Odyssey of Frustration

Adrenaline surged for more reasons than one as the team boarded twin CH-46 helicopters. They were beating their way north to a front, where militiamen loyal to Hussein still fought with unexpected ferocity. Allison spent his early career in field artillery, and Deal, his executive officer, logged years in tanks. But Team 3 was not built for combat. "They kept saying 'permissive' and 'benign' " to describe the expected work environment, Allison recalled. "They didn't say anything about people shooting at us."

There was no shooting that day. What the team found when it landed was a lone Marine in a field.

"He informed us that he had what he thought was anthrax in his pocket," Allison reported later that day to his superiors.

The Marine was "CBRN officer" for his tank battalion, responsible for assessing chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazards. Clearing a building, one of his squads had found unidentified powder and called for help.

The Marine officer had collected a sample and taped it inside a glass jar. He wrapped the jar into the sturdy brown cover of a "meal, ready-to-eat." He taped that, too. Then he sealed the bundle in a Ziploc bag, stuffed it into his trousers and waited for the helicopters to land.

A suspicious-looking document in Arabic accompanied the package. Handwritten on lined paper, the manuscript included three sketches of laboratory flasks. Allison turned to Smith. Together they performed a rapid field assay, using reactive papers known as "bio-tickets." Nothing happened. A second test confirmed it: no anthrax, and no other toxin described in the assay's book of codes.

Still curious, team members took the Arabic manuscript back to Camp Commando for translation.

"It ended up being some kid's high school science project," Deal said.

Eight days later, the arms hunters saddled up again. Marines had fought their way past an ammunition storage site near Nasiriyah and reported "indications" of chemical weapons. Details were vague, and a day elapsed before Team 3 got word.

A BBC television crew shot video at the site on March 29, finding it abandoned but largely undisturbed. By the time Team 3 arrived on March 30, looters had left a shambles. There was no way to guess whether ordnance was gone. The team could only take readings of what remained. Using a $ 16,000 flame spectrometer, resembling a slate gray steam iron with digital display, they found no trace of nerve or blister weapons.

Nasiriyah became an unhappy template for Team 3's search. The invading forces came and went, and Iraqis found opportunity in chaos. Sometimes looters stripped a building to its bare frame -- pulling even sockets and wiring from the walls. Sometimes they burned what they could not carry. Often enough, by the time Team 3 reached a site, someone had done both.

"We should have known from our experience of past wars that this would happen," said Christopher Kowal, who last week left the his military intelligence assignment and an assignment on Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie, one of Team 3's fellow search units. "A huge amount of intelligence just walked away."