Just a few family members and girlfriends have gathered at Camp Lejeune, NC, to send off the Command Element, the only piece of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit that is still Stateside. The entire MEU (sounds like chew), about 2200 men and women, will reassemble in Kuwait, then train in the desert to acclimate to the region. The artillery battery will shoot its 155mm howitzers. The transportation folks will practice driving and securing vehicle convoys with live ammunition. Everyone will rehearse the basic, armed foot patrol. This is preparation for a seven-month deployment to Iraq. A civilian woman and a young male Marine cling to each other, whispering. It's excruciating to watch but turning away is just as hard, I say to Sgt. Major Donnie Barrett, the MEU's highest-ranking noncommissioned officer. A towering, refrigerator-size man who cuts a less-than-cuddly figure in his desert camouflage fatigues, he nods in agreement. Barrett, who joined the Marine Corps 25 years ago, volunteers that he won't let his wife come out to the base to say goodbye anymore. It's too painful, and it never gets any easier, he says. A staff sergeant barks a set of instructions. The Marines shoulder their unwieldy packs and jam them into the buses' baggage holds. They load office equipment and their own canvas seabags onto a five-ton truck. Then the vehicles pull away, leaving behind a handful of subdued loved ones. A MEU is a self-contained fighting unit, a quickly deployable strike force comprised of infantry, support, aviation, and command components. This MEU takes over "security and stability" operations in an area south of Baghdad in mid-July from a departing US Army unit. More than half the Marines in the 24th MEU, some of them in their late teens and early twenties, served in Iraq just one year ago. The members of the infantry arm of the MEU, First Battalion/Second Marines, still talk about the brutal battle at An Nasiriyah, where they lost 18 men, at least one to friendly fire from an aircraft. Marines have been dispatched around the world by successive US presidents in configurations like the MEU to give force to a variety of policies. Administrations say, Jump, and the Marines do just that. Or as a MEU commander told a reporter and me 10 years ago: "We kill people and blow things up." That crude -- and accurate -- statement floored me. It also changed my life. I was a crunchy Brown University graduate who hadn't served in the armed forces. In fact, I never had any interest in joining up. Vietnam War footage I watched on my family's black-and-white TV as a kid terrified me. Over the years I absorbed the belief, pervasive in some parts of American society, that the armed forces were something to be protested -- or ignored. Another crucial factor: My father served in the Army during the Korean War, which was just a couple of years after President Truman ordered the armed forces to mix its all-black and all-white units. Truman's desegregation proclamation, however, didn't magically transform the hearts and minds of the white servicemen who attacked and beat my father and his squad, black men, for simply getting "too friendly" with a couple of German waitresses. "Never join the white man's army," my father, the former sergeant, warned, seething. But the military I covered in the early 90s was not my father's military. The racial dynamic on the ships on which I sailed was similar to what I saw and lived elsewhere in the US; it was a work-in-progress. I stumbled into pockets of matter-of-fact racial and ethnic harmony aboard the USS America and the USS Guadalcanal, even as I noted the scarcity of colored folks in command meetings. More profoundly, though, the MEU commander's blunt statement -- and the month I spent aboard US Navy ships photographing Marines and sailors -- made me realize that my reflexive mistrust of the military was pointless, irresponsible, and self-indulgent. The military simply is. The armed forces are a tremendously powerful tool that has been misused by Presidents -- and used constructively and heroically by some administrations as well. Understanding the military -- what it is, what it has done, and what it can do -- is a citizen's responsibility. This is, I realized, is a form of patriotism, which isn't just waving the flag and supporting every move the president makes. Nor is it opposing every step of the guy you didn't vote for, but who got elected anyway. Patriotism, in my view, means participating in the shaping of this nation and holding our leaders accountable for their actions.