BAGHDAD, Oct 13 (AFP) - The soldier is willing to fight to the death in Baghdad's mean streets, but when he hears two words -- John Kerry -- he cringes.
Staunchly conservative, the military is mainly in the camp of US President George W. Bush, but discord has emerged.
On grimy bases across central Iraq, where the troops are enmeshed in fighting a bloody insurgency, the two candidates elicit visceral reactions from the gut.
The young man in Baghdad who patrols the Shiite slum of Sadr City loves the army. He has served since 1999, but the specter of a liberal from Massachusetts sends more chills down his spine than fighting radical cleric Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army. Democrats gut the military, he claims.
He says he'd rather quit the service than serve under Kerry.
Bush, in his mind, is a great president, who has boosted his pay, while Democrats cut salaries. He swears he'll walk if Kerry wins the election.
In Samarra, as US troops battled insurgents for the city, three soldiers sat around, sipping coffee and watching videos. For them, the world was divided between those who liked Bush and then the liberals.
The liberals are everywhere, they said. The television network CBS stands for the Clinton Broadcasting Service and CNN is the Clinton News Network.
As their fellow soldiers battled in Samarra, the three said Bush had made America safer because they had brought all the terrorists to Iraq.
"Now we don't have to invade any other countries because the terrorists are all coming here," one of them said.
While not many soldiers are watching the presidential debates -- they happen too late at night -- troops are generally better informed than they have ever been in the past. One soldier, who leans toward the Kerry camp, said the access to news on the Internet was keeping people up to date on the issues.
A soldier in Samarra said his captain was an ardent Kerry fan and regaled them regularly with anecdotes from the Michael Moore film "9/11" on the failings of the Bush presidency.
Another person expressed amazement at the gulf in the military over this election.
"There's a lot of division. You'd be surprised," he said.
Amid the decorum of the military, some of the most incisive political debate transpires by the toilet.
On an airbase in western Iraq, Kerry was set to rout Bush in the November 2 elections after the Massachusetts senator picked up 73 votes to 58 on the bathroom wall.
However, the vote has come in for criticism amid suspicions Kerry supporters voted more than once due to the identical hashmarks on his side of the column inside the foul, humid brown and green plastic stalls, known as "Port-a-Johns".
The bathroom wall vents a surprising amount of anger over Bush.
Much of the bile is dedicated to denigrating Bush's home state of Texas, the land of cowboys and toughness that has come to define his wartime presidency.
One diatribe says: "The only thing Bush cares about is a good fight to make a name for himself. If you think he really cares about us you're out of your ... mind. If you really believe 9/11 is related to Iraq then you're just as delusional as the hippie that thinks there will ever be world peace.
"You're not fighting for America. You're fighting for ... politics. End of story Cinderella."
With many voters confused about who to choose, a latrine wall write-in campaign offered some alternatives.
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