Iraq and Roll

After a few months, Lu began moving back and forth between Al Qa'im and the dam, working with the S2 intelligence unit in Al Qa'im to track information on insurgents and terrorists. Lu helped the unit figure out what houses to hit, where to roust out potential bombers and militants. And he had moved into a position as a battle captain, so he was running raids out of Haditha's tactical-operations center.

It was stimulating work, but it was lonely. When Lu was at the dam, he worked mostly by himself, alone in the TOC. Soldiers occasionally came and talked to him about what was going on with the war, but Lu kept his own feelings to himself. "There was a separation between me and the soldiers, and I missed working with them," he says. "When you're a soldier, it's your boys that get you through. But when you're a leader, an officer, your job is to help the soldiers out."

Lu kept a diary, and its entries grew darker as the war went on. He was depressed and anxious, unable to shake things he'd seen go down in the S2. "A lot of times we would be interrogating people who weren't doing anything, and we'd ride them pretty hard," he says. "They'd get caught up in the mix, and they were innocent. It was a little depressing, because it was so hard to tell the good guys from the bad. They could be innocent or they could be Mujahideen.

"I think maybe I was a little more emotional, because I found myself caring for the Iraqis," he continues. "A lot of our guys were trying to do the right thing. But other times other soldiers were like 'Fuck 'em. Kill 'em all.' There was a lack of regard for life. When Iraqis died, no one cared."

Dragon Company survived the first six months of the war without any casualties. But by the end of September, two of Lu's own guys had died. In late August, Private First Class Vorn Mack jumped into the Euphrates to rinse off after a haircut. Lu was in the TOC when the call came in saying Mack had been swept away by the currents. When he tried to coordinate a search effort, he was told divers wouldn't reach the dam for hours. Lu was a good swimmer -- he'd studied at the Navy Scuba School -- and even though he figured Mack was dead, he didn't want to wait. He grabbed a couple of broken fins and a pair of goggles, tied a rope around his waist and held his breath as he was lowered forty feet over the dam wall and into the river. When Lu made his way to Mack's body, he gave the tug to be pulled up, the dead man tied to him.

Lu received the Soldier's Medal for his part in the incident, which was seen as a freak accident. But about a month later, the call came that another soldier was lost in the water, having fallen from a height roughly equivalent to that of a seven-story building. Again, Lu volunteered to go in after him. The guy couldn't have been in the water that long. This time, Lu thought he could save him.

"There were about twenty guys on the rope, and they pulled us up too fast, and he hit his head as we came up," Lu says. "He was like a rag doll when we got him up. His legs were broken. His head had been hit pretty hard. We did CPR on him, but we couldn't bring him back to life. It was a very frustrating death, because I think the guy still had a chance after he jumped."

The quiet belief in the unit was that the death had been a suicide, but nobody wanted to talk about it. "For one thing, if you commit suicide in the Army, you lose all of your benefits," Lu says. "And the unspoken feeling is that it's just a weak thing to do. People don't talk about the fact that soldiers think about suicide, but everyone does. It's an extremely psychologically trying environment."

After the deaths, Lu logged this entry in his diary: I wish I had a loaded pistol at my side.

"I'm a pretty religious person, so I would never carry through," he says, "but there were times after that all went down that I thought I'd be much happier dead than to have to go through all this shit."

Some Iraqis in Al Anbar Province believed that American soldiers had X-ray vision and could see inside their skulls. Some of the homemade bombs that were thrown at Coalition forces landed wrapped in burqas, thrown by insurgents who believed that the cloth could penetrate the force field that surrounded the foreigners. The further the Americans moved away from Baghdad, the further they seemed to go back in time.

The time warp, and the war, had begun to discourage First Lieutenant Chris Wolfe.

As the executive officer of King Battery, an armored unit, part of Chris's job was to train the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a ragtag militia that took all comers -- kids as young as fifteen, old men who looked as worn as the landscape. The unit also worked to secure the Al Dulyam ammunition supply post, a large store of munitions left behind by the Iraqi Army that had become a dangerous destination for insurgents, fundamentalists and looters.