NOW we know: We're in this forever.

According to the AP, the Army has begun letting husbands and wives live and sleep together in Iraq. Instead of returning to single-sex barracks at night, married couples are allowed to live in small trailers with "two pushed-together single beds," according to Staff Sgt. Marvin Frazier as quoted in the article.

This isn't exactly a report of canopy beds with his-and-hers monogrammed towels, but it does seem to be a concession to the probable continuation of the war; setting up house in a foreign country usually means you're going to be there for awhile. And it's been going on since May 2006, meaning that the Army has known for awhile that victory was not one or two skirmishes away.

The reason for the change is morale. Tours of duty running 12 and 15 months, and soldiers being re-enlisted and redeployed without signing on any "I'm happy to extend" dotted lines, mean that marriages are suffering, even marriages between two people in the military who have been assigned to the same location. The concession is unprecedented, partly (as the article points out) because the Gulf War was too short to necessitate major policy changes such as this one, and partly (I would guess) because women have only recently been sent into war zones as active military personnel.

This represents, I think, a further shift in Army mentality -- marked by their ads, in recent years, celebrating the individual as "an Army of One" and emphasizing the personal (often financial) benefits of joining up -- which used to be a "break 'em down and build 'em up again as good, unquestioning, loyal soldiers" sort of organization. This seems to be a philosophical break with their past -- with their entire raison d'etre, in fact.

The other major question this raises, at least in my mind, is "Trailers? Where'd they get those?" (Hurricane Katrina aftermath?)

And where are they keeping them? I understand that much of Iraq is desert, which seems like free space just waiting to be trailered, but aren't the troops stationed mainly near populated areas? Doesn't the profusion of trailers present some sort of tactical liability? Wouldn't the trailers increase the area requiring guard? There are probably more places to hide around and under small trailers than barracks, right? At what point do they become indefensible?

But these issues are only relevant in the case of a glut of trailers; if we're talking two or three per base, they're hardly worth mentioning.

So how many soldiers are taking advantage of the policy?

The Army, bizarrely, claims not to know how many married couples are living together; it says it "doesn't keep track."

Doesn't keep track at all of how many trailers it's required to defend? The Army doesn't have statistics on this? Seriously?

This indicates either that the Army is lying and expects us not to notice -- taking its cues from the president, one can only imagine -- or else that the situation within the military is much, much worse than even the most pessimistic of us thought.

At least some of the soldiers, who I imagine hanging curtains in trailer windows and adopting pets over the next few years, will likely be able to translate between the second generation of American military and the people of the land we occupy. That's something.