What Grimes did not know was that shrapnel had penetrated all the way to the back of Colgan's head. By the TIME the chopper reached the hospital, Colgan was brain-dead. He was kept alive by a respirator while Rabena, who had driven to the hospital with Ilardi, completed paperwork that promoted him to first lieutenant and gave him a "medical retirement"—a step that allows his family to receive more generous benefits. Ilardi kissed Colgan on the chest. "We won't give up the chase," he said.

When Whiteside woke up the next morning, his fingernails were still stained with dried blood. Before the platoon went to bed, Grimes had told them Colgan was in stable condition. "I thought he'd be just fine," Whiteside remembers. At 8:30 a.m., the platoon was told to fall into the horseshoe formation that commanders use to disclose personal information to troops. Captain Mike Kielpinski, the Tomb Raiders' battery commander, sobbed as he broke the news of Colgan's death. Talimeliyor ran back to his cot, disconsolate. "I didn't read my Bible," he remembers. "I didn't wash my clothes. I just wanted to lay in my bed." Whiteside recalls, "I cried for the first day and a half." The rest of the platoon went numb. Says Beverly: "Everything just died. All sounds stopped."

Rabena ordered that the platoon not be assigned patrols for four days. Schermerhorn acknowledges that he needed TIME to overcome his rage. "I wanted to be the first one to kick down a door. I wanted to find the mother____ers. But the one thing we can do is honor his memory. He'd rather we do that than go on a bloodthirsty rampage." A few days after the battalion's memorial service for Colgan, Rabena gathered Whiteside, Schermerhorn and Buxton and phoned Colgan's wife Jill. She asked them about her husband's final hours. Buxton gave her straight answers but omitted gruesome details, telling her that Colgan had been conscious and looking around but not that he had lost an eye. Jill started to break down, then paused and regained her composure. Whiteside told her, "I never liked officers, but I liked your husband." Jill laughed.

The initial shock of Colgan's death has abated, but the soldiers still have to remind themselves that he is gone. His name remains on the satellite-phone bill the platoon updates on a wall of the hooch. "Sometimes I think that I'll wake up," Whiteside says, "and that he's going to walk through the door and get his coffee and watch SportsCenter. And he'll say good morning, and I'll ask him how he's doing. And then I realize, that's never going to happen again."

OPERATION COLGAN'S REVENGE
Dec. 2: A desert chill cuts through the air as the Tomb Raiders prepare for a pre-dawn raid. The target house belongs to a man called Abu Taha, a former officer in the Fedayeen Saddam militia who is suspected of organizing attacks against the Americans. Since early November, intelligence gained from informants and detainees has yielded a list of 20 individuals in the area who the battalion's commanders believe are involved in financing and coordinating roadside bombings. The effort to hunt them down is dubbed Colgan's Revenge. But few members of the platoon are confident they will find Colgan's killers. "To know you got the guy who planted that ied—that piece will never be available to us," says Buxton.

In the month since Colgan's death, the soldiers have been slow to warm to his replacement, Van Engelen, a stolid, tobacco-spitting 24-year-old who lacks his predecessor's charisma. "I still ain't used to him," mutters Whiteside. "There's a difference of experience." Buxton has become a more active, though neurotic leader. Tonight he spends half an hour drawing up different seating arrangements in the three humvees. As the Tomb Raiders grease their guns and pack flashlights and zip-ties (for cuffing hands) into their flak vests, Winston, the platoon's weathered senior sergeant, briefs them on Abu Taha, a middle-aged, overweight man who may be a "major supplier" of weapons to the insurgents. The room falls silent as Winston outlines evacuation procedures in the event that the troops encounter resistance at the house. Since Colgan's death, Winston says, the platoon's anxiety has grown. Every piece of trash now looks like a hidden bomb.

"Everyone is afraid," he says. "If they're not, they're lying. People are cringing." Some soldiers have turned to God. Whiteside reads Scripture and recites the Lord's Prayer before leaving the gates. On the day of Colgan's death, Kamont, a lapsed Baptist who admits to once having been a heavy drinker, flew back to Germany on home leave and told his wife he wants their 2-year-old daughter to grow up in a religious household. "When something like this happens," he says, "you need to have someone to pray to."

