Soldiers' Doubts Build as Duties Shift

Task Force 1-36 had traveled to Karbala from Baghdad last Wednesday. The trip was uneventful. In Shiite towns along the route, some bystanders gave friendly thumbs-up signs, others gawked and still others glared. One boy in a bicycle called out, "Go back to where you came from."

At one point, a young sergeant from Company A dismounted from his Bradley to pull down a poster of Sadr that decorated a pylon at the head of a bridge. Weighed down with a heavy rucksack and M-16 rifle, the soldier was unable to leap high enough to grab it. "Just out of my reach!" he said. "Just out of reach."

The phrase turned out to describe the raid on Husseiniya as well. It was a bust.

The column of Bradleys reached the hamlet late at night. "Ramp down!" came the order from O'Day, and a Bradley's back door swung to the ground like a drawbridge. Date palms appeared in the pale fluorescent lights from silent houses. Market stalls built of mud lined the dusty road. A dog yapped from afar.

Infantrymen scrambled from the Bradleys. The first report from a forward patrol crackled across O'Day's radio. Just a woman and 14 kids here, the voice said.

And so it went: no rebels, no weapons. "Looks like we got some bad information," O'Day said.

The operation should have ended quickly, but early on, one Bradley had rolled into a canal. It sank until only its turret stuck above the water line. Soldiers struggled out the back hatch and flailed to reach the shore against the force of the current and the weight of their flak jackets. They all escaped unhurt. "I can't even swim," said Spec. Edison Ybay. "I learned quick."

Not long after, another Bradley that was going to check out a car spotted on a side road slipped into a shallow irrigation ditch. The soldiers inside waded out through knee-deep water.

It took about six hours for big, armored cranes to arrive and extricate the pair of stuck fighting vehicles.

The troops detained 13 Iraqi men, none of whose names matched those on a list of suspected insurgents provided to the soldiers. Nonetheless, the detainees were kept bound with plastic handcuffs for the entire 12-hour operation. The experience left the villagers unhappy. "You know, we used to like the Americans when they first came. How can we like this?" asked Kamel Alawi, one of the detainees.

Sexton told the Iraqis that any property damage -- Bradleys burst through some walls marking off date groves to get to the houses -- would be compensated. He concurred with O'Day that the intelligence leading them to Husseiniya was faulty. He had sensed something was wrong early on, and told Bradley drivers not to ram any of the houses in efforts to ease soldiers' entry.

"It just didn't smell right," he said explaining that decision. "If we had breached the walls, we would have had dead children. I'm just glad no one got hurt and we didn't have any drowned soldiers, either. Things could have been a lot worse."

The unit returned to the barren field in Karbala early Sunday, then the same morning to their base in Baghdad to await another call.