Any Day Now...

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No one is foolish enough to believe that all Iraqi soldiers will be so meek. One day last week a platoon with the 101st Airborne spent the morning learning how to treat massive chest wounds. But even as the soldiers were taught the grim procedures for stopping acute blood loss--apply a tourniquet first; administer fluids afterward--they suffered more from the anxious tedium of waiting for war. Some of the guys got into a separation-of-church-and-state debate; others complained about missing March Madness; some looked forward to this week, when the ammunition arrives and live-fire training begins. The most interesting discussion was about whether snipers should shoot the wild dogs that roam the perimeters of the camp. The brigade commander nixed the idea; the dogs are necessary to keep the rats at bay.

At Camp Grizzly in the northern desert, Marines spend the sunset hour of most days throwing horseshoes they've made by bending tent spikes. Some do chin-ups on a 2-by-4 hung from a wooden frame next to their tent. Or they just relax by lounging on a wooden bench they built. Behind the bench, a sign on a pole reads BUS STOP. "What bus are you waiting for?" someone asks. "We're thinking of a loop," says Lance Corporal Josh Hotvet, 21, a Marine Reservist from Albany, N.Y. "Baghdad and then home."

In a tent in a nearby camp, a baby-faced recruit helped Gunnery Sergeant John Bass install power and a light. "Good job," Bass told his young charge. "You're a man waiting to happen." In the coming days, boys on both sides of the border are likely to become men in an instant. --With reporting by Jim Lacey and Alex Perry/south of the Iraqi border