Quotes of the Day
The patrol has lasted an hour, the three humvees slashing and darting through hairpin turns and blind alleyways, looking for attackers. It's 9 o'clock on a clear, mild December night in Adhamiya, one of Baghdad's oldest neighborhoods and these days among the most restive. The soldiers are out to draw fire. They cruise the streets and make themselves targets in order to flush insurgents into the open.
But they encounter nothing. So now the convoy is heading back to base, a mile away. The platoon rolls into Adhamiya's main marketplace. The atmosphere is festive. Patrons of the teahouses and restaurants overflow onto the one-lane street. Traffic is running in both directions, and the convoy slows to a crawl. Just across Imam Street, the district's main thoroughfare, sits the Abu Hanifa mosque, where Saddam Hussein was last seen in public before his arrest by U.S. forces. A large crowd of Iraqis mills outside it. Private First Class Jim Beverly, 19, and Private Orion Jenks, 22, stand in the bed of the convoy's second vehicle, a roofless high-back humvee, which resembles a large pickup truck and is generally used to transport troops. Also riding in the back are two TIME journalists. As the convoy begins moving again, Jenks and Beverly chat casually and laugh. Sergeant Ronald Buxton, who is riding shotgun in the cab of the high-back, whips around. "I don't care if you joke or if you smoke," he tells the privates, "but make sure you watch our back."
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The vehicles cross Imam Street and move toward the mosque. TIME senior correspondent Michael Weisskopf glances up at the mosque's clock tower, damaged by U.S. tank shells during a fierce battle in April. As he does, he hears a clunk and sees that an oval-shaped object has landed on the seat beside him. For a split second he thinks it's a rock, then he realizes it isn't. He reaches to throw it out. Suddenly there is a flash. The object explodes in Weisskopf's hand.
Shrapnel ricochets off the walls of the humvee, hitting Beverly, Jenks and TIME photographer James Nachtwey. Smoke rises from the high-back. Blood pours from Weisskopf's right arm; when he holds it up, he realizes the grenade has blown off his hand. Specialist Billie Grimes, a medic attached to the platoon, sprints out of the third humvee and hoists herself onto the high-back. She uses a Velcro strap tied to her pant leg as a tourniquet to stop Weisskopf's bleeding and applies a field dressing to the wound while loudly asking the three other passengers if they are injured. Nachtwey, who has taken shrapnel in his left arm, abdomen and both legs, briefly snaps pictures of Grimes treating Weisskopf before losing consciousness. For several seconds Jenks slumps motionless, stunned, but then instinctively slides his gun's safety to semiautomatic, preparing to return fire. Only later does he learn that shrapnel has fractured his leg.
The convoy halts in front of the mosque. Buxton turns around. "Are there any casualties?" he asks. "Yes! Yes!" replies Beverly. Shrapnel has hit him in the right hand and right knee. Two of his front teeth have been knocked out, and his tongue is lacerated. "Let's go!" he says. "Let's go!" The humvees peel out and roar for home.
This is not the war this army unit — officially known as the Survey Platoon, Headquarters Battery, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment of the 1st Armored Division — was trained to fight. On a traditional battlefield, field-artillery survey units stay behind the front lines and use gyroscopic devices to measure the distance to enemy positions so the Army's big guns can hit their targets. That was the job this platoon, based in Giessen, Germany, pictured for itself when it received deployment orders in March, before the start of the war with Iraq. The group, now nicknamed the "Tomb Raiders," was told to prepare for combat in the event of a prolonged siege of Baghdad. That battle never came. The platoon reached the capital in late May, nearly a month after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But the demands of the occupation of Iraq forced the Tomb Raiders to assume the duties of infantrymen — patrolling streets, conducting raids, hunting insurgents and imposing order in one of the most volatile neighborhoods of Baghdad. In that respect, the platoon embodies the ways in which the 120,000 American men and women in arms serving in Iraq have had to adapt to the evolving challenges of making the country secure.
