What if it also meant working 16 to 20 hours nearly every day in 120-degree temperatures?

As an enlisted soldier, Army Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Peskoff of Fountain took on such a job, overseeing 29 soldiers at a military installation in Mosul, Iraq.

Of course, he didn't know what he was getting himself into.

Taking into account the number of hours he worked each week, his $43,000 salary during his year in Iraq came out to less than $7 an hour.

Meanwhile, the soldiers in his unit had to transport and protect workers of U.S. corporations who earned salaries three to five times higher working on engineering projects, such as building (and rebuilding) oil pipelines.

For the first seven months of the year he was there, starting in April 2003, they had no armor for their vehicles.

"If you don't think about being security for these massive corporations making big bucks being there, you're OK, but if you do, then you realize the entire military is being used and abused," Peskoff, a married 33-year-old father of two girls, told me.

"This is not a Michael Moore conspiracy. It's not just Halliburton. Many U.S. companies are there to get the oil that's there."

(Halliburton, a U.S. corporation that Vice President Dick Cheney once led, has the majority of contracts to build oil pumps and pipelines in Iraq. It also exports crude oil at top dollar.)

As debates swirl over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs, how U.S. corporations abuse workers in developing countries and whether Congress should raise the federal minimum wage, it's perplexing why, during a time of war, we aren't talking more about the exploitation of our soldiers.

Considering the conditions most of them work under, the pay and benefits of our military are woefully low. New recruits can earn less than $20,000 a year, according to statistics provided by the U.S. Army.

And that is not factoring an untold cost: the psychological toll it has taken on soldiers, especially those who have done two or three tours in a war that seems to know no end.

After 10 years of service, Peskoff became medically retired after he was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He scrubs everything in sight and washes his hands repeatedly. He has nightmares when he sleeps. To avoid the painful dreams, he stays up all night, hoping he'll be too exhausted to wake up during a nightmare.

Still, he has them, about four times a week - just like a countless number of Iraq war veterans. And the dreams they are vivid.

"I am always in a Humvee, always driving down a busy road; we're getting attacked by Iraqis hiding in the hills, firing RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and shooting (AK-47s). I see bodies get ripped in half ... I don't even like talking about it," he said, his voice trailing off.

"I came back a totally different person. You may call us mentally weak, but there are a lot of us out there."

Peskoff speaks at a rapid-fire pace. Ask him one question, and he'll go in different directions, but he always comes back to this: He is now an irritable man, not the upbeat person he used to be.

His wife, Lisa, feels the change. Peskoff tries to hide it from his daughters, 6-year-old Hannah and 4-year-old Lillian.

He's angry that the CIA last year closed a unit whose mission was to hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. He wonders if the average American has any clue about what's really going on in Iraq.

"The politicians, not just the Republicans but the Democrats, too, could care less about spreading democracy," he said. "We are pawns. The soldiers are being used."

It seems that we have become a society that no longer may know what is right versus what is just plain wrong. We collectively watched the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Then came the "shock and awe" and the complete destruction of the city of Fallujah. We began to hear the bizarre stories of the inhuman torture of prisoners at Abu Grahib and Guantanamo. Now we are beginning to hear details of the horrendous story about the village of Haditha, a potential time bomb of immense proportions. The senseless deaths of our military and Iraqi civilians continue each and every day; this is complete madness! Is Big Brother wiretapping you and me? Does anyone care? America remains in a state of conditioned silence.

Where is the rage? Where is the outrage? National opinion polls have determined that there is dissatisfaction, uneasiness, and a tiredness in the American people. The public now feels the Iraq war was a mistake and not worth it. Is America disillusioned simply because we are not winning? God, I hope not. Is there anything at all that can reach the American mind so that so many of us who profess "family values" can just get real damned mad when we witness our foreign policy going berserk?

We in this society also watch as America changes in so many different ways domestically. We watch as our remaining jobs continue to be outsourced to countries all over the world as our corporations brazenly reduce the American workforce to achieve greater and greater profits. Our trade and budget deficits are spiraling out of control and our government now has to sell $2 billion of treasury securities each and every day to finance these deficits. China, in particular, along with Japan, various other Asian and European nations now virtually own our nation. We are the greatest debtor nation in history and have no conception of how to end this massive bleeding that is rapidly leading us to national bankruptcy. And the people watch and there is no outrage. Only an eerie silence.

Yes, there is only silence, only a weary acceptance of these travesties foisted upon the American people, only the passive condoning of this insidious wrongheaded direction that those in control of our government are taking. Americans seem to have lost the will to question and challenge. Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest patriots said, "Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism" and truer words were never spoken. If we completely lose our ability to question, to challenge and to dissent when our democracy is in jeopardy, then we will have become nothing more than passive sheep.

