Night raid in Baghdad

At the checkpoint, tanks and Humvees lined the road. Soldiers waved over cars, directed drivers to pull into a dirt lot. They shooed the passengers out of the cars so that a bomb-sniffing dog could hop into the vehicle and snuffle around. In some cases, impossible numbers of people unfolded themselves from the cars. I watched as a family of 14 got out of a pickup truck. They stood in a line, with their backs to the truck (at the soldiers' instructions). The men looked furtively over their shoulders, angry and dismayed at the sight of the dog inside the truck's cab. Iraqis think of dogs as inherently unclean. A dog in your home or car makes those spaces unclean as well. It's very disrespectful. One man started to argue with the soldiers about the dog. They shouted him down, finished the inspection, and sent him on his way.

It's disturbing to watch a scene like that. Undoubtedly, the use of dogs alienates Iraqis, fertilizes their resentment. On the other hand, Iraqis want security more than anything right now. These checkpoints do make a difference, and the dogs significantly speed the process, alleviating long traffic snarls. It's one of the million or so conundrums here.

Sgt. Maj. Schindler favors using the dogs. We stood on the roadside, watching the checkpoint at work. The sergeant major towered over me. A tall, lean guy who looked disconcertingly like Sam Shepard. He spoke with the slight pseudo-Texan drawl that most soldiers seem to have, regardless of their place of origin. But I found him smart and thoughtful, and from what I could see, his men liked him very much. He told me that working in Iraq demanded constant adjustment, that at the beginning the military didn't understand how to deal with Iraqis, and they were still playing catch-up. They try harder to recognize the Iraqis' enormous sense of pride now, he said. Because to insult one Iraqi means you hurt the pride of their whole family. I asked how the use of the dogs fit in with that. He said that the Iraqis respect a strong show of authority. "It's not just what the dogs can do," he said, "but the message they send."

Later, back at the base, I asked him his opinions about the situation in Fallujah, the town west of Baghdad that is considered the center of the anti-American resistance. The 82nd Airborne controls that town. I've heard from a number of journalists that they act with unnecessarily extreme force, and treat every Iraqi like the enemy. Sgt. Maj. Schindler thought for a moment before replying. "The 82nd tends to go at it up there like they're picking a fight," he said. "In addition, you've got a lot of new people up there who have the mistaken impression it's a war zone. You're asking these young soldiers to do some very hard things. Make fast, complicated assessments. Maybe they're a little trigger-happy."

I wandered around the checkpoint and talked to soldiers. None of the guys I spoke to demonstrated the blind dismissal of Iraqis that I had expected. Sure, Iraqis confused the hell out of them. Frustrated them. But they were just people. Rules of engagement have been changing, the soldiers said. No one's supposed to fire his weapon unless an Iraqi is pointing a gun right at him. (A few months ago, soldiers were told to shoot any car approaching a checkpoint too fast. A lot of innocent Iraqis-- sometimes whole families -- got killed that way.) Another change: The soldiers go on fewer dismounted patrols now. This isn't good, they told me. It means losing personal relationships with the Iraqi people. Mostly the soldiers do drive-around patrolling or traffic stops. "It's all gonna get worse if we have no working relationship with the people -- talking with them," one soldier said.

I made notes, leaning against a jeep. Fifty feet away, a small mob of children capered around and chanted, "Good good MISTER!" A soldier asked me who I wrote for. "Salon magazine," I replied. He paused for a second. "Boy," he said, "I can't believe they would send you to a place like this." It took me a moment to realize that he thought I must be employed by a hairdressing journal.

Later that evening, I ate in the base mess hall with some other men (they call the mess hall "the KBR" after the name of Kellogg, Brown and Root, the private subcontracted company that runs it and all other military mess halls in Iraq) where I had the chance to reiterate, a few times, that, no, I didn't work for a hairdressing magazine. I explained that Salon covered news, politics and culture, but not hair.

"You're not one of those reporters that said that they named Iron Hammer [the name given to the new U.S. policy of using massive military force against attackers] after the Nazis, are you?" asked one guy.

I said, "Well, it wasn't named after the Nazis, but it had the same name that the Nazis used." I didn't mention that I had, indeed, written about the topic in my last piece.

I sat with soldiers at a long table punctuated by clusters of condiments. They had steak that night. "You have to understand," said one soldier. "We, like, never get steak." The soldiers sawed away with flimsy plastic knives and forks; they broke so easily that each man went through from two to five of them in the course of dinner. We talked about what they perceived to be too many negative stories in the media. The news just wants the stories about death, they said. Not the good stories. I tried to explain that journalists do want to cover good stories. There just aren't that many of them these days.

For many of the soldiers, President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving trip probably seemed like a positive story. I happened to be in the TOC when word came that seven soldiers from Bandit Island would be going to a special Thanksgiving event with a surprise guest, unknown even to the base commanders. The officers inside the TOC groaned and told me how much the soldiers hate that meet-and-greet shit. They'd rather stay on base. One of the officers said, "This isn't about handing out more soccer balls, is it?" They reluctantly picked out seven of the best and brightest for this mission. "The magnificent 7," they joked.

A photographer who lives in my house happened to be covering the event for Time magazine. Like all the soldiers there, she had no idea that Bush would show up. The soldiers, gathered from bases all over Baghdad, were grumpy, bored and very hungry. They had been around for hours. And then, enter Mr. Bush. The soldiers went nuts. If the guys I spoke to are any indication, it's probable that many soldiers there that day don't even like President Bush. But he is their commander in chief. It must have been quite a morale booster to see him in the flesh.

From what I gather, it made much less of an impression on Iraqis. The brevity of the trip left many Iraqis I've spoken to feeling that Bush acted a bit cowardly.

That night, on the mission, I followed the soldiers down the block to raid a second house. The intelligence they had told them that a young man living in the house might be working with al-Qaida. None of the soldiers felt particularly optimistic about this mission, though. On 90 percent of the house raids, the soldiers find nothing more than confused families and a couple of guns used for home protection. (They used to confiscate all guns; now a family gets to keep one.) The soldiers followed the same procedures as before -- taking positions, banging on the gate, and demanding the family come out. An elderly couple and six young men emerged from the house and, following orders, squatted, mid-street, in the glare of one tank's headlights. The man in question was not among them.

A dozen soldiers entered the house and began searching. After a moment, I asked whether I could go inside. A soldier barked, "Friendly on the way!" and I followed him into a dark courtyard, through a front door, and into the family's home. By the door, piles of sandals indicated where the family de-shoed so as not to track up their carpets. For a brief moment, I considered pulling off my artificially filthy sneakers, just as I would if I was visiting Iraqi friends. Soldiers in muddy boots entered the house behind me and walked across the rug without a thought. And I knew that removing my sneakers would, most likely, bug them. This was no visit. It was a raid.

I went upstairs where soldiers were rifling through drawers, cabinets, boxes. They piled dinars and a few discovered guns on a flowery quilt covering the bed. Word came up from below that they had found something, and I descended to see. In a mostly empty room sat an unearthed box containing an assortment of electronics -- switches, circuit boards, antennae, batteries, soldered bits and pieces. Nearby, a bag containing half a dozen electric garage door opener kits. The kind used to make detonation devices for IEDs. The colonel in charge stood by while I knelt by the box. "Take a good look," he said. "We got some bad guys tonight."

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