A warrior's mission; Anger, laughter part of Iraqi detail for Athol GI.

Byline: Nathan S. Webster

BAYJI, Iraq - During two patrols across this Sunni city of 130,000, U.S. Army Spec. Ross E. Burnham, 24, a paratrooper from Athol, shows the difficulty in pinpointing the attitudes of soldiers serving in Iraq.

First, the angry side shines through: Burnham looking out his Humvee's driver's side window into a busy Iraqi car dealership. Long-robed men discuss prices and deals. Burnham barks a joyless laugh.

"Check it out. They're having a V-BED party," he says, referring to "vehicle-borne explosive devices" like the ones suicide car bomb terrorists attacked his unit's Joint Security Station with on June 25. He curses the Iraqis through the bulletproof glass. "They're teaching each other all the tricks, the best way to blow us up."

He means it literally. Burnham has already nursed through a concussion, caused by a roadside bomb explosion earlier this year.

Those were his tamest comments about the local populace. His team leader, Sgt. Jason Johnson, 35, from Falmouth, apologizes for him later. They both serve with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.

"He's a little cynical," Johnson said about Burnham, but in a friendly manner, shrugging the talk off as harmless hot air. "You know how people from Massachusetts are."

A few days later and Burnham presents a completely different side, happily posing for pictures with neighborhood children. The boys and girls crowd around, and Burnham always smiles broadly, encouraging the shyer children to come forward. All of them get Burnham's handshake or his toothy grin.

His heavy M-249 SAW machine gun becomes a slight afterthought - though never completely - while he grins and poses.

"Those were nice kids," he says. "A lot of the kids are really great, really friendly. If the whole country was like that, it'd be great."

Days later, on July 29, Burnham was like the rest of the soldiers at the Joint Security Station - hiding behind sandbags, plywood and concrete. That was the afternoon Iraq won soccer's Asian Cup, 1-0, an unprecedented and morale-boosting victory for the nation. It also featured a nearly nonstop 45-minute barrage of celebratory weapons fire into the air across the city.

Most U.S. soldiers resisted the opportunity to verbally share in the victory celebration, cynically shrugging off its significance to the Iraqi soldiers, police and interpreters they serve beside.

Burnham jumped right in, excited to recognize the game's larger meaning.

"The Iraqis are doing something right," he said. "It's a lot better than when (Saddam Hussein's sons) Uday and Qusay were here, torturing (soccer players) when they lost. At least they get something to be happy about for a little while."

Like every other infantryman here, Burnham is intensely frustrated with a mission that has changed dramatically over the course of the 15-month deployment, now with about two months left to go. When they arrived in September 2006, the unit raided homes and arrested suspected insurgents. The soldiers loved that, but the aggressive manner did little to win the hearts of the residents.

Bayji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad, is part of the Sunni heartland. Just 30 miles from Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, the city is home to many former Baathists. They lost power, income and influence after the 2003 invasion, and many held a grudge against the United States that raids and arrests did little to soothe.

This area avoided most sectarian carnage, but the al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq now brings indiscriminate violence to the area, terrifying even hardcore Baathist holdovers. Both groups are Sunni, but religious loyalty only goes so far.

On June 25, the Islamic State of Iraq group staged the suicide bomb attack on the downtown Joint Security Station shared by U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police. Five U.S. soldiers were slightly injured, and 27 Iraqi policemen died when their barracks collapsed. An Aug. 21 truck-bomb attack on a lightly guarded traffic police compound killed at least 37 people, all Iraqi.

Baathists might not have minded 27 or 37 U.S. deaths but were outraged by the murder of local Iraqis. Charlie Company commander Capt. Tim Peterman, 32, from Roy, Utah, drives the point home in his meetings with tribal leaders.

"Al-Qaida killed your fathers, sons and brothers - our brothers," Peterman tells them, sometimes in the Arabic he is relatively fluent in. "I don't care if someone is a former general or a former Baathist. If he's willing to stand next to me and fight al-Qaida, I'll work with him."

Peterman knows full well that sheiks he negotiates with probably funded the Sunni insurgency over the last few years. Unlike al-Qaida, Peterman said those Sunni insurgents strove not to kill their local neighbors when fighting the United States. In the rampaging violence of Iraq, that's something at least.

Peterman agrees with the comparison with the end of World War II, when the United States was willing to bargain with former Nazis in the face of the Soviet Union's greater threat.

The hope is that local leaders can begin putting together armed neighborhood watch groups to protect tribal districts from al-Qaida incursions. In a year or two, those groups could become Iraqi army units, providing legitimate, homegrown security.

There's no question it's a gamble. If a full-scale civil war did break out, those groups could just as easily become factional militias, fighting over the city street by street. But it's the best idea anyone has left. Peterman uses a two-minute warning analogy with the sheiks, making clear that time is running out on U.S. involvement.