Drawn from disparate backgrounds, the platoon's members provide a portrait of the military's diversity as well as insight into the motivations — and fears — of America's fighting forces. Its soldiers include Sergeant Marquette Whiteside, 24, an African-American gunner who pines for his 6year-old daughter; Specialist Sky Schermerhorn, 29, an idealist now gnawed by doubt about what he is fighting for; and Buxton, 32, a brainy Gulf War I veteran who since being deployed has taught himself Arabic and missed the birth of a son. Specialist Bernard Talimeliyor, 24, a native of the U.S. protectorate of Yap, Micronesia, was so moved by the events of 9/11 that he decided to enlist, even though he had never seen mainland U.S. Two noncommissioned officers, Staff Sergeant Abe Winston, 42, and Sergeant David Kamont, 34, serve as mentors to the platoon's three youngest G.I.s, Private Lequine Arnold, 20, an African American from Goldsboro, N.C.; Beverly, an amateur artist from Akron, Ohio; and Jenks, who joined the platoon in late November. Grimes, 26, the only female soldier attached to the unit, maintains a steely grit around the guys but cries on the phone to her father when she talks about what she has witnessed in Iraq. Sergeant Jose Cesar Aparicio, 31, a reservist, heads a psychological-operations team attached to the platoon. The leader of the Tomb Raiders, First Lieutenant Brady Van Engelen, 24, took over command two months ago and is still fighting for his soldiers' respect.
The platoon has served in Iraq for seven months and expects to stay for five more. In three weeks with the Tomb Raiders, over the course of 30 patrols with the unit and sister platoons, TIME journalists witnessed the tedium and the terror, the sacrifice and resolve that epitomize the lives of G.I.s across Iraq. Like thousands of Americans in this war, the Tomb Raiders have absorbed losses that have changed their lives forever. Theirs is the story of what the Army looks like today and what this war has become.
--Danger in the Shadows
NOV. 25: Marquette Whiteside is standing up in the gunner's hatch, swinging his machine gun in the direction of the Iraqis who stop to watch as the Americans drive by. Poised atop the armored humvee, he looks almost carefree, a broad smile fixed to his face as he sings to himself and tosses children candy on this gray afternoon. But that buoyancy conceals vigilance. As a gunner, he has the job of scanning the roads and rooftops for ambushers. "I smile at everyone," he says, "but I'm constantly aware of my surroundings."
The two-vehicle convoy curls past the Adhamiya police station and heads north along the Tigris River, which bounds the neighborhood on two sides. Of the 88 sectors in Baghdad, Adhamiya is rated by the U.S. command among the six most dangerous for coalition forces. The 1.2sq.-mi. area is home to 400,000 people, most of them Sunni Muslims. The anti-American graffiti that blankets the walls of neighborhood buildings attests to the strong resistance to the U.S. presence here. Spray-painted in Arabic and English, it reads, DOWN USA. LONG LIVE SADDAM. YES TO MARTYRDOM FOR THE SAKE OF IRAQ. "The majority of people seem all right," Whiteside says. "But it's like racism. Some people actually, truly hate us, and they're going to teach their kids the same thing."
Whiteside learned to shoot a gun as a teenager, rabbit hunting in Pine Bluff, Ark., during occasional visits by his father, a Navy veteran. Whiteside joined the Army in February 2001 after serving 45 days in jail because of unpaid traffic tickets. "It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," he says. "I was locked up and couldn't do anything for my daughter. God opened my eyes and made me realize I wasn't doing anything with my life. In the military, I can't quit."
Though Whiteside says he thrives on the rush of being the eyes of the platoon, he frets about the threats he can't see. When the Tomb Raiders roll out for a night patrol six hours later, Whiteside is tenser than before, gripping his gun tightly as the platoon careers through dark, empty alleys running with sewage. "I hate it when the lights go out," he says, staring down a street that is barely the width of a humvee. "You don't know what's going to happen. If they sat down and planned it, they could block this road and just light us up."
The platoon stops on a largely deserted road along the river and sets up a checkpoint. After fruitlessly searching a dozen cars for weapons, the Tomb Raiders head home. Whiteside unloads his gear and lays his machine gun next to his cot, which sits below a gallery of pictures of half-clad women clipped from magazines. "It's like Groundhog Day," he says. "It's the same thing every day. You just don't know whether you're going to live or die."
--A Hooch Called Home
NOV. 26: The toilet is driving Sky Schermerhorn crazy. It's bad enough that the bathroom at the base is shared by 10 G.I.s with varying standards of hygiene plus half a dozen Iraqis assigned to train with the platoon. What gets Schermerhorn is that no one else seems to mind that every 15 minutes the toilet stops up or floods, and when it does, no one else tends to it. Schermerhorn is the platoon's most garrulous soldier, a pudgy specialist with downcast eyes who joined the Army at 27 out of a desire to "protect freedom and democracy." Inside the two-story house where the Tomb Raiders live, Schermerhorn scrutinizes the habits of the other soldiers, looking for signs of lassitude. Today he decides to send a message about the toilet. YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT LIVE HERE, he scrawls on the bathroom's tile wall. THE F___ING TOILET IS BROKEN. "If a guy's unable to flush a toilet correctly," Schermerhorn says, "what is he going to miss when we're out there?"
