An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: “Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!”

It’s a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld’s house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, “shock and awe” and all the other “new way of war” buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.

Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way—by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.

It is noon and the mercury is hanging steady at 115 Fahrenheit. The filmmaker Garrett Scott and I are “embedded” with Alpha Company of the Third Battalion of the 124th Infantry, a Florida National Guard unit about half of whom did time in the regular Army, often with elite groups like the Rangers. Like most frontline troops in Iraq, the majority are white but there is a sizable minority of African-American and Latino soldiers among them. Unlike most combat units, about 65 percent are college students—they’ve traded six years with the Guard for tuition at Florida State. Typically, that means occasional weekends in the Everglades or directing traffic during hurricanes. Instead, these guys got sent to Iraq, and as yet they have no sure departure date.

Mobilized in December, they crossed over from Kuwait on day one of the invasion and are now bivouacked in the looted remains of a Republican Guard officers’ club, a modernist slab of polished marble and tinted glass that the GIs have fortified with plywood, sandbags and razor wire.

Behind “the club” is a three-story dormitory, a warren of small one-bedroom apartments, each holding a nine-man squad of soldiers and all their gear. Around 200 guys are packed in here. Their sweaty fatigues drape the banisters of the exterior stairway, while inside the cramped, dark rooms the floors are covered with cots, heaps of flak vests, guns and, where possible, big tin, water-based air-conditioners called swamp coolers. Surrounding the base is a chaotic working-class neighborhood of two- and three-story cement homes and apartment buildings. Not far away is the muddy Tigris River.

This company limits patrols to three or four hours a day. For the many hours in between, the guys pull guard duty, hang out in their cave-like rooms or work out in a makeshift weight room.

“We’re getting just a little bit stir-crazy,” explains the lanky Sergeant Sellers. His demeanor is typical of the nine-man squad we have been assigned to, friendly but serious, with a wry and angry sense of humor. On the side of his helmet Sellers has, in violation of regs, attached the unmistakable pin and ring of a hand grenade. Next to it is written, “Pull Here.”

Leaning back on a cot, he’s drawing a large, intricate pattern on a female mannequin leg. The wall above him displays a photo collage of pictures retrieved from a looted Iraqi women’s college. Smiling young ladies wearing the hijab sip sodas and stroll past buses. They seem to be on some sort of field trip. Nearby are photos clipped from Maxim, of coy young American girls offering up their pert round bottoms. Dominating it all is a large hand-drawn dragon and a photo of Jessica Lynch with a bubble caption reading: “Hi, I am a war hero. And I think that weapons maintenance is totally unimportant.”

The boys don’t like Lynch and find the story of her rescue ridiculous. They’d been down the same road a day earlier and are unsympathetic. “We just feel that it’s unfair and kind of distorted the way the whole Jessica, quote, ‘rescue’ thing got hyped,” explains Staff Sgt. Kreed Howell. He is in charge of the squad, and at 31 a bit older than most of his men. Muscular and clean-cut, Howell is a relaxed and natural leader, with the gracious bearing of a proper Southern upbringing.

“In other words, you’d have to be really fucking dumb to get lost on the road,” says another, less diplomatic soldier.

Specialist John Crawford sits in a tiny, windowless supply closet that is loaded with packs and gear. He is two credits short of a BA in anthropology and wants to go to graduate school. Howell, a Republican, amicably describes Crawford as the squad’s house liberal.

There’s just enough extra room in the closet for Crawford, a chair and a little shelf on which sits a laptop. Hanging by this makeshift desk is a handwritten sign from “the management” requesting that soldiers masturbating in the supply closet “remove their donations in a receptacle.” Instead of watching pornography DVDs, Crawford is here to finish a short story. “Trying to start writing again,” he says.

Crawford is a fan of Tim O’Brien, particularly The Things They Carried. We chat, then he shows me his short story. It’s about a vet who is back home in north Florida trying to deal with the memory of having accidentally blown away a child while serving in Iraq.

Later in the cramped main room, Sellers and Sergeant Brunelle, another one of the squad’s more gregarious and dominant personalities, are matter-of-factly showing us digital photos of dead Iraqis.

“These guys shot at some of our guys, so we lit ‘em up. Put two .50-cal rounds in their vehicle. One went through this dude’s hip and into the other guy’s head,” explains Brunelle. The third man in the car lived. “His buddy was crying like a baby. Just sitting there bawling with his friend’s brains and skull fragments all over his face. One of our guys came up to him and is like: ‘Hey! No crying in baseball!’”

