Many of us are displaying yellow ribbons and bumper stickers saying "Support our troops." But what does this mean? What are we actually doing to support our troops?

Here are some of the things we might do.

We could demand that the government provide decent equipment, pay and benefits for those fighting our war. We could visit the many wounded in hospitals.

We could use less gasoline by driving smaller vehicles and trying to keep our work and home close, making us less dependent on Middle East oil.

We should prod the government to be more actively involved in helping find a fair solution to the Israel-Palestinian impasse, one of the leading causes - according to scholars of the region and every Arab country (including our supposed friend, Saudi Arabia) - of the intense hatred of the West that provoked the 9/11 attack.

We should call on Congress to institute a draft so that the burden of fighting this war is shared equally by all Americans and our military is not stretched so thin. In fact, if we are young, we could enlist and help our fellow Americans straighten out the situation in Iraq so the overworked troops, many returning to Iraq for a second tour of duty, could come home.

We should place responsibility for the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison on the upper echelons of the war planners such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted on sending a super-lean military to Iraq, and President Bush, who announced the suspension of Geneva Convention rules for the Guantanamo prisoners, thus setting the tone for this abuse. We should not let young, low-level service people and inexperienced National Guard personnel take the blame.

We can work for peace and bring the troops home, and not let them be thrown into poverty and despair like many of the Vietnam vets. Let's be as brave as the troops and look into the faces of people with arms blown off and legs missing and the deep scars of having seen comrades die and children burned and crippled, and try to think through the ways of preventing youngsters from having to go through these horrors ever again.

Dorothy Weil is a longtime Cincinnati artist and writer, and the grandmother of four girls she says she hopes will never have to go to war.

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