So apparently, we’re losing the war.

At least, that’s what you’d think to judge from the questions being asked in recent news briefings. In the face of setbacks and casualties, more than one reporter has suggested that American war planners somehow botched the job.

And, though support for the war is holding steady, the public also seems a little dubious.

Indeed, a bartender in Ohio told the New York Times she has become dispirited at the way the war seems to grind endlessly on. “I thought we would get in there – boom, boom, boom – and get out. But it’s feeling as though things are a little out of our government’s control right now.”

One businessman used the word “quagmire.”

It seems necessary to point out at this juncture that the war has been under way for a little more than two weeks.

Of course, it feels a lot longer. That is, I suspect, an unavoidable side effect of the wall-to-wall coverage the fighting has received.

It’s instructive to remember that American involvement in the Second World War dragged on for four bloody, miserable years and the only information most folks at home received about the fighting came in censored newsreels and newspaper reports. Perhaps they were luckier in some respects.

We are, by contrast, immersed in the war. Sometimes, it seems there may be more reporters on the battlefield than Iraqis. Representatives of the Fourth Estate are “embedded” with frontline units, bringing us news from the foxhole, from the carrier, from the convoy, from the soldiers under fire, from the field, from the war.

If Vietnam was the first “living room war” because of the way it brought body bags and firefights into our homes, this is the first real-time war, the first one that we see unfold as it happens. My wife, for goodness’ sake, saw a wounded soldier call home to reassure his folks “as the injury was being treated!”

Technological innovations have made it possible for media to bring the war closer, to give it an immediacy that was never previously possible. To judge from the early results, this is both a blessing and a blight.

The good news is that we see more than we ever did before.

The bad news is that we see more than we ever did before.

Consider the words of Nancy Chamberlain, who lost her son in a helicopter crash two weeks ago. She told NBC News, “I truly admire what all of the network news and all the new technology is doing today to bring it into our homes, but for the mothers and the wives who are out there watching, it is murder. It’s … it’s heartbreak. We can’t leave the television. Every tank, every helicopter, “Is that my son?’ And I just need you to be aware that technology is – it’s great, but there are moms, there are dads, there are wives out there that are suffering because of this.”

This is not, in other words, a television show. It is war.

And the fact is, many of us have no idea what that means. Our perceptions were shaped by the first Gulf War which was, in effect, a video game, a whiz-bang display of American technological prowess that was quick and, with all due acknowledgement of the 148 Americans who died in the fighting, seemed relatively painless.

That experience has apparently encouraged some of us to forget what war is. But there’s a reason William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is all hell.”

Even taking Nancy Chamberlain’s concerns into account, it’s probably a good thing media are showing us what Sherman meant. Making us tired of it already, sick at heart already. Maybe it’s good that a week can feel like a year.

Maybe that will encourage us to henceforth treat this ugly business with the soberness it deserves. Because what’s amazing is not that this war is messy, awful and terrifying, but that any of us ever thought it could be anything but.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is: [email protected].