As Schermerhorn speaks, Kamont and Winston recline on the secondhand couches that adorn the platoon's common area. They stare at a television hooked up to a portable DVD player that serves up a steady stream of war movies, sci fi, horror and porn. In front of the TV is a coffee table littered with picked-over ready-to-eat meals, Tootsie Rolls and water bottles filled with tobacco juice. Heat comes from three portable radiators. The platoon's house — the hooch, as the G.I.s call it — lies within the perimeter of the Azimiya palace compound, built by Saddam in the mid-1990s for his oldest son Uday. The portion of the palace not destroyed by U.S. missiles now functions as the 2nd Battalion's Tactical Operations Center. During the summer, the troops filled the swimming pool and built a sand volleyball court on the grounds. Lieut. Colonel William Rabena, the battalion's stout commanding officer, sleeps in an egg-shaped room dubbed the Love Shack, on a circular canopied bed.
After inspecting the bathroom, Schermerhorn writes his name on a tile wall in the common area that serves as a reservation sheet for the platoon's single Internet terminal. Most members of the platoon communicate daily with family members through email. The soldiers recently bought a webcam and connected it to the house laptop. The Tomb Raiders' hooch can be eerily antisocial, largely because today's G.I. can spend so much time in front of TV and computer screens. Schermerhorn spends the next hour instant messaging his girlfriend of three months, Nicole, a German he met while based in Giessen. The two speak three times a week on a satellite phone, and Schermerhorn tape-records 90-minute soliloquies for her when he is on guard duty. But he doesn't tell her everything. "I have to be cautious to preserve her sanity," he says. "If she knew what we did every day, she couldn't sleep at night."
--Family That Raids Together
NOV. 27: The platoon lives in two worlds — one beyond the steel coils that drape the compound, where the soldiers rely on one another to survive, and one "inside the wire," where they struggle to find space of their own. Today, to fill up the downtime between patrols, Beverly surfs the Internet for information on eArmyU, the military's online college program. Beverly describes himself as "the opposite of the typical Army recruit." He loves the soft rock of Sting and devours fantasy novels in his free time. When he joined the Army in 2002, two days after his 18th birthday, he wasn't looking for combat. "I asked the Army recruiter what he could do for me in terms of college. He said it would be free," he says. "But I didn't know I'd be paying for it in this way." Beverly's fresh-faced innocence makes him the target of barracks humor. "It's like a fraternity," he says, looking up at the writing on the hooch's walls, which feature unflattering allusions to his manhood. "If they don't screw with you, they don't like you," he says.
Actually, the soldiers rarely admit to any deep kinship. The ties that bind any platoon are fashioned by circumstance. "Out here, I'd take a bullet for any one of these guys," says Schermerhorn. "But there are probably three people here I'd give a s___ about keeping in touch with when I get home." Says Whiteside: "We get on each other's nerves because we see each other every day. But being stuck with someone 24/7, all there is to do is talk. Basically, it's like one big dysfunctional family."
Outside the wire, the dysfunction ends. On duty, "it's like butter, we're so smooth," says Whiteside. Everyone attributes the unit's cohesion to the man who became their platoon leader shortly after they arrived in Baghdad, Second Lieutenant Benjamin Colgan, 30. He was originally attached to the Tomb Raiders' battalion as a chemical and biological officer, responsible for managing preparations for unconventional attacks. But that position is a desk job, and Colgan, a 12-year veteran of the special forces, longed to be on the streets. "Use my skills," he told Rabena. At the time, the Tomb Raiders were leaderless, their original commander having remained in Germany for the birth of his first child, so Colgan got the job.
To break the ice with his new charges, Colgan made a point of hanging out in the platoon's common room — a rare occurrence in military culture, where social separation of officers from their soldiers is still the norm — and asked not to be addressed as sir. Says Talimeliyor: "When we first met, I thought, Man, this L.T., he talks a lot. I thought he was going to be annoying." A former enlisted man, Colgan could relate to the soldiers in his command. "He knew how to talk to the enlisted guys like normal people," says Whiteside.
Colgan was determined to transform the platoon into a combat unit that could handle street patrols and raids on enemy safe houses, neither of which the Tomb Raiders had ever conducted. And so the hooch became a training center. Every afternoon the platoon practiced close-quarters combat and house-clearing techniques in the basement. Colgan rearranged the furniture to simulate different settings and ordered three $300 battering rams for kicking in doors. "Get in loud, fast and violent," he told them, while insisting that they treat those they found inside with respect. "They're young, they're new," Colgan wrote of the platoon in an email to his sister Liz. "But they're doing good."
