Army Spec. Matthew Rushing had packed his rucksack and was just two hours from departing on the convoy that would take him out of this turbulent country when he got the news: His battalion had been ordered to remain in Iraq for another four months.
But Rushing, like many others in his engineering unit from the 1st Armored Division, is handling the delayed departure with equanimity.
"I don't think anyone really wants to stay here," said Rushing, 21, a Humvee driver from Green River, Wyo., as he sat in one of his unit's two Internet cafes on Sunday evening. "But a lot of people realize you can either gloom on it, or you can get over it." At any rate, he said, he'd been following the news about fighting in Fallujah and central Iraq, and so, he said, "I kind of expected it."
When Lt. Col. John Kem, the battalion commander, got the word April 9, he immediately called all the soldiers in the unit into formation and spoke to them.
"There were a few hysterics, a few tears," recalled Kem, who graduated from Langley High School in McLean in 1981 and whose father is director of public works for Arlington County. He told them to take a day to wallow in their unhappiness and then to put it behind them.
"They told us, 'Whine today, and go to sleep tonight, and when you wake up, it's over,' " recalled Staff Sgt. Sean Long, 30, a communications specialist.
Pfc. Erik Ward, 20, of Chicago, said his buddies rolled with the news because of Kem's forthright approach. "Our leadership has been real honest about it," he said. "The colonel told us he was disappointed," just as they were, he recalled.
On this small island at the northern end of Baghdad, which contains a rusting roller coaster and other ruins of an amusement park, Spec. Whitney Eargle, a bridge-laying specialist from Greenville, S.C., stood on sentry duty at dusk, watching for intruders along the river's reedy banks, especially for the nightly visitors he calls "the mortar idiots."
"The truth is, you can be mad about it, you can let it get you down — but you're still going to be here," he said with a shrug.
'My wife's going nuts'
The 275 members of the 16th Engineering Battalion here may feel differently in a few months, as the stunning heat of the Iraqi summer hits them for a second time, and as they take on a difficult new mission as part of a big, brigade-size quick reaction force that the U.S. Army is creating here to rush to hot spots.
The idea behind that force is to prevent the embarrassing recurrence of loss of control of cities, as occurred recently in Fallujah, Najaf and Kut in central Iraq. The new force also promises to give commanders an extra bit of combat flexibility as the planned turnover of sovereignty on June 30 nears — an event that authorities here widely expect will be preceded by outbursts of violence.
But for the moment, members of the 1st Armored Division are showing little of the rock-bottom morale that plagued the 3rd Infantry Division last June in Baghdad when its postwar tour was unexpectedly extended. Back then, the grumbling was so bad, with soldiers denouncing President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, that orders were issued to shut up.
It isn't that soldiers here haven't felt any inconvenience. Some are scrambling to revise their post-Iraq plans, such as delaying college. And a few weddings have been postponed, one for the second year in a row.
Lt. Andrew Bischoff, 25, of Port Jervis, N.Y., said his fiancee was angry. "She's in Buffalo, New York, and no one understands," he said.
Soldiers say the hardest hit among them are the 32 from Alpha Company who were already in Germany — and who now must return to Iraq.
Families back in Germany also are deeply unhappy, the soldiers say. "My wife's going nuts because of the extension," said Spec. Brian Froeschner of St. Louis. Wives who moved back to the United States when their husbands deployed are wrestling with airlines for refunds on their tickets to Europe.
Capt. Michael Baim, of Corpus Christi, Tex., commander of the battalion's Bravo Company, said that "we have a lot of sense of ownership" of the progress the engineering outfit has seen here. The battalion has conducted many infantry-style operations, such as raids and patrols, but also has engaged in large-scale renovation of sewer and water systems in northeast Baghdad.
A new realism
A year of service has also brought a new realism to the troops' assessments of the situation. Few expect overnight solutions anymore.
"It's going to have to be a permanent presence here," Lt. David Dake of Savannah, Ga., said Monday morning over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, pancakes and cake, all prepared and delivered by the contractor Kellogg Brown & Root. "We're going to be here a long, long time."
As Dake's hearty morning meal indicated, the soldiers are also enjoying a considerably better quality of life than the 3rd Infantry had last year when its stay in the rubble of Baghdad was extended.
Their base on Baghdad Island feels surprisingly safe, with a moat-like lake on one side and the broad Tigris River on the other. The base gets hit by a mortar shell or two on most nights, but no one has been killed by those attacks, which are minor compared to those at many U.S. bases here. The troops also have hot showers and big television sets showing a variety of American news, sports and entertainment programs. A snack bar serves kabobs and cheeseburgers.
Each of the Internet cafes boasts 15 to 20 terminals. On Sunday night, the cafes were full and had waiting lines. One popular subject being researched: the cars the troops plan to buy with all the money they are saving while serving in Iraq. Baim, the Bravo Company commander, said many of his soldiers have saved $10,000 to $20,000 over the last year — and now will get $1,000 a month bonus pay for each of the four months of their extended duty.