We in America are so very content with our lifestyles, our gas-guzzling SUV's, Hummers, huge pickup trucks, bigger and bigger homes that many cannot really afford, interest-only loans; and now, believe it or not, 50-years mortgages. We see the price of gasoline rapidly escalating and we watch as our government, the auto companies and the energy corporations have no plan or any desire whatsoever to try to solve the energy problems that are endangering our very future. It seems that the American mind is so fixed upon personal gain, the accumulation of wealth and material possessions that this fixation has negated and wiped out the former great influence of moral values in our society. It appears we have become slaves of consumerism and that this addiction has virtually wiped out the will, incentive and courage to dissent.

We need to discuss 9/11. Yes, it was one of the most terrible, destructive, events in our history, Yes, a great tragedy, but It certainly is not of the same magnitude in total destruction of lives and property as other major events in our history such as the Civil War, Vietnam and several notable domestic disasters. But we need to understand the more destructive long-term psychological damage that it stamped into the fragile American psyche. The criminal perpetrators of this vicious act knew exactly what they were doing. Bush & Co. knew they had accomplished one of their major objectives -- instilling fear and paranoia into the American mind.

The Bush administration pretended to go after alleged 9/11 perpetrator Osama bin Laden with a vengeance in Afghanistan, an action that a majority of Americans fell for. However, thereafter, those in power made one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history. While, in this essay, I will not explore the underlying issues of WMD, Saddam, liberation of Iraqis, bringing democracy to Iraq, lack of any legal or moral justification. -- when this Bush administration made that ill-conceived military invasion, when they then filled the American mind with more fear and foreboding about terrorists hiding behind every bush, they effectively gave any real terrorists an important victory.

These seeds of fear and extreme paranoia had been deeply planted into the American mind by the 9/11 perpetrators and, thereafter, have been fertilized and cultivated by this same Bush administration. These neocon-driven bulls rushed into Iraq to "fight them over there instead of here," initiating their fantasy plan to tie the Iraq war to al-Qaeda. Each and every day they continue to trumpet that "the insurgents are making their last gasp, democracy is near, we must stay the course, we cannot cut and run" and on and on. And the corporate media continue to feed this propaganda into that very damaged American psyche.

Where is the rage, the outrage? Oh, I think that it is present in our society, buried somewhere deep in the American mind. While the outrage may be present in some latent state, it has been completely suppressed and bottled up by fear and paranoia. But so far no member of the opposition party or anyone in a leadership role has been able to counter this psychological malady with a powerful vocal serum to provide healing and a clear message that can free the American mind.

Big Brother & Co. did a masterful job of devising programs of misinformation and distortion that were spread throughout America by the obedient lapdogs known as the corporate-controlled mass media. Why have this media completely failed to provide the leadership to the American people to awaken them? Because they are trapped in a state of journalistic paralysis. They have been brainwashed and conditioned to fear that dissent will be considered to be a traitorous act -- compliance and servitude are the twin credos of this sad community of gutless, spineless pseudo-journalists. This is a media that truly have sold their journalistic soul to the highest bidder -- and guess who that might be?

When we as individuals and a society have the God-given ability to weigh all sides of all these momentous issues that threaten the future of our nation, our children and the entire world community, yet we may no longer have the moral strength and the will to logically choose between what we know is right and wrong -- then it may be that this society is truly in a state of moral decline, one that might be irreversible.

But, the jury is still out -- America, our society and our democracy is standing at a crossroads that will determine our future. Many questions and facts have been presented but many more must and will emerge. The American mind is, in effect, the jury that will decide the fate of America and what its future will entail. The American people, not the government in power, are still the foundation upon which America was built. If this foundation continues to erode and crumble, then our future will be meaningless -- and irrelevant, no more than slaves to the god of consumerism.

If this jury remains in a state of conditioned silence and is unable to make honest and moral deliberations -- if this jury, this society, will not and cannot show its outrage and demand that the course of this nation be dramatically changed -- then the verdict will be that outrage and dissent are just too dangerous to even consider and that sheeplike passivity is the safest and most expedient course of action. At that point, we Americans will have lost our will to dissent, and this society will have died and it will not rest in peace.

Witnesses said a car drove up and parked in the square in front of the city's grand mosque, immediately attracting a crowd of people assuming it was a contractor looking for day labor.

"A blue car pulled into the area and dozens of people surrounded the car thinking that they were looking for workers," said Nasser Kadhim, who lost his brother in the blast and was himself wounded.

"A few minutes later the explosion happened and everything was thrown into the air."

