Korea, the Balkans and elsewhere. And it doesn't have enough brigades and divisions to rotate between home and foreign missions.

To some critics, this spells a need for more than the Army's 10 divisions and 481,000 soldiers.

"We're reaching a point where we have to go ahead and bite the bullet and put more forces in our force structure," Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said at a congressional hearing last week, "so we can rotate those troops, who are doing so well and serving so proudly, out of Iraq."

Instead, the Army has reached for a morale-busting solution discredited in Vietnam: If it doesn't have enough brigades and divisions to change battle-worn units for fresh ones, it replaces individuals with new soldiers from back home...

Among troops in Iraq, meantime, one question is foremost.

With his unit in formation recently, Lt. Col. Mark Calvert, a squadron commander with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, was asked: "When are we going home?"

"We ARE home," Calvert said, gesturing at their dusty, windblown encampment in eastern Baghdad. "And we will be at home here until the Army tells us this isn't home anymore."