FORWARD OPERATING BASE VULCAN, Afghanistan – The journalists who went to war with American troops in Iraq in 2003 wrote stories and shot photographs that came home by satellite to families who had no other news of their loved ones.

Five years later, communications in the war theater are very different. It's 5 degrees below zero with a hard crust of snow outside. Inside these plywood barracks, however, every soldier's little partitioned "hooch" has an Ethernet cable. There's a cellphone tower a few hundred yards away.

The soldiers here call and e-mail home. Many have pages on Facebook.com and MySpace.com where they network with dozens of friends. Alabama National Guard Maj. Mike Tomberlin, a business reporter with The Birmingham News in civilian life, blogs for his other employer every day so readers in Alabama and across the country – across the world, even – can follow.

Thanks to technology, Afghanistan is not entirely a "forgotten war." The families, friends and even the civilian employers of reservists and National Guard members over here keep in touch and in the loop.

Lt. Col. Ben Walters, a reservist stationed at Camp Alamo in Kabul, works as a missile control engineer for Lockheed Martin in Grand Prairie when he's not with the Army.

"Afghanistan doesn't get the headlines Iraq does. We're not near as many folks as there are in Iraq," he said. "But I have no complaints about being forgotten. My friends at Lockheed Martin are very into it and supportive. I know the military families are keeping close tabs on us. And I think much of the public is, too."

What they get from the soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen may be a view through a soda straw. That's all frontline journalists could send back in the early days of this war and the war in Iraq.

But Internet search engines make it easy for anyone to follow along at Pentagon briefings and congressional hearings or to read the latest assessments from various think tanks.

Officers circulate books about these wars to read in the long winter nights. The few movies about them, such as Robert Redford's recent Lions for Lambs, get watched here on DVD.

If Afghanistan and even Iraq have slipped off the front page, however, it's because there are so few Americans actually in the fight. There are about 26,000 American military men and women here in Afghanistan, and 160,000 in Iraq. Lots of American civilians are working in both theaters as well, but it's not like Korea, Vietnam or even the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, when half a million or more servicemen and women were in the fight.

These are small wars. There is no war tax to pay for them, no war bonds to support them. President Bush will be remembered for exhorting Americans to do their part for the war effort by going shopping and sticking to business as usual.

That makes sense when the enemy is terrorism and the enemy's mission is to terrorize, but it looks sheepish when the few sacrifice so much for the many.

These may be small wars, but they are also long ones. World War II began with a savage shock on Dec. 7, 1941, that had its similarities to 9/11, but it was over in less than five years.

We are at six years and counting in Afghanistan. Some civilian contractors working here for the military are signing deals that run until 2018. Hardly anyone in uniform – American or Afghan – will hazard a guess as to how long the war will last.

What we forget, however, are the burdens our men and women in uniform bear as these years slip past.

Employers have to cinch their belts when an engineer – even a reporter – has to take a year out of work to wear a military uniform. When that becomes a second year, an employer has a hard time imagining that employee moving up in the company or even staying in touch with his work.

The Army and the Marines are losing good sergeants and mid-rank officers who leave after being here for two, three and even four tours of duty. And recruiters whose job is to replace the lost personnel say it is getting really tough to sway parents who have no appetite for sending their son or daughter to a war with no end in sight.