[lbo-talk] "I'm always afraid"....

[Stephen Philion]

They are never frozen by fear, they said, but the danger is never far from
their thoughts.


Hicks said he feels he is always "waiting for when it is going to happen."


Sgt. Randy Smith (news - external web site), 25, of Hurricane, W.Va., the
leader of Hicks' unit, Platoon 2, Squad 3 of the engineers battalion, said
he knows "that any minute anything bad can happen," but he tries not to
think about it.


For Ernesto Sainz, 32, the squad's gunner, the night is the worst time.





"I'm always afraid," said Sainz of El Paso, Texas. "That is when you can't
see and it's only me, sticking out of the Humvee."

Danger lurks in Iraq

The soldiers talked about the decline in roadside bombings lately but said
the ones they have come across recently seem more sophisticated and harder
to spot. They talked about the mortars fired by rebels that fall every so
often on their base without causing much damage.

They discussed their unease about not knowing much Arabic beyond a few
phrases and orders, the lack of translators when they are out on patrol and
the dismay they feel when they can't get their message across.

"You'll get a few guys who don't want to cooperate and you will have to
rough them up to get their attention," Smith said. "It's frustrating. An
ambulance will be coming through, and you will have to stop it."

Hicks felt a different kind of frustration. The battalion had helped
establish military sites when coalition troops first arrived, then shifted
to checking Iraqi power and sewage facilities, and later renovating schools
when major combat was declared over. Lately, though, much of their work has
been patrols in Baghdad.

"I was hoping more for the hearts-and-minds work, for more of the
humanitarian side of things," said Hicks, who had worked in a program that
provides water sports therapy for persons with special needs in San
Francisco before he joined the military.

The soldiers remarked that many of the new arrivals are young and
inexperienced while those who have been in Iraq for eight months or more
feel like seasoned veterans. They also talked about being ready if something
happened during the holidays.

In an elevated outpost overlooking a road running beside the base, Sgt.
Damon Barouch, 29, of Grand Junction, Colo., watched a white van that had
cruised by the base several times. Suspicious, he relayed the word forward
to another checkpoint and got a message back that it might be a taxi.

 From the far distance came the thud of a mortar being fired somewhere in
Baghdad.

"I'm not taking any chance today, for sure," Barouch said. "They may think
we are not ready, but we are."

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