The young, troubled student dropped in and out of American colleges, drifting between California and Colorado. He had a drug habit, and was arrested for selling them. Through his horrified family's intervention he was spared prison, and went back to dropping in and out of universities. He traveled. He did more drugs. He had an American girlfriend he'd left behind, and he called her from time to time.

Back at home, the student waited in the room, talking with some others, as his uncle entered. Seeing his student nephew, his uncle moved forward to greet him. But instead of a handshake or embrace, the student suddenly pulled out a gun, and shot his uncle three times in the face, wounding him fatally.

True, American school campuses are becoming increasingly violent places. But we'd not yet considered them war zones.

So last week, when America's flags flew at half-staff across the nation, some of us wondered who else besides the 32 Virginia Tech massacre victims had died. Although President George W. Bush himself authorized lowering the flags, the flag at half-staff is a patriotic mourning symbol usually reserved for honoring deceased government dignitaries and war heroes. The 32 dead Virginia Tech students and their teachers are neither.

Or are they?

It took the VT shooter a little more than 10 minutes to massacre thirty of his 32 victims. That sounds a lot like war to me.

That sounds like the daily body count in Baghdad - on a "good" day.

Early evidence indicates the VT killer trained carefully for his military-style mission in every way - physically, mentally, and of course, he obtained some serious weapons. Why?

Since the 9/11 atrocities, Republicans have consolidated power by insisting we are a nation at war - not just with Iraq, but with Afghanistan - and Iran, Syria, and even Pakistan and, incredibly, Venezuela had better watch themselves.

We fight, President George W. Bush frequently proclaims, "over there" so that "they" don't come "over here." But at the same time, Bush tells us, we Americans are on an eternal "war" alert even at home, necessitating secret courts, coercion supposedly falling somewhat short of actual torture, extraordinary police measures violating our constitutional guarantees to free speech and privacy, and always, always, we are told, constant vigilance. If we are not prepared, Muslim fanatics will slam more jets into our downtowns, and Mexican hoards will steal across our borders. We must be always armed and ready to fight to the death.

And so we are.

What happens on our school campuses today has become little more than a reflection of what our government does abroad.

Think back to 1966, shortly after the Cold War heated up. America's top-secret Vietnamese assassination program, Operation Phoenix, had indiscriminately killed and wounded thousands in an unofficial war. That same year Charles Whitman, a blond-haired, blue-eyed "All American" former US Marine and Texas University student murdered his sleeping wife and mother, then terrorized a campus by shooting 17 people to death and injuring 31 others.

Ever since we almost destroyed half our nation with our own murderous civil war, our nation's body count right here at home has steadily escalated, with nary a real foreign terrorist in sight. Videos made by the Columbine High School teenagers who killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others claimed inspiration from the US government's assault on the Texas Branch Davidians and the Oklahoma City bombing, believed to be a populist revenge response to the Davidians' slaughter.

The Columbine killers took less than 15 minutes to assault most of their victims with a brutal precision eerily reminiscent of the US troops' 1968 My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians. Does that sound like war?

President Bush insists we can "still win the war in Iraq." He and the Republicans seeking to follow in his stead claim they are creating an Iraqi society that looks just like America's. Or is it that we are creating a society in America that looks just like Iraq's?

Meanwhile, our flags are flying high again today.

Mission accomplished.