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U.S. Troops Uneasy as Rules Shift in Iraq
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Ivanov arrived at his informant's house shortly after midnight. The man was sitting on a sofa, leaning over a small space heater, watching "Black Hawk Down," a movie about the 1993 killings of U.S. soldiers during an operation in Mogadishu, Somalia. Ivanov asked the man if his target had weapons at home. The man said he didn't know. Ivanov's men stared blankly at the screen as the last American soldier was beaten to death by fighters.
Having obtained little usable information, Ivanov decided to call it a night. He split up with the Iraqi sergeant and began walking back to the American outpost.
At 1:55 a.m., as the infantrymen were crossing a street where U.S. troops have been targeted with roadside bombs in recent weeks, Rad, the interpreter, saw a red blinking light on a billboard.
"That's an EFP!" he exclaimed, referring to a type of armor-piercing roadside bomb.
The soldiers scurried inside a nearby building. They searched the occupants of a dwelling and took fingerprint and iris scans. Ivanov radioed the station and gave troops there a description of the suspected roadside bomb and his unit's location. The device appeared to have been placed to target the turret of an armored vehicle, a tactic extremists have used in recent months to kill soldiers inside the new, mine-resistant trucks the Pentagon purchased.
Ivanov's men stood behind a wall, using laser beams on their rifles to wave off vehicles headed toward the suspected bomb.
Two hours later, a U.S. bomb squad determined that the device was a dud. Ivanov's men, cold and sleep-deprived, walked in silence back to the outpost, where a brand-new Iraqi flag now flies.