“I know that probably sounds sick,” says Sellers, “but humor is the only way you can deal with this shit.”

And just below the humor is volcanic rage. These guys are proud to be soldiers and don’t want to come across as whiners, but they are furious about what they’ve been through. They hate having their lives disrupted and put at risk. They hate the military for its stupidity, its feckless lieutenants and blowhard brass living comfortably in Saddam’s palaces. They hate Iraqis—or, as they say, “hajis”—for trying to kill them. They hate the country for its dust, heat and sewage-clogged streets. They hate having killed people. Some even hate the politics of the war. And because most of them are, ultimately, just regular well-intentioned guys, one senses the distinct fear that someday a few may hate themselves for what they have been forced to do here.

Added to such injury is insult: The military treats these soldiers like unwanted stepchildren. This unit’s rifles are retooled hand-me-downs from Vietnam. They have inadequate radio gear, so they buy their own unencrypted Motorola walkie-talkies. The same goes for flashlights, knives and some components for night-vision sights. The low-performance Iraqi air-conditioners and fans, as well as the one satellite phone and payment cards shared by the whole company for calling home, were also purchased out of pocket from civilian suppliers.

Bottled water rations are kept to two liters a day. After that the guys drink from “water buffaloes”—big, hot chlorination tanks that turn the amoeba-infested dreck from the local taps into something like swimming-pool water. Mix this with powdered Gatorade and you can wash down a famously bad MRE (Meal Ready to Eat).

To top it all off they must endure the pathologically uptight culture of the Army hierarchy. The Third of the 124th is now attached to the newly arrived First Armored Division, and when it is time to raid suspected resistance cells it’s the Guardsmen who have to kick in the doors and clear the apartments.

“The First AD wants us to catch bullets for them but won’t give us enough water, doesn’t let us wear do-rags and makes us roll down our shirt sleeves so we look proper! Can you believe that shit?” Sergeant Sellers is pissed off.

The soldiers’ improvisation extends to food as well. After a month or so of occupying “the club,” the company commander, Captain Sanchez, allowed two Iraqi entrepreneurs to open shop on his side of the wire—one runs a slow Internet cafe, the other a kebab stand where the “Joes” pay U.S. dollars for grilled lamb on flat bread.

“The haji stand is one of the only things we have to look forward to, but the First AD keeps getting scared and shutting it down.” Sellers is on a roll, but he’s not alone.

Even the lighthearted Howell, who insists that the squad has it better than most troops, chimes in. “The one thing I will say is that we have been here entirely too long. If I am not home by Christmas my business will fail.” Back “on earth” (in Panama City, Florida), Howell is a building contractor, with a wife, two small children, equipment, debts and employees.

Perhaps the most shocking bit of military incompetence is the unit’s lack of formal training in what’s called “close-quarter combat.” The urbanized mayhem of Mogadishu may loom large in the discourse of the military’s academic journals like Parameters and the Naval War College Review, but many U.S. infantrymen are trained only in large-scale, open-country maneuvers—how to defend Germany from a wave of Russian tanks.

So, since “the end of the war” these guys have had to retrain themselves in the dark arts of urban combat. “The houses here are small, too,” says Brunelle. “Once you’re inside you can barely get your rifle up. You got women screaming, people, furniture everywhere. It’s insane.”

By now this company has conducted scores of raids, taken fire on the street, taken casualties, taken rocket-propelled grenade attacks to the club and are defiantly proud of the fact that they have essentially been abandoned, survived, retrained themselves and can keep a lid on their little piece of Baghdad. But it’s not always the Joes who have the upper hand. Increasingly, Haji seems to set the agenda.

A thick black plume of smoke rises from Karrada Street, a popular electronics district where U.S. patrols often buy air-conditioners and DVDs. An American Humvee, making just such a stop, has been blown to pieces by a remote-activated “improvised explosive device,” or IED, buried in the median between two lanes of traffic. By chance two colleagues and I are the first press on the scene. The street is empty of traffic and quiet except for the local shopkeepers, who occasionally call out to us in Arabic and English:

“Be careful.”

Finally we get close enough to see clearly. About twenty feet away is a military transport truck and a Humvee, and beyond that are the flaming remains of a third Humvee. A handful of American soldiers are crouched behind the truck, totally still. There’s no firing, no yelling, no talking, no radio traffic. No one is screaming, but two GIs are down. As yet there are no reinforcements or helicopters overhead. All one can hear is the burning of the Humvee.

