By Tom Plate

They laugh at their own macho Marines — for being so ridiculously macho. The sentiment seems to be, isn't one major war enough work for the year?

Is this a Puff-the-Magic-Dragon campus peacenik sit-in at the University of Hawai'i? No, it's the muted-drums-of-war scene here at red-blooded military base Camp Smith, perched 600 feet above Pearl Harbor, the headquarters for the commander of the Pacific forces. Some of our military's best and brightest are stationed here. A good thing, too: For if President Bush orders action against North Korea, these men and women would get the job.

Some people paint our military men and women with a simplistic ideological brush, depicting them as either brain-dead super-patriots (by the right) or as utterly vicious militarists (by the left).

They're neither. "The thing to understand about the military mentality," explains a top military operations officer, "is that they're pragmatists. Give them a job, they figure out how to do it, and then they do it." To them, Iraq was just a "job."

The next job, of course, might well be North Korea. And the Tommy Franks of that operation could be Tom Fargo. He is the four-star admiral and former submarine commander who runs this place. Even so, many of Fargo's people are rooting for negotiations to work in Korea as much as any sleepless South Korean in range of North Korean mortars and missiles. From the standpoint of someone who may be ordered to do the job, North Korea is to Iraq as Godzilla is to a fat carp goldfish swimming in a hotel pond.

Don't confuse the residents of Camp Smith — who hail from such places as Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri — with those Americans who have no interest in world affairs. Fargo's wife — a Midwest version of Lucille Ball who's so funny she could probably get the North Koreans to laugh themselves to death — comes from Florida.

''What do you make of the new South Korean president?'' asked Sarah Fargo. She and everyone else here ask the question because tomorrow's crucial meeting between Roh Moo Hyun, the newly elected head of South Korea, and Bush could well determine whether her husband and his Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines will go to war.

Don't worry, she was told. Roh, 56, is solid and sensible — no anti-American radical or Korean warmonger. The boss' wife was visibly relieved. Relatively few Americans know it, but about two years ago, a similar Seoul-Washington summit in the White House ended in diplomatic disaster. Bush, then freshly in office, and Korean President Kim Dae Jung, then about 76, did not hit it off, to put it mildly. The result was renewed tension on the peninsula, an upsurge in defiance and nuclear activity from the North and a monstrous threat to peace.

Better chemistry can be expected between the now more seasoned Bush and the more contemporary Roh. Indeed, they owe it to the world to seal the Seoul-Washington relationship into an alliance for peace. Open warfare on the Korean peninsula would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Koreans — and who knows how many of the nearly 40,000 U.S. military personnel already stationed there?

A top commander at Pearl was asked if he thought war was inevitable. He is well-versed in the psychotic ways of the North Koreans, the extreme emotions of the South Koreans and the constant need of domestic arms manufacturers to satiate greedy stockholders. "It's negotiable, absolutely," he said. "But of course we're ready for the job if reason fails."

Nicely put. For wars are the enemy of all reason. They shorten lives, create single moms and deprive heartland cities of vibrant young people. Such truths are overwhelming at a place like this. There's no lack of patriotism here, to be sure; but there's also no lack of sanity. As they joke, America's war quota ought to be sated for the time being. Let's now give peace a chance.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.