The loss of Colgan has tested another kind of faith—the belief that their mission in Iraq is worth the ultimate sacrifice. After arriving in Baghdad, Schermerhorn sent a tape-recorded message to his mother Robin Ann. "We're over here for a cause! There's a whole nation here that knows nothing of freedom," he said. "And I believe that what we're doing here—regardless of our lack of ability to find weapons of mass destruction—is the right thing." Now he's not so sure. "It's hard to see headway," he says. "The same guys who are waving at you and saying ÔGood Bush' are firing at us. I'd like to see these people enjoy what I have on a daily basis. But I don't know that anything we've accomplished since we've been here was worth the L.T.'s life or—thinking about it—my own."

The raid on the house of Abu Taha kicks off just before 2 a.m. Driving without lights, the platoon moves past the Abu Hanifa mosque and pulls up in front of a darkened one-story structure. A three-man "breach team" hurdles the front wall and attempts to force its way into the house. It takes Schermerhorn 10 tries before he finally smashes open the metal door with a battering ram. In the front room, the breach team finds a woman sitting calmly on the floor with her three children. She identifies herself as Abu Taha's wife and says she has not seen him in a year. The soldiers search the house but find no sign of an adult male. Finally, Van Engelen apologizes and tells the woman the Army will replace her front door, and will give her one three times as nice if she brings her husband by the compound. She thanks him. "My daughters gave your soldiers flowers," she says. "We love the Americans very much."

Later that day, just after 8 p.m., a mortar round lands about 500 yds. west of the palace's front gate. Within five minutes the Tomb Raiders load up the humvees and head out in search of a blue BMW, which roof guards spotted driving away from where the mortars were launched. After stopping a few cars but finding no sign of the attackers, the soldiers make their way back toward the center of Adhamiya and eventually pull up near the main gas station.

The place is in meltdown. Dozens of drivers waiting to fill their tanks are out of their cars shouting at the station owner, who has shut down the pumps to prevent an elderly man at the front of the line from filling a jerrican with gas. Coalition authorities have discouraged this practice because it is popular with black marketeers. The man says he has written permission from the Ministry of Health to fill his can, and Winston and Van Engelen approach the owner to sort out the mess. While two Iraqi police officers watch impassively, the rest of the troops point their guns at the drivers, who quickly return to their cars. Van Engelen instructs the owner to fill the man's jerrican with one pump and begin filling the motorists' tanks with another. The owner agrees but begs the troops to stay. "We want your help to restore order," he says. "If you leave, I will close the station." Van Engelen refuses. "You have no choice," he says. "We're leaving. You have to stay open." The owner nods reluctantly, just before the power goes out.

SELLING A MESSAGE
Dec. 5: Sergeant Aparicio is a popular guy. As his vehicle rolls through a graceful old neighborhood on the northern edge of Adhamiya, hordes of children chase after him, grabbing for the U.S.-produced Arabic newspapers and leaflets he is passing out to locals through his window. As head of the reservist psychological-operations team attached to the Tomb Raiders' battalion, Aparicio is responsible for canvassing the area, handing out pro-U.S. literature and listening to the complaints of residents. When he stops at a teahouse in a peaceful, predominantly ShiÔite area of Adhamiya, locals surround him and deluge him with complaints about the lack of electricity, shortage of medical supplies, chronic unemployment and high price of gas. Aparicio listens patiently, jotting down each petition in his notebook and promising to report them to his superiors. The crowds thank him and wish him well. As Aparicio climbs back into his humvee, he shakes his head. "We're going to hear the same thing all day," he says. "It's just a circle. You can never give enough."

The mood on the street darkens as Aparicio's convoy heads down Imam Street, the Sunni heart of Adhamiya. "You are animals!" a shop owner shouts at the soldiers. At one point Aparicio hands a newspaper to a well-dressed elderly man, who looks at it, tears it up and tosses it back at the humvee. Aparicio shrugs. "The people who are going to be won over have been won over," he says. "We've been here so long that we're not going to get anyone new on our side." But for all their doubts, the Tomb Raiders, like much of the military in Iraq, are determined to finish what the U.S. has started. "We're here. We definitely can't leave," says Whiteside. "Things would be a lot worse if we just pulled out."

IT'S TOO QUIET
Dec. 10: A little more than a month after Colgan's death, an eerie calm has settled over Adhamiya. Across Baghdad, the number of ieds hitting U.S. convoys has plummeted. "It's too quiet," says Captain Mark Manno, who took over from Kielpinski as the Tomb Raiders' battery commander, during a meeting with his three platoon leaders. "I just feel they're going to try something."

In response to a mortar attack the previous night, the battalion commanders decide to flood Adhamiya with troops from four batteries to deny the insurgents territory to fire from. The Tomb Raiders are told to move out at 8 p.m., around the TIME when mortar attacks typically occur. It is on the return trip from this mission that Jenks, Beverly and the two TIME journalists are wounded.