It took just three raids, Whiteside says, for the team to gel. Over the next three months, the platoon conducted more than 40 raids on houses of suspected insurgents and former members of Saddam's regime in Adhamiya. In July, Colgan led the platoon on midnight searches of a Muslim cemetery next to the Abu Hanifa mosque, where insurgents were believed to be storing weapons. Colgan instructed the soldiers to bang the lid of each crypt; if it sounded hollow, the troops hoisted the 250-lb. granite slab and looked inside. On its second graveyard hunt, on July 4, the platoon netted a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher and 31 RPGs. A later search turned up a stash of the explosive C4. Afterward, the platoon nicknamed itself the Tomb Raiders.
Colgan's most valuable asset was his skill at gathering intelligence. "He was better and quicker than anyone else," says Lieutenant Lucien Ilardi, leader of one of the two other platoons in the Tomb Raiders' battery. Platoon leaders usually act on intelligence passed down from their commanders or from special-ops units, but Colgan generated tips himself. He cultivated informants on the streets and dined in the houses of new Iraqi friends. One gave Colgan a gold charm bracelet for the baby he and his wife were expecting. He memorized the names, residences and descriptions of top Baathists. On patrols, Colgan tirelessly chatted up locals, recording their complaints in a green notebook he kept in a Ziploc bag. "When that notebook comes out," Schermerhorn says, "we know we're going to be there another hour."
With Colgan at the helm, the platoon's morale soared. Even in 130° heat, the Tomb Raiders sometimes ran patrols five times a day on four hours' sleep. No one minded. "The first five months just flew by," says Whiteside. Colgan's disarming style seemed to soften the hearts of the people of Adhamiya. "There are very few people who can break into your house, arrest your husband and then by the time he leaves, have everyone waving and smiling. It takes a special person," says Whiteside. "We all thought, This cat is invincible."
--The Rookie's Mission
NOV. 28: Having arrived in Baghdad only three days ago, Orion Jenks has missed all that bonding. Now he is preparing for his maiden trip outside the wire. Yesterday Jenks spent Thanksgiving away from home for the first time, eating rubbery turkey with a bunch of strangers in a chow hall decorated with the corny Pilgrim motif of a kindergarten. The battalion required all soldiers at the base to speak to their families for five minutes on the phone, but the call only added to Jenks' longing for home. "I was hating life," he says.
Jenks grew up in San Francisco, where he says he often heard the rattle of a drive-by shooting. He claims he had a gun pulled on him once, while skateboarding through the Mission District. "I'm not scared, I'm anxious," he says, putting on his flak vest before patrol. "I don't like to be coddled. It's like driving. You don't learn until you do it." Listening to the new guy's bravado, Schermerhorn shakes his head. "He's green," the veteran says. "He talks a lot and thinks he knows everything."
As the platoon's three humvees pull out of the gates, Jenks' gun is turned the wrong way. "First off, you want to make sure your weapon is pointed away from other personnel," Schermerhorn says. "Watch out for other personnel at all times. Eye contact with buddies." Then he adds, "Have fun out there. No need to get your a__hole all tight." The convoy arrives at a local playground. The soldiers dismount and begin handing out candy to swarms of children. Before long, the kids are climbing all over them, asking for money, trying out the English profanities American soldiers have taught them. When Jenks gets flustered by the tumult, Schermerhorn walks over. "All you have to remember is you are in control out here. They respect you when you are in control," he says. "But most of the people here are good people. They deserve the same respect as you would give your mother."
Back at the house that evening, Schermerhorn is still preoccupied with Jenks. "I'm worried about him," he says. "I heard him say he could handle this because he was shot at back home. Well, I was shot at when I was living in the city, and I've never felt the fear I've felt here."
--What Not to Say
DEC. 1: Ronald Buxton walks into the hooch and slumps onto the sofa, exhausted. "I just made the call," he tells Kamont. In August Buxton's wife Audrey gave birth to the couple's second child, Jared. Buxton was scheduled to leave Iraq this month to see the baby for the first time, but he received word in November that his redeployment had been delayed two months. Tonight he delivered the news to Audrey over a satellite phone. She and the couple's 7-year-old son broke down crying. Buxton was quiet. "I listen a lot," he says.