The luring of innocent civilians next to a booby-trapped vehicle appearing to offer work or cheap food is a ploy frequently used by the more extremist insurgent groups operating in Iraq.

The latest blast came only a day after a grisly market massacre killed 48 people, mostly Shiites, in a small town just south of Baghdad -- the latest in the increasingly bloody sectarian-tinged killings.

Initially these attacks were largely confined to the Baghdad area, but in recent weeks attacks targeting specific sectarian groups appear to be spreading around the country.

On Sunday, a suicide bomber blew himself up and destroyed a coffeeshop used by Turkmen Shiites, killing 28, in the northern town of Tuz Kharmatu, not far from the oil city of Kirkuk.

Kufa itself, with its Shiite holy shrines and constant stream of pilgrims, has been targeted with bombs before by what many believe are extremist Sunni Arab insurgents.

On July 6, a bomb attack against a bus for Iranian pilgrims outside the Maytham al-Tammar shrine next to the same mosque killed 12 people and wounded dozens, most of them Iranian nationals.

This week's carnage comes as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's fledgling government struggles to deal with the issue of security, which he has singled out as his top priority.

In Baghdad, which has seen the deadliest sectarian attacks, a month-old security plan that put 50,000 US and Iraqi soldiers on the streets seems unable to stem the tide of killing.

The US military announced it would hold a briefing on the operation but has postponed it several times.

The seeming impotence of government troops has been thrown in sharp relief by a series of brazen midday kidnappings of prominent officials, often involving dozens of attackers.

And a gruesome attack by Shiite gunmen on a Sunni Arab neighborhood on July 9 killed more than 40 people.

Increasingly, US officials are acknowledging that militias are part of the security problem in Baghdad and several operations have targeted specific militia leaders in past weeks.

In the British-administrated south of the country, a new crackdown has been launched against Shiite militias.

At least five Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded in clashes with British troops early Tuesday during an operation in the centre of the port city of Basra targeting weapons caches, a security source said.

The once relatively peaceful city of Basra has in recent months been riven by battles between rival militias and gangs smuggling oil, prompting British forces to step up operations.

On Sunday, two suspected militiamen were taken into custody at the cost of a British soldier's life.

The US military Tuesday reported the killing of a soldier in an explosion south of Baghdad, raising to four the number of American deaths in two days and to 2,549 its total military losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The People's Liberation Army has deployed 784 ballistic and 36 cruise missiles aimed at the island, he said, adding that the number of missiles is rising at the rate of 120 per year.

These could paralyse Taiwan's communications and transportation and command centers in a 10-hour bombardment, Taiwan's defense ministry says.

A Pentagon report has said China is building up its military at a pace that is tipping the balance against Taiwan and could pose a credible threat to other armies in the region.

Taiwan plans to stage a major military exercise Thursday to display its capability to fend off any invasion. Chen is expected to preside over the drill codenamed "Han Kuang 22" and involving at least 10,000 soldiers.

China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan should it declare formal independence. It has regarded the self-governing island as part of its territory since their split in 1949 at the end of a civil war.

Tensions between Taiwan and China have escalated since the independence-leaning Chen was elected president in 2000. He was narrowly re-elected in 2004.

China crushed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 with the loss of hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

"The United States has given its nod over the sales of 66 F-16C/D Block 52s for at least 100 billion Taiwan dollars (3.1 billion US)," the paper said, without naming a source.

If the report is confirmed, it would be the biggest arms deal Washington has offered Taiwan since 2001 when US President George W. Bush agreed to provide the island with eight diesel-powered submarines, 12 P-3C submarine-hunting aircraft and an improved version of Patriot missiles, the paper said.

Taiwan's defense ministry declined to comment on the report.

The new planes aim to reinforce the air force's combat capability before it can acquire so-called "third generation" fighters from the United States, the paper said.

The United States in 1992 agreed to sell Taiwan 150 less sophisticated F-16A/Bs, but refused to provide F-16C/Ds which have a longer range and powerful ground attack capability.

In addition to 146 F-16A/B fighters, the air force has 128 locally produced Indigenous Defense Fighters and 56 French-made Mirage 2000-5s, along with 60 or so aging F-5 Tigers.

President Chen Shui-bian has pledged gradually to increase military spending to around three percent of gross domestic product, up from 2.5 percent currently.

China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan should it move towards formal independence, prompting the island to seek more advanced weaponry.

China announced in March its military budget for this year would rise 14.7 percent to 35 billion dollars, the latest in a series of double-digit annual increases dating back to the early 1990s.

A Pentagon report last year estimated that China's defense spending was two to three times the publicly announced figure and that the cross-strait military balance was tipping in Beijing's favor.