Everyone is spent, whiling away the interminable hours between flights by watching Armed Forces television, or sleeping, or simply staring at a wreckage-fringed airport that had been the scene of some of the most ferocious fighting of the war.

I remember the night when dozens upon dozens of rockets were launched against the defenders of this place, dubbed Objective Lyons, the weapons' red trails lighting up the night as I watched from a desert perch on the west bank of the Euphrates River. I remember thinking that many people would not see the morning.

Now, as I joined a dozen other reporters in the wait for passage home, my thoughts could not shake the troops with whom I had lived for more than a month as an "embedded" journalist, the 630 artillery soldiers who had endured three weeks of sustained combat and had fought in almost every major engagement from Kuwait to Baghdad. They had just learned that their deployment would not end in days, as they had hoped, but in six to eight long weeks.

They were happy for me, bitterly disappointed for themselves, and grudgingly resigned to another assignment, on Baghdad's east bank of the Tigris River, where their exact role had not yet filtered through the ranks.

After setting foot on the Kuwaiti sand in March 2002, most of these soldiers had seen enough of the Middle East. And although the 1/10 Field Artillery Battalion had emerged unscathed -- the unit did not suffer a single casualty in the campaign -- its soldiers were not unchanged.

"They won't remember us for what we did in the war," said Lieutenant Tony Caracio, a graduate of West Point, who had been the picture of gung-ho enthusiasm back in the unit's Kuwaiti camp. "They'll remember us for shooting a civilian who doesn't stop at a checkpoint."

Nothing like that had happened with this unit by the time I left Iraq, but many soldiers shared Caracio's concerns about the battalion's postwar transformation from charge-ahead warriors to static peacekeepers.

They were uniformly proud, however, of what they had accomplished, from their madcap opening-night scramble from Kuwait to their important role in the battles at Nasiriyah, Samawah, Najaf, Karbala, and, finally, Baghdad.

In three weeks of fighting, they had fired 6,283 rounds of 155mm howitzer shells, more ammunition than the battalion is allotted for an entire year of training at Fort Benning, Ga. They had outshot the combined total of the other two artillery battalions attached to the Third Infantry Division, and they had launched shells even while taking direct fire at a hellish highway intersection dubbed "Ambush Alley" on the fringes of Baghdad.

Lieutenant Colonel John D. Harding Jr., the battalion's pugnacious commander, said he hadn't heard of anything like it since World War II. "We kicked the enemy's ass from the border all the way to Baghdad," said Harding, 42, a 1979 graduate of Lincoln-Sudbury High School in Massachusetts. "I loved those three weeks. I did. It invigorated me beyond belief."

But now, feet propped on a desk in battalion "headquarters" at a battle-damaged petroleum institute, Harding admitted feeling depressed. "I'm a war fighter, and I'm not fighting a war anymore. It's tough stuff."

Harding said he'd search for ways to keep his troops active and motivated in the transition to peacekeeping, when the battalion will perform a different kind of "targeting": pinpointing for the reconstruction specialists such civic locations as schools, power plants, hospitals, food storehouses, and water sources.

Although Harding savored the strategems of war, their chess-like implementation, and the adrenaline-pumping smell of danger near the front lines, his soldiers rarely spoke of the day-to-day events with their colonel's same sense of adventurous relish. Time and again, I was struck by the businesslike understatement displayed by these artillery troops, few of whom had seen combat before. I also was impressed by the courage I saw in them every day, and in their uncomplaining performance under tough conditions in an often-hostile country.

But now, they wanted to go home.

'In extremis' encounters; a lieutenant's comfort

The journey to this point had been much more than I expected: more intensity, more danger, more days when making time to wash one's face became a motivational milestone.

In the devastated village of Kifl, I dived into a crater when three Iraqi artillery shells burst about 50 yards away. On the fringes on Baghdad, I watched from close range as the crew of the colonel's Bradley fighting vehicle unloaded M16 rifle fire on an unseen enemy shooting AK-47s and a machine gun from behind 10-foot-high reeds.

I heard the Air Force colonel attached to the Third Brigade, of which the artillery battalion is part, call in A-10 Warthog planes to counterattack the stubborn Iraqis who had threatened to overrun our position. An air dispatcher radioed the colonel that the mission would be perilous for the pilots, and to reconsider his request unless our unit was "in extremis" -- or the gravest danger.

I didn't hear Lieutenant Colonel Jim Fairchild's response, but minutes later I heard the Warthogs unleash their firepower at targets just outside our perimeter. A week later, when I asked Harding about that night, he said that we would have run out of ammunition if the aircraft hadn't arrived.