Buxton pulls out his Palm Pilot, which carries a photo album of his family and a glossary of 238 Arabic words and phrases. Slight and bespectacled, Buxton is the platoon's resident egghead. He downloads daily briefings on economics and politics from the Cato Institute and practices his Arabic with the dozen Iraqi interpreters who work at the palace. Since picking up a few beginners' books in Kuwait in May, Buxton has taught himself to read Arabic, and can converse casually with locals in Adhamiya. "I can't stand to be around people I can't understand," he says.
When they are inside the wire, Buxton and the rest of the soldiers in the platoon wrestle with how much to tell their families about the risks of life outside it. Grimes keeps the worst details out of her letters to avoid worrying her mother. The really "bad stuff" she saves for phone conversations with her dad. Buxton says his wife "knows I'm here, but she doesn't know specifics. She knows what she doesn't know." Which means she does not know any of the details of the night of Nov. 1.
In the run-up to that date, insurgents were increasingly often attacking military convoys with home-made bombs known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs)--typically, munitions disguised as roadside trash and detonated by remote control. While on patrol Sept. 23, the Tomb Raiders helped evacuate a U.S. military police officer who had been hit in the eye by shrapnel from an IED. On the way back to the palace, Colgan's vehicle disappeared in a cloud of dust when a second bomb exploded near it. "I thought they'd been hit," says Major Scott Sossaman, the battalion's operations officer who had been communicating with Colgan. "For 10 seconds we didn't know what happened." Then Colgan's voice crackled over the line again. "We're O.K.," he said.
By the beginning of Ramadan in late October, the 2nd Battalion was finding five IEDs a week in Adhamiya. At the same time, the palace compound was taking fire from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades nearly every night. Ilardi discussed the sector's deteriorating security with Colgan. "These IEDs are getting crazy," Ilardi said. "I don't know how we can combat it." Colgan shrugged and said, "We have to keep doing what we're doing." Ilardi says both men agreed that they should keep the thick windows of their humvees closed to prevent shrapnel from flying in.
In an e-mail to his father, Colgan sounded uncharacteristically worried, writing, "Dad, it's getting old, and it's getting crazy." On Oct. 31, after a mortar attack on the palace injured two soldiers, the Tomb Raiders combed the streets of Adhamiya looking for the perpetrators. They came up empty, but Colgan believed he had obtained a fix on the coordinates of a suspected insurgent cell leader. The next morning he e-mailed his father again: "The fighting is very one-sided. They are on the offensive, and we are mostly on the defensive. Only time will tell, and I hope it works out for this place. I just don't ever care to visit again."
On the night of Nov. 1, the platoon was tasked with staying in reserve at the base, ready to serve as the battalion's quick-reaction force in case of an attack. At 11:30 p.m., an RPG landed inside the walls of the palace. Members of a sister platoon to the Tomb Raiders were on patrol at the time and opened fire on a vehicle they believed had launched the grenade, but the car got away. The Tomb Raiders loaded into three humvees and joined the chase, Colgan riding shotgun in the lead vehicle and Schermerhorn driving. When the convoy reached a bridge leading out of Adhamiya, Colgan told Schermerhorn to swing around to cut off traffic going toward it. His window was down.
As the vehicle turned, an explosion went off under the humvee's right tire. "It felt like we hit a boulder," Schermerhorn recalls. "A shock wave went through the vehicle. I was stunned for a split second. I was deafened for a few minutes." Whiteside, who was in the gunner's turret, was knocked unconscious by the blast and fell onto Buxton's lap. Buxton patted him in the dark, feeling for blood, but found none. As Whiteside righted himself, Schermerhorn waited for Colgan's instructions. But Colgan was unconscious. Blood poured out of the left side of his forehead. His eye was bulging and purplish. "Get him home!" Buxton yelled.
Schermerhorn sped away, the humvee's flat tire flapping crazily. Whiteside climbed out of the turret and began trying to resuscitate the lieutenant. Colgan made a gurgling sound. He has a wife and kids, Whiteside thought. We've got to keep him alive. Buxton grabbed the radio handset. "This is Tomb Raider 6-3 Delta," he said. "Lieutenant Colgan is down."
Colgan's eyes were open when the three soldiers carried him into the aid station inside the palace compound. Two special-forces medics began to stabilize him. They asked Colgan his name. "Ben," he said. "What happened?" The medics performed a tracheotomy to help him breathe. Colgan's face was covered in blood, and his eye was protruding out of its socket, but his pulse was stable. A medevac helicopter took Colgan to the 28th Combat Support Hospital in central Baghdad. When Lieutenant Ilardi returned from his patrol, he rushed to talk to Grimes. She told him Colgan was responsive and that his eye had been damaged but it might be salvageable. "I've seen crazier things," she said.
