Stryker Brigade News

Firing up a radio, Burns orders two Iraqis from one pickup to hop into the back of the Stryker. He tells Pennington to catch that truck.

The Stryker roars to life and speeds down a steep hill and across the sandy wastes at more than 40 miles per hour, churning up a cloud of dust that reflects the full moon. The Iraqis in the back are grinning and shaking like honeymooners on a vibrating bed. Burns loses sight of the suspect truck.

It was probably nothing. Probably not an insurgent with a bedful of rocket-propelled grenades. Probably not a budding suicide bomber en route to some crowded marketplace in downtown Mosul. Probably nothing to disturb the hard-earned peace of this cold desert, the front door to one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq, a desert patrolled by just 300 Americans from wet, green Washington State.

Back up the hill they go. Back to their pickup go the Iraqis. Back to sleep goes the soldier in the rear.

Some time later, Sergeant Tracy Toliver spots something with glowing eyes and several legs. "It's a dog!" he says.

*For the past few months, the worst place in Iraq has been Mosul. Violent death is only part of the equation. A certain number of suicide bombings are required. But it's more than just the number of attacks times the average body count, divided by the time span.

Wherever you get a really bad feeling just walking the streets, wherever the walls of your barracks seem to curl in around you, wherever the food tastes wrong, the air seems stale, and the local fauna looks, well, apprehensive, that is the place. That is where you don't want to get deployed. That is where you don't want your helicopter dropping in for gas. If you're an American soldier on a bus somewhere—in Kuwait, maybe—and some rear-echelon type asks you where you're headed, and you say, "[Fill in the blank]," and they wince and say, "That sucks"—that's when you know.

There's a reasonable explanation for the problems in Mosul. For much of 2004, Falluja was an insurgent stronghold. In November, the U.S. military all but leveled the city. The smart insurgents hit the road, north along the main highway to Mosul, an impoverished, ethnically divided city.

They decided to stop along the way, in the Sunni bastion of Qayyarah and its surrounding towns and villages, collectively known as Q-West to Americans.