A Unit's Fitful Year at War

To the veterans -- retired generals, former platoon sergeants, winners of the Medal of Honor -- Iraq was so different from Vietnam as to be scarcely recognizable.

From 1966 to 1971, the 5th Battalion had operated from improvised firebases dynamited out of the Vietnamese jungle; the soldiers moved on foot and in Huey helicopters. While out on patrol, the soldiers, roughly 80 percent of them draftees, often slept in burrowed trenches with dimensions of, as they put it, "2-by-2-by-you."

Perhaps the main difference between then and now was in the scope and ferocity of the killing: During its six years in Vietnam, the 5th Battalion lost 363 men, often in company- and battalion-size firefights with the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong irregulars. Through Monday, the 5th Battalion had lost seven soldiers in Balad in more than 11 months of fighting, six from one platoon.

After visiting the reactivated unit in Balad, retired Col. Charlie Baker wrote in a dispatch to his hometown paper: "If the enemy was hard to see in the early days of Vietnam, they are invisible in Iraq. I got there on April Fool's Day, and left in the middle of May. There was no war going on that I could see."

Eddie Ratcliffe, 59, a former sergeant from St. Simons Island, Ga., who had done three combat tours in Vietnam, asked the soldiers if he could send them anything. The soldiers, who lived in trailers and standing buildings on a base with an Internet cafe, ESPN and, occasionally, steak and lobster, responded: "Sheets."

"Is this even a war?" Ratcliffe said he wondered.

Ratcliffe sponsored 1st Lt. Lamarius Workman, a stocky, 30-year-old platoon leader from Brunswick, Ga. Workman commanded Charlie Company's 3rd Platoon, a group of about two dozen also known as Combat Blue.

"I don't even know that it is a war," Workman said one August morning in his dank room, its chipped concrete walls covered with satellite images, maps and pinup calendars. He described Iraq as "a long, dull day" -- twice-a-day, four-hour patrols to search for insurgents he almost never saw.

Asked if the Americans were winning, Workman chuckled: "Hell, I don't know. I don't know what winning the war is."

'Don't Blow, Don't Blow'

Out on the flat expanses, along the rivers and canals, on the darkened roads and endless patrols, in the quiet of the battalion's solitary outpost, the war in Iraq possessed its own terrifying rhythms of violence.

On Feb. 13, while patrolling at 4:30 a.m., a Humvee from Workman's Combat Blue platoon rolled into a freezing canal. Three soldiers and an Air Force firefighter drowned. Workman emerged from the water covered in frost and nearly incoherent. Nahvi shimmied down a drainage pipe to pull out Workman and four other soldiers, whom Nahvi then treated for hypothermia on the banks of the canal.

Insurgents frequently shelled Camp Paliwoda, the 5th Battalion's headquarters, with mortars and rockets. Sgt. Christopher Taylor of Opelika, Ala., who was attached to the 5th Battalion, was killed July 24 when an 82mm shell exploded near him as he walked between his artillery position and a bunker.