What Grimes did not know was that shrapnel had penetrated all the way to the back of Colgan's head. By the time the chopper reached the hospital, Colgan was brain-dead. He was kept alive by a respirator while Rabena, who had driven to the hospital with Ilardi, completed paperwork that promoted him to first lieutenant and gave him a "medical retirement"--a step that allows his family to receive more generous benefits. Ilardi kissed Colgan on the chest. "We won't give up the chase," he said.
When Whiteside woke up the next morning, his fingernails were still stained with dried blood. Before the platoon went to bed, Grimes had told them Colgan was in stable condition. "I thought he'd be just fine," Whiteside remembers. At 8:30 a.m., the platoon was told to fall into the horseshoe formation that commanders use to disclose personal information to troops. Captain Mike Kielpinski, the Tomb Raiders' battery commander, sobbed as he broke the news of Colgan's death. Talimeliyor ran back to his cot, disconsolate. "I didn't read my Bible," he remembers. "I didn't wash my clothes. I just wanted to lay in my bed." Whiteside recalls, "I cried for the first day and a half." The rest of the platoon went numb. Says Beverly: "Everything just died. All sounds stopped."
Rabena ordered that the platoon not be assigned patrols for four days. Schermerhorn acknowledges that he needed time to overcome his rage. "I wanted to be the first one to kick down a door. I wanted to find the mother____ers. But the one thing we can do is honor his memory. He'd rather we do that than go on a bloodthirsty rampage." A few days after the battalion's memorial service for Colgan, Rabena gathered Whiteside, Schermerhorn and Buxton and phoned Colgan's wife Jill. She asked them about her husband's final hours. Buxton gave her straight answers but omitted gruesome details, telling her that Colgan had been conscious and looking around but not that he had lost an eye. Jill started to break down, then paused and regained her composure. Whiteside told her, "I never liked officers, but I liked your husband." Jill laughed.
The initial shock of Colgan's death has abated, but the soldiers still have to remind themselves that he is gone. His name remains on the satellite-phone bill the platoon updates on a wall of the hooch. "Sometimes I think that I'll wake up," Whiteside says, "and that he's going to walk through the door and get his coffee and watch SportsCenter. And he'll say good morning, and I'll ask him how he's doing. And then I realize, that's never going to happen again."
--Operation Colgan's Revenge
DEC. 2: A desert chill cuts through the air as the Tomb Raiders prepare for a pre-dawn raid. The target house belongs to a man called Abu Taha, a former officer in the Fedayeen Saddam militia who is suspected of organizing attacks against the Americans. Since early November, intelligence gained from informants and detainees has yielded a list of 20 individuals in the area who the battalion's commanders believe are involved in financing and coordinating roadside bombings. The effort to hunt them down is dubbed Colgan's Revenge. But few members of the platoon are confident they will find Colgan's killers. "To know you got the guy who planted that IED — that piece will never be available to us," says Buxton.
In the month since Colgan's death, the soldiers have been slow to warm to his replacement, Van Engelen, a stolid, tobacco-spitting 24-year-old who lacks his predecessor's charisma. "I still ain't used to him," mutters Whiteside. "There's a difference of experience." Buxton has become a more active, though neurotic leader. Tonight he spends half an hour drawing up different seating arrangements in the three humvees. As the Tomb Raiders grease their guns and pack flashlights and zip-ties (for cuffing hands) into their flak vests, Winston, the platoon's weathered senior sergeant, briefs them on Abu Taha, a middle-aged, overweight man who may be a "major supplier" of weapons to the insurgents. The room falls silent as Winston outlines evacuation procedures in the event that the troops encounter resistance at the house. Since Colgan's death, Winston says, the platoon's anxiety has grown. Every piece of trash now looks like a hidden bomb. "Everyone is afraid," he says. "If they're not, they're lying. People are cringing." Some soldiers have turned to God. Whiteside reads Scripture and recites the Lord's Prayer before leaving the gates. On the day of Colgan's death, Kamont, a lapsed Baptist who admits to once having been a heavy drinker, flew back to Germany on home leave and told his wife he wants their 2-year-old daughter to grow up in a religious household. "When something like this happens," he says, "you need to have someone to pray to."
