On Baghdad Patrol, a Vigilant Eye on Iraqi Police

Getting out of his Humvee, Shields found one Iraqi dead in a passing open-sided truck, his head flipped onto his back. Four Humvees back from Shields's vehicle, the soldier in the driver's seat nursed a mangled, bleeding foot.

One passenger in the targeted Humvee, 1st Sgt. Larry Philpot, lay sprawled on the ground, eyes closed. At first glance, Shields took him for dead. Another passenger, Staff Sgt. Robert Cortez, limped by, a spear of steel wire jutting out of the flesh of his foot. A brown line rimmed the teeth of the stunned men from the battered Humvee, trademark of the smoke that filled the vehicle.

Shields's men doused the flames, put the pieces of the Iraqi bystander in a body bag, held their fire against another anguished Iraqi rushing to the dead man, called for the Iraqi army, and treated the wounded.

The convoy inched back to its base near Baghdad's airport a little more than an hour after heading out. The 2nd Platoon dropped off their wounded and grabbed a quick meal in the dining hall, frowning in annoyance at the fellow troops around them cheering a boxing match on TV. Then they went back out on patrol, a lightly concussed Philpot among them.

Retrieving the Dead

Hours later, his night of patrols and house searches nearing an end, Shields received a message from the base: Local police had been told of four corpses dumped in the streets and needed help picking them up.

The 2nd Platoon drove to the police station, where the Iraqis, most of them Shiite, were holed up behind watchtowers and blast walls in a heavily Sunni neighborhood. Inside, the policemen milled about in baggy T-shirts and untucked uniforms. They offered Shields bites of a falafel sandwich, and excuses.

They were tired, they were nervous, their cars were broken down, their friends had been killed lately and they were in mourning, the policemen told Shields, shaking their heads and expressing regrets over the impossibility of going out into the Sunni neighborhood at night to retrieve the bodies.

When Shields located the commander, Maj. Ahmed Mohammed, it gradually became clear that the police were scared and wanted the Americans to get the four corpses.

Emotion rippled across Shields's face in a wave of clenching and unclenching muscles.

"You do realize," Shields said, unclamping his mouth and leaning forward over the slight Iraqi police major, "that this is your job?"

"How do you expect Americans to help you when you won't do anything?" Shields asked, before reaching a parking-lot accord that U.S. soldiers would escort a single pickup truck of police to fetch the bodies and come back.

Trolling the streets slowly, following a tip whose source they did not specify, the police found the first man lying face up on the sidewalk, his face covered by a splayed cardboard box, his right hand still clutching a length of thin wire. The police loaded his rigid body into the back of the pickup like a coffee table.

Three more bodies lay under blankets and plastic sheeting by a generator and by one of the felled palm trees that people in neighborhoods across Baghdad now use to barricade streets. Much of the internal organs of one bullet-riddled man stayed behind when police lifted him into the truck. Another had been shot in the right eye. All had been killed where they fell. They lay in pools of blood -- in the case of the man shot in the eye, a copious pothole of blood -- dotted with bullet cartridges.

Murmuring Iraqi policemen surrounded the pickup truck when the convoy returned after midnight to the parking lot, illuminated only by light spilling out of the police station. The Iraqis pointed out signs of torture on the bodies. "Let's go," Shields said.