While the firefight was raging, Lieutenant Josh Hernandez stopped outside the open ramp to the Bradley, looked inside, and yelled to a nearby soldier: "Where's Brian? Has anyone seen Brian?" Hernandez didn't know I had flung myself into the armor-cradled hatch of the Bradley, and could not make myself heard over the noise and confusion outside. I have never felt more comforted than when I saw this young soldier take time during a dangerous fight to find and protect me. "Hey, you're one of us," he said later. "We can't have our reporter getting killed, can we?"

The coolness under dangerous conditions was extraordinary in every front-line soldier I encountered. For example, take Captain Dave Waldron, a 30-year-old tank commander from Natick, Mass. Waldron, a former high-school football player, directed the lead tank company, in the lead task force, in the lead brigade, in the fiercely resisted US push across the Euphrates River toward Baghdad. "All we did was keep our guns at 10 and 2 o'clock and just kept firing and driving," Waldron said. "The guy in front of you would get shot, and the tank behind him would shoot the guy who shot the first guy. It was just like a movie."

Except, unlike the movies, this was deadly reality. Waldron received a shrapnel wound to the cheek and lost the top of one finger. He refused medical treatment until the battle subsided, another officer said.

"We killed at least 40 vehicles and 200 soldiers," Waldron recalled. "We saw more Iraqi infantry just laying their lives down for whatever reason."

When war hits home: The soldiers' emotions

The unexpected tenacity shown by the Iraqi soldiers who chose to fight impressed many US troops in their drive north. But, like Waldron, most soldiers seemed perplexed as to why Iraqis would choose the near-suicidal option of facing the American juggernaut.

The notion of defending one's homeland or village against a foreign army, undoubtedly a reflexive impulse for some Iraqi soldiers who despised Saddam Hussein, did not register with many of the US troops whose high-tech weaponry made this a grossly one-sided fight. To most Americans, the Iraqis who chose to resist were a dumbfounding puzzle.

Specialist John Valentin, a tough native of Queens, N. Y., who drove Harding in a Humvee when the colonel didn't man the turret of his Bradley, had another perspective. While guarding a crossroads during the final attack on the Republican Guard's Medina Division, Valentin asked, "What do you think we'd do if some army was coming through our town back home?" The answer, to him, was obvious.

As the US advance rolled toward Baghdad, soldiers talked often of the Iraqi corpses that dotted the roadside in increasing numbers. Sometimes, photographs were taken. Occasionally, some troops recounted in ghoulish detail the twisted position of the bodies they had seen, or their missing limbs or heads. "Let's go kill some stuff" was one phrase the soldiers used to pump themselves up as they headed toward a new round of fighting.

The plight of ordinary Iraqis, however, did not escape the soldiers' attention. Major Eric Kail, the battalion's impressive executive officer, shook his head outside Baghdad one afternoon as he recalled seeing charred automobiles that apparently had carried families. "You wonder if they had just been trying to escape," said Kail, who seemed saddened by the thought. Such "collateral damage" is inevitable in war, but the fate of those caught in the crossfire was noted, if not dwelled upon, by many soldiers.

'One of band of brothers' takes his wistful leave

Later, waiting in the passenger lounge at newly renamed Baghdad International Airport, I felt some regret at leaving. My story had run its course; the combat was over. But the many kindnesses that had been shown me, a civilian with no previous ties to this battalion, had been a constant source of small wonders.

I had not sacrificed for as long as these troops, had not left my loved ones for as long, was not expected to expose myself to the deadly risk that is the job description of a combat soldier, and I could come and go as I pleased in pursuit of a daily story.

But they accepted me in their ranks as one more soldier who got dirty as they did, albeit with a very different mission. "You're now one of the band of brothers. You know that, don't you?" said Sergeant First Class Joseph Eyre, 44, the hardened son of a three-war veteran who flew 32 bomber missions in World War II, had served in Korea, and was wounded during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

I was touched by the sentiment, but I can never claim that privilege.

As I flew home on a C-17 cargo jet, however, I did have this privilege: Lieutenant General "Buzz" Moseley, the top Air Force commander in the war, let me use his bird's-eye seat in the giant plane's cockpit. After a hard month of ground travel, the air trip to Kuwait took only 50 serene, stress-free minutes.

Halfway through the flight, Air Force Brigadier General Ron Rand, a son of Quincy, Mass., tapped me on the knee and pointed straight ahead. There, over Kuwait, hung a brilliant full moon, like a glorious, welcoming beacon. Behind us, over the recent Iraqi battlefield, the last pastel rays of a dying sun settled, peacefully, it seemed, into a soft cushion of clouds.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/20/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.