The loss of Colgan has tested another kind of faith — the belief that their mission in Iraq is worth the ultimate sacrifice. After arriving in Baghdad, Schermerhorn sent a tape-recorded message to his mother Robin Ann. "We're over here for a cause! There's a whole nation here that knows nothing of freedom," he said. "And I believe that what we're doing here — regardless of our lack of ability to find weapons of mass destruction — is the right thing." Now he's not so sure. "It's hard to see headway," he says. "The same guys who are waving at you and saying 'Good Bush' are firing at us. I'd like to see these people enjoy what I have on a daily basis. But I don't know that anything we've accomplished since we've been here was worth the L.T.'s life or — thinking about it — my own."
The raid on the house of Abu Taha kicks off just before 2 a.m. Driving without lights, the platoon moves past the Abu Hanifa mosque and pulls up in front of a darkened one-story structure. A three-man "breach team" hurdles the front wall and attempts to force its way into the house. It takes Schermerhorn 10 tries before he finally smashes open the metal door with a battering ram. In the front room, the breach team finds a woman sitting calmly on the floor with her three children. She identifies herself as Abu Taha's wife and says she has not seen him in a year. The soldiers search the house but find no sign of an adult male. Finally, Van Engelen apologizes and tells the woman the Army will replace her front door, and will give her one three times as nice if she brings her husband by the compound. She thanks him. "My daughters gave your soldiers flowers," she says. "We love the Americans very much."
Later that day, just after 8 p.m., a mortar round lands about 500 yds. west of the palace's front gate. Within five minutes the Tomb Raiders load up the humvees and head out in search of a blue BMW, which roof guards spotted driving away from where the mortars were launched. After stopping a few cars but finding no sign of the attackers, the soldiers make their way back toward the center of Adhamiya and eventually pull up near the main gas station.
The place is in meltdown. Dozens of drivers waiting to fill their tanks are out of their cars shouting at the station owner, who has shut down the pumps to prevent an elderly man at the front of the line from filling a jerrican with gas. Coalition authorities have discouraged this practice because it is popular with black marketeers. The man says he has written permission from the Ministry of Health to fill his can, and Winston and Van Engelen approach the owner to sort out the mess. While two Iraqi police officers watch impassively, the rest of the troops point their guns at the drivers, who quickly return to their cars. Van Engelen instructs the owner to fill the man's jerrican with one pump and begin filling the motorists' tanks with another. The owner agrees but begs the troops to stay. "We want your help to restore order," he says. "If you leave, I will close the station." Van Engelen refuses. "You have no choice," he says. "We're leaving. You have to stay open." The owner nods reluctantly, just before the power goes out.
--Selling a Message
DEC. 5: Sergeant Aparicio is a popular guy. As his vehicle rolls through a graceful old neighborhood on the northern edge of Adhamiya, hordes of children chase after him, grabbing for the U.S.-produced Arabic newspapers and leaflets he is passing out to locals through his window. As head of the reservist psychological-operations team attached to the Tomb Raiders' battalion, Aparicio is responsible for canvassing the area, handing out pro-U.S. literature and listening to the complaints of residents. When he stops at a teahouse in a peaceful, predominantly Shi'ite area of Adhamiya, locals surround him and deluge him with complaints about the lack of electricity, shortage of medical supplies, chronic unemployment and high price of gas. Aparicio listens patiently, jotting down each petition in his notebook and promising to report them to his superiors. The crowds thank him and wish him well. As Aparicio climbs back into his humvee, he shakes his head. "We're going to hear the same thing all day," he says. "It's just a circle. You can never give enough."
The mood on the street darkens as Aparicio's convoy heads down Imam Street, the Sunni heart of Adhamiya. "You are animals!" a shop owner shouts at the soldiers. At one point Aparicio hands a newspaper to a well-dressed elderly man, who looks at it, tears it up and tosses it back at the humvee. Aparicio shrugs. "The people who are going to be won over have been won over," he says. "We've been here so long that we're not going to get anyone new on our side." But for all their doubts, the Tomb Raiders, like much of the military in Iraq, are determined to finish what the U.S. has started. "We're here. We definitely can't leave," says Whiteside. "Things would be a lot worse if we just pulled out."
--"It's Too Quiet"
DEC. 10: A little more than a month after Colgan's death, an eerie calm has settled over Adhamiya. Across Baghdad, the number of IEDs hitting U.S. convoys has plummeted. "It's too quiet," says Captain Mark Manno, who took over from Kielpinski as the Tomb Raiders' battery commander, during a meeting with his three platoon leaders. "I just feel they're going to try something."
