Iraq and Roll

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."

"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.

Chris's job was frustrating. Soldiers in King Battery would spend days putting up a grid to supply the city with power; overnight it would be cut down, the lines stripped for their copper. They built wooden shelters for Iraqis who'd volunteered to police points along the Syrian border; the structures were burned as firewood. Several Iraqis died at the Al Dulyam post while trying to strip munitions for brass that could be sold in Baghdad or at the Husaybah market district in Al Qa'im. A few others lit the place up by smoking cigarettes while standing in gunpowder.

"A lot of the Iraqis didn't understand what we were even doing in their city," Chris says. "We were trying to help them, but they couldn't see how. There was a whole hierarchy of needs that they had. Under Saddam's day, they'd have their power cut off all the time. They were used to not having it. There wasn't any kind of regularity in their lives."

There was even less regularity to the war. Around the time the Third Armored Cavalry arrived in Iraq, the country was just beginning to shake off the shell shock of the previous few months. Iraqis found themselves without a leader or much clue about what to do next. Which put them, roughly, in the same boat as the U.S. Army.

Chris's training -- at West Point; at officer's basic training in Oklahoma; in Korea, where he spent a year before landing at Fort Carson -- had prepared him for battleground scenarios. He knew tank-on-tank, one army fighting another in an articulated battlefield. In Iraq, Chris was seeing very little battle combat, but lots of small, unpredictable fire. American soldiers were getting blown up in their Humvees, at roadside checkpoints, in suicide missions. A friend from his unit was killed while traveling in a convoy that Chris had originally planned to join.

"After he got killed, it kind of made it all real for me, like, something's changing here, something's going on," he says. "We started to see more organized resistance from the insurgents, these guys with hoods throwing IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and carrying out ambushes. I was working with young guys, tanker guys, who'd been trained on things like how to secure a prisoner. Suddenly they're up against guys who are proficient enough to wire an artillery round out of random parts."

Chris dropped nearly twenty pounds after arriving in Iraq, the result of a combination of Army rations and unrelenting sweat. In the field, all soldiers were required to wear a fifteen-pound vest and a Kevlar helmet even though temperatures often reached 120 degrees. On top of everything else, Chris was going through a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, someone he'd planned to live with when he got back from the war. Lu, Geoff and Dave tried to cheer him up by driving into the middle of the desert and letting him smash the living shit out of an old out-of-commission copy machine.

There wasn't much else to do.

Chris learned to ride a motorcycle, and, like every other soldier, he watched the mail.