Soldiering On, Even as Spirits Ebb

December 26, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

CAMP ST.-MÈRE, Iraq, Dec. 25 — When Bach's "Ave Maria" filtered softly out of Christmas communion at a makeshift Roman Catholic chapel on Thursday night, this forward base of the 82nd Airborne Division was an oasis of calm. Stars shimmered above as mess hall workers in Santa Claus hats noiselessly finished clearing the remnants of the soldiers' turkey dinner. Along with the soaring music from the Mass, only the steady hum of the base generators broke the silence.

But peace on earth is the stuff of hopes and prayer for the 3,300 men and women of Task Force Panther, at a cluster of three bases outside Falluja, ground zero of the insurgency in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein nearly nine months ago. At this base, Camp St.-Mère, as painfully as anywhere in Iraq, America is at war, and the burden falls mainly on the division's Third Brigade — the White Devils — who arrived here from Fort Bragg, N.C., four months ago.

As fought by these soldiers, this war has little in common with the glories memorialized in the camp's name, drawn from St.-Mère Église, the Normandy town where the 82nd's paratroopers dropped on D-Day in June 1944. Here, the enemy is shadowy and fleeting, and prepared to use any tactic, however brutal, to kill and wound Americans.

The division's territory is huge: all of western Iraq to the Syrian and Jordanian borders, hundreds of miles away. But the war's epicenter, for the Third Brigade, lies along the 80-mile axis from Baghdad to Ramadi. Falluja falls midway. This is the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, known as such for its domination by Sunni Muslims, who remain Mr. Hussein's strongest loyalists. About 90 percent of all insurgent attacks have been in this area.

In this war, soldiers here say, all pretense of honor is gone.

Along Highway 1, the expressway stretching westward past Falluja, shepherds wave at passing American convoys, then use doctored cellphones to detonate 122-millimeter artillery shells fashioned into crude bombs and buried in the median strip or under overpasses. Recently, troops at Camp St.-Mère said, a man sent his 8-year-old son to throw a grenade into the back of a Humvee, severely wounding an American soldier. The father and son were seized.

It is a conflict that saps at least some spirits. The American command in Baghdad has acknowledged at least 14 suicides among the 120,000 American troops in Iraq since Baghdad fell on April 9. But at Camp St.-Mère, most soldiers appear to think that the war is worth fighting. Most, too, seem to think it is winnable, although perhaps not for several years, longer if ordinary Iraqis keep denying the American-led coalition intelligence on the insurgents.

Others seem less sure, passing their days in their bunkrooms, keeping to themselves.

At the Christmas night Mass, the chaplain, Capt. Marian Piekarczyk, a 50-year-old Polish-born reservist from San Antonio, Tex., caught some of the hesitancy among the troops, the dispirited air. The chaplain told a sparse congregation of about 50 that, before the service, many soldiers had told him that they would not be in the mess hall, or at the chapel. "They told me, `I don't feel like celebrating Christmas.' But I told them, `We need to be celebrating Christmas more than ever before.' "

Christmas brought its share of attacks with plenty of heavy ordnance, despite Mr. Hussein's arrest and American raids that have netted hundreds of tons of stockpiled weapons. About 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Camp St.-Mère and Camp Volturno, three miles closer to Falluja, came under sustained mortar and rocket fire, but there were no injuries.

But in the pitch darkness outside the camps, the landscape seemed, briefly, like a scene from a Vietnam war. Amid the thud of mortars and the whistling of rockets, an AC-130 gunship circled over the desert, leaving a huge triple O-ring of vapor at 5,000 feet. A pilotless reconnaissance plane droned overhead. Helicopters clattered fast and low toward Falluja's dim lights on the horizon. High above, fighter-bombers patrolled.

A reporter's vehicle — a battered, Baghdad-registered Chevrolet — drove up a dirt road toward Camp St.-Mère, setting off alarms of a possible suicide bomber. Magnesium flares were fired from sentry posts, casting ghostly light as they drifted on miniature parachutes. The Iraqi driver, hoping to improve the Americans' view through their night-vision binoculars, halted at a zigzag of concrete barriers and switched off the car's lights. A man inside shouted: "We are Americans! Don't shoot!"

After soldiers cleared the vehicle and its four occupants, they said they had orders to fire on any unidentified vehicle approaching, if it behaved suspiciously and they could not establish that it posed no threat. "You were lucky," a staff sergeant said. "After the flares, the next rounds were high-explosive."

In the barracks, and out across Camp St.-Mère, Christmas Day was a time for cleaning weapons, re-packing gunny sacks, watching old Clint Eastwood films on DVD's and waiting in line at rows of computers and satellite telephones. The Army offers the world's cheapest satellite phone calls, about 5 cents a minute. On the computers, soldiers are limited to 20 minutes.

After three days of operations that captured nine suspected insurgent leaders, the soldiers at Camp St.-Mère were taking advantage of a lull. In one bunkroom, a group of men broke from a midmorning movie to talk about the war. From Delta Company, Second Battalion of the 504th Infantry Regiment, they, like many of the 82nd Airborne's troops, are combat-toughened soldiers, with experience in Afghanistan, Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkans.

These men, all but one in their late teens and 20's, identified themselves as part of the post-Sept. 11 generation, Americans called to duty in a newly dangerous world. They compared themselves, in the hazards they face, and the stakes for America, to their grandfathers' generation, men who fought in Africa, Europe and the Pacific in World War II.

"We've heard the older generation talk of us as Generation X, individuals who've grown up soft," said Sgt. Michael Gabel, 25, of Baton Rouge, La., whose grandfather fought in China in World War II.

"My platoon sergeant at boot camp said, `If your generation had to storm the beaches of Normandy, you couldn't do it.' I thought he might be right then, but now I disagree. Our generation hadn't been challenged yet, but here we are, and we're rising to meet the challenge."

The soldiers' talk abounded with accounts of near-misses, of grenades tossed out of seemingly friendly crowds, of roadside bombs exploding beside Humvees.

The long, quiet hours of Christmas provided new opportunities to debate the likely outcomes of the campaign against terrorism.

"The way we're going to beat the terrorists is to broker a long-term solution in the Middle East," Staff Sgt. Mark Bruzinski, 35, of Redding, Conn., said."Once you've created a wider peace in the Middle East, you take the wind out of the sails of people who want to destabilize things."

Specialist Jonathan Parisan, 22, from Pottsdown, Pa., said: "I agree with the fact that Saddam needed to be taken care of. But his regime is toppled now. From here on out, every American who's whacked, every guy who loses an arm or a leg here — I just think it's time the Iraqis took over."

Sergeant Gabel reached the opposite conclusion. "The extremists believe us to be infidels, they make us out to be the slaves of Israel," he said. "They hate us for their poverty, and for our power. Our enemies, if they don't see that American boots on the ground will duke it out at any cost, they'll go on elsewhere."

He thought a moment, and seemed suddenly less sure, as if weighing what the war — in which more than 460 American soldiers have died — could mean for him, and for thousands of others at bases like this one. "Some guys here say, `We've got to the place that we've been waiting for all our lives.' They love it," he said. "Other guys think it's like sitting at a PlayStation playing war, only for real. But the thing about a PlayStation is, when you die, you can hit the reset button."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company