In response to a mortar attack the previous night, the battalion commanders decide to flood Adhamiya with troops from four batteries to deny the insurgents territory to fire from. The Tomb Raiders are told to move out at 8 p.m., around the time when mortar attacks typically occur. It is on the return trip from this mission that Jenks, Beverly and the two TIME journalists are wounded.
--Back into the Breach
DEC. 12: Beverly and Jenks are recovering from surgery in the intensive-care ward of the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. In a way, they seem as boyish as they did before the attack. While a DVD of Lord of the Rings plays on Beverly's laptop, Jenks laments that his PlayStation 2 console is on its way to Iraq just as he is being sent back to Germany. Both show visitors plastic cups that contain shrapnel fragments removed from their bodies. There is no bitterness or self-pity. Says Beverly: "You've always got to expect the worst, and I'm glad that's not what happened." Jenks is more frustrated about leaving Iraq so soon after arriving. "I didn't have a chance to do anything positive or productive," he says. For Beverly, the teenager who never expected to see combat, the attack strengthened his conviction that his service in Iraq had purpose. "I did good. I did good things for a lot of people," he says. "I don't know about the reasons we came here, but I'm glad we did."
The Tomb Raiders are now stretched thin. With Beverly likely to remain outside of Iraq for the rest of the deployment and Whiteside preparing for reassignment to another unit, only six soldiers who were part of the platoon when it was constituted in Kuwait will still be in country in 2004. For missions outside the wire, the Tomb Raiders borrow soldiers from other platoons, but they have to carry out their routine duties — monitoring the radio, maintaining vehicles, staffing the battalion's Internet cafe, manning guard positions on the roof — with fewer soldiers, straining their combat effectiveness. "Maybe we don't have enough personnel," Van Engelen says. "Maybe if we had more, they'd get more rest. Maybe they'd be more alert and energized when they went out."
Tonight is a test of their fortitude. "We're trying something different," Van Engelen tells the Tomb Raiders as they gather around a gray satellite map of Adhamiya, preparing for their first patrol since the grenade attack. "So far our footprint has been big. This has gotten us into trouble." Van Engelen believes that the platoon will draw less attention without the humvees. The soldiers can hardly remember when they last did a foot patrol of any kind, and this will be the first one they have ever done at night. Van Engelen wants the soldiers to walk in a cigar-shaped formation, rather than the typical V, so they can stay in the shadows on one side of the street. He tells them that if they spot anything suspicious, they have approval to shoot. "I'm telling you right now," he says, "if you can ID the target, you don't have to wait for your buddy to do the same thing."
Whiteside pumps hip-hop on his CD player while he screws a flashlight onto his M-4 rifle. Talimeliyor tries to untwist the straps of his backpack, which is loaded with a 6-lb. radio. "We've never done a dismounted at night," Buxton says, to no one in particular. The soldiers line up, cinching down their vests and adjusting their packs, checking the action on their rifles. Then they open the door and head out onto the street.
--"Who We Are"
DEC. 14: Like all the other american soldiers in Iraq, the members of the platoon have been tempered by the fires of the occupation, the raw emotions of war now forged into something harder and more durable. The news of Saddam's capture on this day is a jolt of euphoria for the Tomb Raiders, but it does little to alter their cool assessment of the perils ahead. "This country is still up for grabs, as far as these people are concerned," says Schermerhorn. "It's still going to be crazy around here for us."
Ultimately, that's where you discover the heroism of the 120,000 soldiers serving in Iraq today — not so much in their battlefield bravery or the firmness of their resolve as in their acceptance of uncertainty and the courage of their restraint. Buxton, the veteran of the first Gulf War, sits on his cot inside the Tomb Raiders' hooch. As he struggles to express his thoughts, it becomes clear that the eloquence lies in his frustration. "There is nobody to shoot back at. That's every soldier's biggest complaint," he says. "But we are not cold-blooded killers. We are not going to kill innocent civilians. That's just a part of who we are." He thinks back to the grenade attack. "A couple of us saw some guys running away and thought about pulling the trigger. But when you see a guy running through a crowd, do you spray the crowd to get the guy? If in a situation like that you can control your impulse for revenge, then that means you are fighting for something larger."
Buxton pauses. "There's potential here in Iraq. There's also stuff that needs to be done. It's slow going. But what if we did just leave? Would we really have accomplished anything?" he says. "I don't want to come back here a third time." Outside, the air is crackling with celebratory gunfire. "That reminds me," Buxton says. He gets up from his cot, walks to his door and draws a red X through the picture of Saddam.
- Romesh Ratnesar & Michael Weisskopf