Now and then The World's presumed editorial position is featured as news by other media. The World was the focus of a good slice of redneck rage on a local radio station a couple of years ago, when we published an editorial saying we thought the proposal for a Coos County requirement that every household have a gun was simply foolish.

"Ah HA!" came the accusations. "The World is anti-gun!"

No, we weren't. And no, we're not. The editor and I both own guns. I'm certain dozens of The World's hundred or so employees do, too, although it's none of my business to ask. And it would be none of the county's business to require me to own a gun. Or a parakeet. Or anything else.

Last week, The World was the subject of another round of radio chatter, again presuming "where we're coming from" in the newspaper's editorial position. I heard Friday that a Rush Limbaugh wanna-be on some talk station up in Portland was raking The World over the coals for publishing every Saturday the running count of the lives of United States servicemen and women who have been lost to date in the process of the war and occupation in Iraq.

We were already aware that this weekly publication angers some people. We've received and published letters taking us to task for doing so. Not only for our weekly publication of the numbers, but for what the writers presume is "our position" on the war in Iraq.

Among the three members of The World's Editorial Board, we have respectful differences of opinion on the war in Iraq. But we were in complete agreement that the numbers of casualties in Iraq should be published every week. I can't speak for the others' reasons, but I can speak for mine.

Personally, I was behind the president's decision to go to war in Iraq. Saddam was a monster. But soon it became clear that this was going to be no Gulf War II. As a people we began to accept that the road to a peaceful, self-governed Iraq will likely be a long and tortuous one. Attacks on American forces increased and lives began to be lost.

The United States has no greater asset or investment it can make than the lives of its citizens. Young citizens by the thousands, most of them 100-percent willing, have answered the orders of their commander in chief and have and will put themselves in harm's way in Iraq. When one of them is killed, we as a people suffer a loss. There but for the grace of God go each of us.

I am a Vietnam veteran. The first time I visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., it struck me that only once the war was long over could Americans of all political perspectives come together to honor the almost holy gift represented by each American life lost there. A woman standing next to me at "the wall" brushed one of the panels with her hand, passing over several dozen names engraved there and said, softly "Š.so many; so many Š."

Lyndon Johnson said this in 1965: "I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men into battle. I have seen them in a thousand streets, of a hundred towns in every state in this Union, working and laughing and building and filled with hope and life. But as long as there are men who hate and destroy, we must have the courage to resist."

I imagine George W. Bush might say the same thing today.

We should not want to wait for an Iraq war memorial to be built to be conscious of our nation's investment in this mission and humbled at its results. Staying in the moment, remaining aware of the real costs and consequences of any decision; those things are all hard to do; hard for individuals, and hard for us as a nation.

One recent letter presuming our collective point of view called The World "traitors," guilty of "aiding and abetting (the enemy.)" I believe a far greater insult to the young lives given to this mission would be for a newspaper not to keep the public aware and conscious of their number, aware of the ultimate gift to our nation each one of them has given in the name of freedom.

Whether or not we as citizens are supportive of the president's determination to go to war with Iraq and now to see to conclusion the stabilization of the region, we should not choose to be ignorant of the numbers of American lives lost there. Each life lost in Iraq is a gift to every American.

(Greg Stevens is the publisher of The World.)