DANGER IN THE SHADOWS
Nov. 25: Marquette Whiteside is standing up in the gunner's hatch, swinging his machine gun in the direction of the Iraqis who stop to watch as the Americans drive by. Poised atop the armored humvee, he looks almost carefree, a broad smile fixed to his face as he sings to himself and tosses children candy on this gray afternoon. But that buoyancy conceals vigilance. As a gunner, he has the job of scanning the roads and rooftops for ambushers. "I smile at everyone," he says, "but I'm constantly aware of my surroundings."

The two-vehicle convoy curls past the Adhamiya police station and heads north along the Tigris River, which bounds the neighborhood on two sides. Of the 88 sectors in Baghdad, Adhamiya is rated by the U.S. command among the six most dangerous for coalition forces. The 1.2-sq.-mi. area is home to 400,000 people, most of them Sunni Muslims. The anti-American graffiti that blankets the walls of neighborhood buildings attests to the strong resistance to the U.S. presence here. Spray- painted in Arabic and English, it reads, DOWN USA. LONG LIVE SADDAM. YES TO MARTYRDOM FOR THE SAKE OF IRAQ. "The majority of people seem all right," Whiteside says. "But it's like racism. Some people actually, truly hate us, and they're going to teach their kids the same thing."

Whiteside learned to shoot a gun as a teenager, rabbit hunting in Pine Bluff, Ark., during occasional visits by his father, a Navy veteran. Whiteside joined the Army in February 2001 after serving 45 days in jail because of unpaid traffic tickets. "It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," he says. "I was locked up and couldn't do anything for my daughter. God opened my eyes and made me realize I wasn't doing anything with my life. In the military, I can't quit."

Though Whiteside says he thrives on the rush of being the eyes of the platoon, he frets about the threats he can't see. When the Tomb Raiders roll out for a night patrol six hours later, Whiteside is tenser than before, gripping his gun tightly as the platoon careers through dark, empty alleys running with sewage. "I hate it when the lights go out," he says, staring down a street that is barely the width of a humvee. "You don't know what's going to happen. If they sat down and planned it, they could block this road and just light us up." The platoon stops on a largely deserted road along the river and sets up a checkpoint. After fruitlessly searching a dozen cars for weapons, the Tomb Raiders head home. Whiteside unloads his gear and lays his machine gun next to his cot, which sits below a gallery of pictures of half-clad women clipped from magazines. "It's like Groundhog Day," he says. "It's the same thing every day. You just don't know whether you're going to live or die."

A HOOCH CALLED HOME
Nov. 26: The toilet is driving Sky Schermerhorn crazy. It's bad enough that the bathroom at the base is shared by 10 G.I.s with varying standards of hygiene plus half a dozen Iraqis assigned to train with the platoon. What gets Schermerhorn is that no one else seems to mind that every 15 minutes the toilet stops up or floods, and when it does, no one else tends to it. Schermerhorn is the platoon's most garrulous soldier, a pudgy specialist with downcast eyes who joined the Army at 27 out of a desire to "protect freedom and democracy." Inside the two-story house where the Tomb Raiders live, Schermerhorn scrutinizes the habits of the other soldiers, looking for signs of lassitude. Today he decides to send a message about the toilet. your mother does not live here, he scrawls on the bathroom's tile wall. the f___ing toilet is broken. "If a guy's unable to flush a toilet correctly," Schermerhorn says, "what is he going to miss when we're out there?"

As Schermerhorn speaks, Kamont and Winston recline on the secondhand couches that adorn the platoon's common area. They stare at a television hooked up to a portable dvd player that serves up a steady stream of war movies, sci fi, horror and porn. In front of the TV is a coffee table littered with picked-over ready-to-eat meals, Tootsie Rolls and water bottles filled with tobacco juice. Heat comes from three portable radiators. The platoon's house—the hooch, as the G.I.s call it—lies within the perimeter of the Azimiya palace compound, built by Saddam in the mid-1990s for his oldest son Uday. The portion of the palace not destroyed by U.S. missiles now functions as the 2nd Battalion's Tactical Operations Center. During the summer, the troops filled the swimming pool and built a sand volleyball court on the grounds. Lieut. Colonel William Rabena, the battalion's stout commanding officer, sleeps in an egg-shaped room dubbed the Love Shack, on a circular canopied bed.

After inspecting the bathroom, Schermerhorn writes his name on a tile wall in the common area that serves as a reservation sheet for the platoon's single Internet terminal. Most members of the platoon communicate daily with family members through e-mail. The soldiers recently bought a webcam and connected it to the house laptop. The Tomb Raiders' hooch can be eerily antisocial, largely because today's G.I. can spend so much TIME in front of TV and computer screens. Schermerhorn spends the next hour instant messaging his girlfriend of three months, Nicole, a German he met while based in Giessen. The two speak three times a week on a satellite phone, and Schermerhorn tape-records 90-minute soliloquies for her when he is on guard duty. But he doesn't tell her everything. "I have to be cautious to preserve her sanity," he says. "If she knew what we did every day, she couldn't sleep at night."

FAMILY THAT RAIDS TOGETHER
Nov. 27: The platoon lives in two worlds—one beyond the steel coils that drape the compound, where the soldiers rely on one another to survive, and one "inside the wire," where they struggle to find space of their own. Today, to fill up the downtime between patrols, Beverly surfs the Internet for information on eArmyU, the military's online college program. Beverly describes himself as "the opposite of the typical Army recruit." He loves the soft rock of Sting and devours fantasy novels in his free time. When he joined the Army in 2002, two days after his 18th birthday, he wasn't looking for combat. "I asked the Army recruiter what he could do for me in terms of college. He said it would be free," he says. "But I didn't know I'd be paying for it in this way." Beverly's fresh-faced innocence makes him the target of barracks humor. "It's like a fraternity," he says, looking up at the writing on the hooch's walls, which feature unflattering allusions to his manhood. "If they don't screw with you, they don't like you," he says.

Actually, the soldiers rarely admit to any deep kinship. The ties that bind any platoon are fashioned by circumstance. "Out here, I'd take a bullet for any one of these guys," says Schermerhorn. "But there are probably three people here I'd give a s___ about keeping in touch with when I get home." Says Whiteside: "We get on each other's nerves because we see each other every day. But being stuck with someone 24/7, all there is to do is talk. Basically, it's like one big dysfunctional family."

Outside the wire, the dysfunction ends. On duty, "it's like butter, we're so smooth," says Whiteside. Everyone attributes the unit's cohesion to the man who became their platoon leader shortly after they arrived in Baghdad, Second Lieutenant Benjamin Colgan, 30. He was originally attached to the Tomb Raiders' battalion as a chemical and biological officer, responsible for managing preparations for unconventional attacks. But that position is a desk job, and Colgan, a 12-year veteran of the special forces, longed to be on the streets. "Use my skills," he told Rabena. At the time, the Tomb Raiders were leaderless, their original commander having remained in Germany for the birth of his first child, so Colgan got the job.

To break the ice with his new charges, Colgan made a point of hanging out in the platoon's common room—a rare occurrence in military culture, where social separation of officers from their soldiers is still the norm—and asked not to be addressed as sir. Says Talimeliyor: "When we first met, I thought, Man, this L.T., he talks a lot. I thought he was going to be annoying." A former enlisted man, Colgan could relate to the soldiers in his command. "He knew how to talk to the enlisted guys like normal people," says Whiteside.

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