Then it begins: The ammunition in the burning Humvee starts to explode and the troops in the street start firing. Armored personnel carriers arrive and disgorge dozens of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to join the fight. The target is a three-story office building just across from the engulfed Humvee. Occasionally we hear a few rounds of return fire pass by like hot razors slashing straight lines through the air. The really close rounds just sound like loud cracks.

“That’s Kalashnikov. I know the voice,” says Ahmed, our friend and translator. There is a distinct note of national pride in his voice—his countrymen are fighting back—never mind the fact that we are now mixed in with the most forward US troops and getting shot at.

The firefight goes on for about two hours, moving slowly and methodically. It is in many ways an encapsulation of the whole war—confusing and labor-intensive. The GIs have more firepower than they can use, and they don’t even know exactly where or who the enemy is. Civilians are hiding in every corner, the ground floor of the target building is full of merchants and shoppers, and undisciplined fire could mean scores of dead civilians.

There are two GIs on the ground, one with his legs gone and probably set to die. When a medevac helicopter arrives just overhead, it, too, like much other technology, is foiled. The street is crisscrossed with electrical wires and there is no way the chopper can land to extract the wounded. The soldiers around us look grave and tired.

Eventually some Bradley fighting vehicles start pounding the building with mean 250-millimeter cannon shells. Whoever might have been shooting from upstairs is either dead or gone.

The street is now littered with overturned air-conditioners, fans and refrigerators. A cooler of sodas sits forlorn on the sidewalk. Farther away two civilians lie dead, caught in the crossfire. A soldier peeks out from the hatch of a Bradley and calls over to a journalist, “Hey, can you grab me one of those Cokes?”

After the shootout we promised ourselves we’d stay out of Humvees and away from U.S. soldiers. But that was yesterday. Now Crawford is helping us put on body armor and soon we’ll be on patrol. As we move out with the nine soldiers the mood is somewhere between tense and bored. Crawford mockingly introduces himself to no one in particular: “John Crawford, I work in population reduction.”

“Watch the garbage—if you see wires coming out of a pile it’s an IED,” warns Howell. The patrol is uneventful. We walk fast through back streets and rubbish-strewn lots, pouring sweat in the late afternoon heat. Local residents watch the small squad with a mixture of civility, indifference and open hostility. An Iraqi man shouts, “When? When? When? Go!” The soldiers ignore him.

“Sometimes we sham,” explains one of the guys. “We’ll just go out and kick it behind some wall. Watch what’s going on but skip the walking. And sometimes at night we get sneaky-deaky. Creep up on Haji, so he knows we’re all around.”

“I am just walking to be walking,” says the laconic Fredrick Pearson, a k a “Diddy,” the only African-American in Howell’s squad. Back home he works in the State Supreme Court bureaucracy and plans to go to law school. “I just keep an eye on the rooftops, look around and walk.”

The patrols aren’t always peaceful. One soldier mentions that he recently “kicked the shit out of a 12-year-old kid” who menaced him with a toy gun.

Later we roll with the squad on another patrol, this time at night and in two Humvees. Now there’s more evident hostility from the young Iraqi men loitering in the dark. Most of these infantry soldiers don’t like being stuck in vehicles. At a blacked-out corner where a particularly large group of youths are clustered, the Humvees stop and Howell bails out into the crowd. There is no interpreter along tonight.

“Hey, guys! What’s up? How y’all doing? OK? Everything OK? All right?” asks Howell in his jaunty, laid-back north Florida accent. The sullen young men fade away into the dark, except for two, who shake the sergeant’s hand. Howell’s attempt to take the high road, winning hearts and minds, doesn’t seem to be for show. He really believes in this war. But in the torrid gloom of the Baghdad night, his efforts seem tragically doomed.

Watching Howell I think about the civilian technocrats working with Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional Authority; the electricity is out half the time, and these folks hold meetings on how best to privatize state industries and end food rations. Meanwhile, the city seethes. The Pentagon, likewise, seems to have no clear plan; its troops are stretched thin, lied to and mistreated. The whole charade feels increasingly patched together, poorly improvised. Ultimately, there’s very little that Howell and his squad can do about any of this. After all, it’s not their war. They just work here.

Christian Parenti is the author, most recently, of The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (Basic) and a fellow at City University of New York’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

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—The Nation, October 6, 2003