Bochco, for one, is not kidding himself about higher purpose: "Our agenda … is simply, and fundamentally, to create a very compelling entertainment," he says in the video press kit FX sent out with the series' first three episodes. Gerolmo is more expansive: "War is a natural subject of television. It's got all the drama of 'Law & Order' and it's got all the action of '24' and, for better or worse, it's got all the gore of 'CSI.' Why not write about war? … We can give you a powerful, visceral gut-wrenching experience that the news can't give you."

The soldiers all have nicknames — "Smoke," "Dim," "Doublewide," "Angel," and so on — and general attitudes, but, with a couple of exceptions, not yet much in the way of personalities. In general ways, they are reminiscent of the sort of characters who populated the war films of old: There is the "smart guy," a kind of slumming intellectual, whose intelligence is signaled, as it has been in a thousand other films, by the fact that he wears glasses; the All-American Kid; the urban cynic; the ethnic guy (here an Arab American from Detroit); the tough sergeant and his clueless superior. And there are the usual Hollywood touches that add excitement not necessarily in the service of truth — the power ballad that ends the episodes, the florid camera moves (though this is less eccentric than some Bochco productions), the smoke and lighting effects. When the stateside husband of a soldier goes to a family support group, all the women are good-looking, as if they'd just stepped over from "Desperate Housewives." One gets a whiff of "Apocalypse Now" here, a taste of spaghetti westerns there.

Enter Taint Ment.