Boston ? When this war is over, I will remember a soldier from Rochester, N.Y., standing at a new playground built by a contingent of American soldiers in Umm Qasr. The man, carrying a picture of his 2-year-old taped inside his helmet, watched the Iraqi kids playing and said, “It kills me to see a little kid without shoes. It kills me.”

This was the same day a coalition tank turned its guns on a Baghdad hotel full of journalists, killing two. The same day a B-1’s bombs struck a residential neighborhood in hopes of busting Saddam’s bunker.

War often strikes these jarring notes. But this one has more than any other in my memory. The war in Iraq is cast, after all, as destruction for liberation. The mission, as the government defines it, is to destroy the enemy and befriend the people.

This is the mission we have dropped into the laps of the military. Soldiers are now expected to be both efficient warriors and humanitarian aid workers. They march a fine line between the use and abuse of power. They are expected to kill, and yet to be “killed” by the sight of kids without shoes.

My sense of how emotionally complex this task is has colored my view of the war, and also of the military scandal that has occupied so much home-front attention. Over the past months, as we went to war in Iraq, a sexual abuse scandal unfolded at the Air Force Academy that is only now bringing a new leadership team to that campus.

For the most part, the alleged rape and assault of dozens, perhaps hundreds of cadets over the years has been cast in civilian terms as a tale of predatory men and victimized women. But it may be more important to think of it as a crisis in the culture that goes to the heart of the modern military mission: the need to train leaders in the tricky, heady, dangerous, controlled exercise of power.

We know something about the women who were chosen for the Air Force Academy from the top of their high school classes. Most of them were, as one rape victim described herself, “excited about proving myself as a woman in a man’s world.” If these young female cadets — 16 percent of the student body — were nontraditional women, we know from studies that the other 84 percent tended to be more traditional than other men their age.

The world they cohabited is one where the welcoming sign read, “Bring Me Men.” This is also a world designed to teach the next generation of military leaders how to command and control others. To give and take orders.

In the culture at Colorado Springs, upper classmen command and freshmen obey. “If they say jump, you say how high,” says one woman who became a victim. But in the hierarchy of sex and rank, something went terribly awry. Most of the sexual assaults, the rapes, were committed by male upperclassmen against female freshman or what are called “four degrees.” One woman, outranked, followed orders and says she walked down a path to the site of her own rape.

In a pattern that defines the abuse of power, sexual assault became a form of hazing that strong young women were supposed to “take.” Christine Hansen, director of the Miles Foundation, a military victim support group, says assault became, “a rite of passage.” One upperclass female cadet is said to have told a new cadet, “if you want a chance to stay here, if you want to graduate, you don’t tell. You just deal with it.”

Many of the strong young women who came to Colorado Springs to be empowered ended up feeling powerless. Some “took” it. Some complained to an administration which as often as not turned on them. More than one woman was given a “hit” or infraction for “sexual activity” after reporting rape. Not one of the accused rapists was convicted. Nearly all graduated into leadership.

It’s bad enough that our own cadets were treated like our worst fantasies of female POWs. But what is equally disastrous was the message about power and control imparted to this elite corps.

Today the sign — Bring Me Men — is down. There is an Agenda for Change, including the dubious clustering of women’s rooms together. But the issue is not segregation; it’s the integration of values.

Humanitarian warfare may be an oxymoron. But in Iraq, where soldiers bomb buildings and build playgrounds, Americans are expected to make war on enemies and friends of the people. It’s a delicate dance of restrained power, controlled violence. They are expected to learn the difference between the use and the abuse of power. That military lesson still begins at home.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.