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AN NASIRYAH, IRAQ

Weary Iraq POWs content in capture

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff, 3/24/2003

N NASIRYAH, Iraq -- As rounds from US howitzers thundered around An Nasiryah early Saturday morning, many artillery soldiers got their first look at an enemy who, until then, had been only a coordinate on a radar-linked battle grid. Five Iraqi soldiers sat on their haunches, knees bent up to their chins, on the sun-baked mud outside this strategic Euphrates River city. Voluntary prisoners of war, the men sat silent, 20 feet apart, with a bottle of water placed on the ground before each of them. They looked gaunt, tired, and compliantly resigned to what lay ahead.

Ali Table, their sergeant, had his hands tied behind him as two US soldiers toting M-16s kept guard, slightly uneasy with a task that is not usually the role of an artillery soldier.

Table, 36, a father of three from Baghdad, said he and his men surrendered a few hours earlier yesterday because they were terrified of the death that rains from the sky.

''We no fight pilots,'' said Table, whose neatly trimmed hair and pressed olive uniform set him apart from his four subordinates. ''We are not asking for that.''

They walked toward Bravo Battery after dawn, approaching the camp through a field of grain with hands raised, white towels clearly displayed. They carried no weapons, were searched, given food and water, and told to sit on the ground until the artillerymen could hand them off to someone else.

The prisoners seemed relieved to be out of the war, said Sergeant Sam Chance, 28, of Apex. N.C. ''Yeah, I'd be glad, too,'' he said.

Chance's unit, the Third Brigade of the Third Infantry, had pounded the 11th Iraqi Division throughout the night and achieved all its objectives with only one US soldier out of 5,000 wounded in the fight.

Table ensured he was not one of the undetermined Iraqi dead and wounded from the airstrikes, artillery fire, and two infantry assaults. In the end, Table said, he had no desire to die for Saddam Hussein. ''I no fight for him,'' Table said. ''From me to you, I am very, very tired.''