BACK INTO THE BREACH
Dec. 12: Beverly and Jenks are recovering from surgery in the intensive-care ward of the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. In a way, they seem as boyish as they did before the attack. While a dvd of Lord of the Rings plays on Beverly's laptop, Jenks laments that his PlayStation 2 console is on its way to Iraq just as he is being sent back to Germany. Both show visitors plastic cups that contain shrapnel fragments removed from their bodies. There is no bitterness or self-pity. Says Beverly: "You've always got to expect the worst, and I'm glad that's not what happened." Jenks is more frustrated about leaving Iraq so soon after arriving. "I didn't have a chance to do anything positive or productive," he says. For Beverly, the teenager who never expected to see combat, the attack strengthened his conviction that his service in Iraq had purpose. "I did good. I did good things for a lot of people," he says. "I don't know about the reasons we came here, but I'm glad we did."

The Tomb Raiders are now stretched thin. With Beverly likely to remain outside of Iraq for the rest of the deployment and Whiteside preparing for reassignment to another unit, only six soldiers who were part of the platoon when it was constituted in Kuwait will still be in country in 2004. For missions outside the wire, the Tomb Raiders borrow soldiers from other platoons, but they have to carry out their routine duties—monitoring the radio, maintaining vehicles, staffing the battalion's Internet cafŽ, manning guard positions on the roof—with fewer soldiers, straining their combat effectiveness. "Maybe we don't have enough personnel," Van Engelen says. "Maybe if we had more, they'd get more rest. Maybe they'd be more alert and energized when they went out." Tonight is a test of their fortitude. "We're trying something different," Van Engelen tells the Tomb Raiders as they gather around a gray satellite map of Adhamiya, preparing for their first patrol since the grenade attack. "So far our footprint has been big. This has gotten us into trouble." Van Engelen believes that the platoon will draw less attention without the humvees. The soldiers can hardly remember when they last did a foot patrol of any kind, and this will be the first one they have ever done at night. Van Engelen wants the soldiers to walk in a cigar-shaped formation, rather than the typical V, so they can stay in the shadows on one side of the street. He tells them that if they spot anything suspicious, they have approval to shoot. "I'm telling you right now," he says, "if you can ID the target, you don't have to wait for your buddy to do the same thing."

Whiteside pumps hip-hop on his CD player while he screws a flashlight onto his M-4 rifle. Talimeliyor tries to untwist the straps of his backpack, which is loaded with a 6-lb. radio. "We've never done a dismounted at night," Buxton says, to no one in particular. The soldiers line up, cinching down their vests and adjusting their packs, checking the action on their rifles. Then they open the door and head out onto the street.

WHO WE ARE
Dec. 14: Like all the other American soldiers in Iraq, the members of the platoon have been tempered by the fires of the occupation, the raw emotions of war now forged into something harder and more durable. The news of Saddam's capture on this day is a jolt of euphoria for the Tomb Raiders, but it does little to alter their cool assessment of the perils ahead. "This country is still up for grabs, as far as these people are concerned," says Schermerhorn. "It's still going to be crazy around here for us."

Ultimately, that's where you discover the heroism of the 120,000 soldiers serving in Iraq today—not so much in their battlefield bravery or the firmness of their resolve as in their acceptance of uncertainty and the courage of their restraint. Buxton, the veteran of the first Gulf War, sits on his cot inside the Tomb Raiders' hooch. As he struggles to express his thoughts, it becomes clear that the eloquence lies in his frustration. "There is nobody to shoot back at. That's every soldier's biggest complaint," he says. "But we are not cold-blooded killers. We are not going to kill innocent civilians. That's just a part of who we are." He thinks back to the grenade attack. "A couple of us saw some guys running away and thought about pulling the trigger. But when you see a guy running through a crowd, do you spray the crowd to get the guy? If in a situation like that you can control your impulse for revenge, then that means you are fighting for something larger."

Buxton pauses. "There's potential here in Iraq. There's also stuff that needs to be done. It's slow going. But what if we did just leave? Would we really have accomplished anything?" he says. "I don't want to come back here a third time." Outside, the air is crackling with celebratory gunfire. "That reminds me," Buxton says. He gets up from his cot, walks to his door and draws a red X through the picture of Saddam.

—With reporting by Brian Bennett/Baghdad, Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles, Eli Sanders/Kent and Maggie Sieger/Chicago

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