TWO SOLDIERS.

As a unit of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, Bravo Company found itself in some of the fiercest fighting last year during the advance on Baghdad. Its hundred-and-thirty-odd paratroopers are among the Army's best-trained and best-equipped soldiers, and none died during formal hostilities. The dying came later, after President Bush declared the mission accomplished. Bravo Company was assigned to garrison a teardrop-shaped sector of southern Baghdad defined by a hairpin bend in the Tigris River. The paratroopers, having trained to fight uniformed regiments in open combat, found themselves in an amorphous grind of guard duty, police work, and civil governance. Their main task was protecting the Al Dora oil refinery, but they were also responsible for keeping peace in a large area around it. The district embraced by the river is a pleasantly verdant but particularly hostile corner of Iraq. Many top officials of the Baathist regime owned mansions in the neighborhood, and though they fled the war, their sympathizers remained, doling out hundred-dollar payments to poor date farmers willing to plant a bomb or fire a mortar at the Americans. The area is also home to several radical mosques, behind one of which the paratroopers uncovered a huge weapons cache--among the largest ever found in Iraq. Rockets fired from the brushy banks of the Tigris would drop onto the Green Zone of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Bravo Company prowled the darkness with night-vision scopes, searching for the shooters. The postwar work was hot, nerve-racking, complicated, and dispiriting. The paratroopers spent hours trying to organize local councils, never knowing if the same people smiling at them by day were firing mortars at them by night. On June 18th of last year, a Bravo Company soldier named Michael Deuel, away from the unit on temporary assignment to battalion headquarters, was guarding a propane station when an Iraqi walked up behind him, stuck the muzzle of a gun under the lip of his Kevlar helmet, and pulled the trigger. It was Bravo Company's first death in Iraq, and though the paratroopers did not witness it firsthand, they were shaken.

An endlessly flat, treeless desert, seemingly of kitty litter, begins within half a kilometre of the Tigris, but the copious bush of the riverside and the inscrutable hostility of the locals led the men of Bravo Company to call their assigned district Mini-Vietnam. Marshes, date-palm orchards, and water-filled ditches held Bravo Company to a few roads, not much wider than their squat Humvees, which were vulnerable to attack by rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and "improvised explosive devices." The soldiers gave the roads names: Ambush Alley, R.P.G. Alley, I.E.D. Alley. One road in Bravo Company's district, though, seemed peaceful, and it was called, simply, River Road.

Though the district was treacherous, the soldiers of Bravo Company lived in the relative comfort of the Al Dora refinery offices, playing Madden N.F.L. on a PlayStation 2 in their off-hours. From M.C.I., which was setting up cell-phone service for the Coalition Provisional Authority, they cadged a cell phone with a Westchester County area code. They couldn't call out, but family and friends could call in, by dialling 914 and the number--a far cry from, say, the sporadic V-mail of the Second World War. For months, Bravo Company ate nothing but M.R.E.s, packaged rations that, though monotonous, are lean and sanitary. When the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root showed up, in July, to open a field kitchen, the rich, fried food, perhaps in combination with new microorganisms, made everyone in the company sick for a few days.

Of the thirty-nine paratroopers who belonged to Bravo Company's 3rd Platoon, no two could have been more different than Specialist Solomon Bangayan, a Philippine citizen serving in American uniform, and Specialist Marc Seiden, a Jew from New Jersey. Bangayan was tiny and shy. He stood five feet five inches tall, and his smooth complexion and glossy black hair made him look about fifteen years old. He'd joined the Army in the spring of 2001, about eight months after arriving in the United States from the Philippines, and spoke halting, schoolbook English. For him, soldiering was a means to attain citizenship in the United States and to accrue money for an education in nursing. But he applied a grim resolve to proving his worth as a soldier. Once, searching for weapons in an Iraqi house, he kicked an unyielding door so hard that he landed on his back. He got up and kicked it again and again until another soldier nudged him aside and blasted the lock with a riot gun. The men of Bravo Company gave him the nickname Bang and called his mangled diction Banglish. In a crowd of big, loud white guys, he gravitated to a quiet friendship with Specialist Ricardo Costas, a delicate, latte-colored Puerto Rican with enormous, long-lashed eyes whose squad leader called him Sweetness.

Seiden, tall and broad-chested, from Brigantine, New Jersey, was the company clown. His rugged face, ceaseless ribbing, and New Jersey accent reminded fellow-paratroopers of the actor Bruce Willis. Seiden never let up; in the middle of a firefight, he would turn to a comrade and ask, "Do I look fat?" Pumping out light-machine-gun rounds--with rocket-propelled grenades whizzing past--he would pause to ask, "Do you think my butt's getting big?" At twenty-six, Seiden was older than most of his brothers-in-arms, and he thrived on the excitement and rigor of Army life. He was a post-9/11 enlistee, inspired to join, in part, by the death of a family friend in the World Trade Center attack. He planned to reenlist; last Christmas, he started filling out the forms to become a helicopter pilot.

On January 2, 2004, the 3rd Platoon roused early. It was a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, a day when clerics in Mini-Vietnam were known to preach mischief. The 3rd Platoon was to take two Humvees and drive down River Road to patrol the Salah al-Din mosque, or Celine Dion mosque, as the soldiers called it. Farther down River Road, at the southeast corner of Bravo Company's district, lay the Tobah mosque, which was thought to be Wahhabi-influenced and deserving of special attention. Of the company's seven Humvees, two were "up armored"--plated heavily enough to deflect rifle fire--and the 3rd Platoon was given both for this mission. The platoon's leader, First Lieutenant Andrew Blickhahn, a balding twenty-six-year-old two ...