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...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...
...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...
...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...
...worried mom back in Pine Bluff, Ark. They open with "Dear Chocolate"--his name for her--and include macho tales of his refusal to duck while under fire, followed by admonitions not to worry. He cracks jokes about how insurgents once lobbed rockets at his unit's base as the soldiers lay in bed. "My son," says Catherine, "has a weird sense of humor...
...brick battalion headquarters on the base, a family-readiness group meets regularly to plan luncheons and trips to the zoo. If someone is sick, the other spouses mobilize grocery shopping and child care. In the corner there is a stack of coloring books to help kids prepare to say goodbye--and hello again. A wall is decorated with pictures of soldier-dads swimming in the pool at the Baghdad palace where they are quartered...