Conservative Democrat’s challenge to war strategy puts two old pros on opposing sides.

The trouble with being an itinerant newspaper editor is that, after 30 years, your head is like a portable Rolodex of names, faces and issues – useless information, all taking up valuable storage space inside the cranial computer.

But, occasionally, it does allow me to make strange connections that sometimes span decades and even thousands of miles of territory.

I then feel compelled to inflict these mildly amusing anecdotes on the unfortunate people at hand, most often my fellow editors here in the Sun Journal newsroom.

But this one I’ll share with you.

I awoke Friday morning with the realization that I may be the only journalist in the country to have covered the political birth of two now well-known political figures: John Murtha and Dick Cheney.

Both figured prominently in the news last week, sparing heatedly over the direction of the war in Iraq.

I was the editor of a college newspaper in Johnstown, Pa., in 1974 when John Murtha first ran for Congress.

Johnstown is famous for the flood of 1889, which occurred when a dam built to form a sporting lake for coal and steel barons of nearby Pittsburgh, broke. The working-class mill city was swept down the Conemaugh River, killing 2,209 unfortunate inhabitants.

The city’s steel and manufacturing workers have been understandably suspect of the rich and powerful ever since.

Like most college students at the time, I was fed up with the war in Vietnam and the Nixon administration.

John Murtha struck me as a gung-ho jarhead – a Marine who actually volunteered to go to Vietnam when most white guys with a college degree were running in the other direction.

After returning, he decided to run for Congress. After writing about him and hearing him speak, I was sure we would never agree on anything.

He was, however, deftly able to straddle an important line in the largely rural 12th District, in favor of government benefits, but also in favor of God, guns and the military.

As a conservative Democrat, he won the election, and he’s been winning re-election now for 30 years.

Three years later after Murtha entered Congress, I was the editor of a twice-weekly paper in a dusty ranch-and-farm town in southeastern Wyoming.

Dick Cheney suddenly appeared running for Congress.

He had been born in Nebraska, so he was really a despised Cornhusker at heart, but he had grown up in Casper, Wyo., and attended the University of Wyoming.

He wisely left the oil refineries of Casper for the corridors of power in Washington, and he quickly rose through the Ford administration, eventually serving as an assistant to the president and chief of staff.

Wyoming has a single congressional seat, and it had been warmed for years by Teno Roncalio, an old-style political pro. When Dick Cheney popped up in 1977, he seemed, by comparison, like a fresh face on the hot and dusty high plains.

The political ritual in Wyoming is a lot like Maine. Candidates are expected to travel the state, give speeches and set aside a few minutes to meet with every hayseed publisher and editor.

My publisher, who hailed from the actual Sundance, Wyo., made famous by Newman and Redford, described himself as a monetary conservative and a social liberal, which always puzzled me. Basically, he was equally in favor of lower taxes and throwing a good party.

Cheney met with us. He seemed learned, traveled and well-spoken, and I liked him. I was sure the publisher would, too.

Dead wrong. He despised Cheney, calling him a “carbetbagger” who left the state and came back looking for a job in Washington just so he could leave again. Cheney, he said, had the handshake of a “snake.”

So, we endorsed somebody else, and Cheney won without our help.

It is odd now, after all these years, to see two guys, who probably spent 30 years agreeing with each other, slugging it out over Iraq. Cheney Thursday called Murtha and others “cut-and-run” Democrats.

He may be poking the wrong bear.

Murtha is a decorated combat veteran, a member of the Appropriations Committee and ranking member and former chair of the Subcommittee on Defense. He’s a force to be reckoned with.

On Thursday, he angrily dismissed Cheney, as, essentially, a despicable draft dodger with no military service or experience.

It shows, I think, the growing fissure in America that is developing over the war in Iraq. But Murtha’s news conference was significant.

He doesn’t seek the limelight, but his roots in the U.S. military establishment go back more than 40 years. He’s the guy who gives them their money.

When Murtha speaks, you can believe he is speaking on behalf of generals and colonels who cannot speak on the record for themselves, as well as a fair number of vets and even soldiers in uniform.

That’s why his news conference was front-page, prime-time news across the U.S. Murtha’s statement, that Iraq is “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion,” likely reflects the thinking of the people he knows best in the U.S. military.

And that is a very bad sign.