"We'll know if it works, because we won't be back," said Burnham's squad leader, Staff Sgt. Brian Wilson, 26, from Westminster, Colo. "The Iraqis want us to get out of here as much as we want to leave."

Burnham also gives the planners of "reconciliation" credit for trying.

"I understand what they're doing. I hope it works," he said.

Burnham never complains about the overall mission or the grunt work of being an infantryman. He doesn't utter a single gripe on a patrol through the village of Bujwari, when the temperature hits 125 degrees and he's carrying the extra weight of the 27-pound .249 SAW machine gun. Since he sets up on a building's perimeter, it's usually a "Burnham, go over there" direction from Johnson, and he jogs off in the brutal sun, under 90 pounds of armor and gear.

None of the paratroopers mind their medieval living conditions. The two-story Joint Security Station building has air conditioning, a weight room and sporadic Internet. It sounds a lot better than it really is.

With paratroopers and gear packed into every room, there's no privacy and no real rest. The air conditioning, while a must in the confined and airless space, makes it difficult to walk from 80 degrees inside to 125 degrees outside. But none of them cares anything about that. They've all lived in worse.

Soldiers do think their heavy body armor restricts mobility, but they love the up-armored Humvee trucks. Burnham said the armored Humvees have saved many members of the company, from either snipers or IEDs.

"They hit my Humvee right behind the trunk," Burnham said, about an IED attack on his vehicle earlier this year. It earned him a concussion, he said, though he's waiting on an official Purple Heart. "The triggerman was a little slow, thank God.

"The Humvee armor is a lifesaver. Everybody in this company would have been shot at some point if our armor wasn't so good," he said. "We get ambushed, and afterwards you can see the chink in the glass from a sniper's bullet, right at everybody's head level."

The last soldier the company lost, Cpl. Eric Palmer of Maize, Kansas, died on June 24, three days after being shot during a dismounted patrol. Two other soldiers have been lost to sniper shots, another pair sent home with serious injuries. Most injuries, like Burnham's concussion or other soldiers' broken bones and lacerations, are so common they are barely brought up.

Burnham said an attack could sometimes be predicted, just through inactivity and exposure. It's the little details he can't stand, like sitting in an idling Humvee past the magic 30 minutes the soldiers say it takes for an insurgent attack to be organized.

"I told (Spec. James) Hammonds, we were going to start taking fire from an alley," he said, relating a previous patrol. "Twenty-five minutes later they started maneuvering, getting into a building and firing on us."

Nobody was hurt, but that wasn't Burnham's point. Most roadside bombs or sniper bullets aren't powerful enough to penetrate Humvee armor, but that's not the point, either. It's the sitting around they hate, waiting for something to happen.

"It just takes one piece of shrapnel to get through a Humvee's armor," he said. "It shouldn't. It probably won't. But if it does, and it hits you in the head, you're dead. That happened to a guy in another unit. One little piece got through and killed him."

"Back home, people think this is a big joke, that nobody dies," he said. "If they knew how many IEDs we get, how many mortars, they'd see it then. If we gotta do it, then let's do it. When everybody gets against us, the rules of engagement change, and our guys start getting killed. People back in the States need to shut up and let us do our jobs."

Peterman acknowledges the deep frustration his men feel, especially the confusion over what their "job" has become. Any long-term success from Peterman's tribal meetings will never be seen during this deployment. But if local leaders take up arms against al-Qaida, this will be one less region of the country where U.S. troops would need to maintain security. Peterman agrees that reality is at least a year or two away.

For now, Peterman preaches that his men are doing their jobs, even if they don't know it, even if they hate the neighborhood patrols where an Iraqi interpreter asks the locals if their electricity is working. It couldn't be less an infantryman's job, and Peterman knows that, too.

"The hardest thing for my guys to do is the right thing," Peterman said. "Our biggest success is when we go out, knock on doors and meet people."

Freelance photojournalist Nathan S. Webster of Stratham, N.H., was recently embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division in Bayji, Iraq.

Ross E. Burnham

Age: 24

Wife: Lisa M. Burnham

Native of: Athol

Education: Athol High School, Class of 2001; attended Mount Wachusett Community College 

Mother: Katherine A. Burnham of Athol

Father: Raymond E. Burnham of Athol

Siblings: Brother Jordan, 21; sister Alexa, 20

Interests: Physical fitness, working out, trap shooting

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: (1) U.S. Army Spec. Ross Burnham, 24, a paratrooper from Athol, shakes hands with an Iraqi child while on patrol in Bayji, Iraq. (2) U.S. Army Spec. Ross Burnham of Athol, center, rests in front of a fan at the Al Zaitun restaurant in Bayji, Iraq. On the left and right are Iraqi soldiers who are on a joint patrol with Spec. Burnham. (3) U.S. Army Spec. Ross Burnham, 24, of Athol, left, and team leader, Sgt. Jason Johnson, 35, of Falmouth, talk to a neighborhood boy during a patrol in Bayji, Iraq.

PHOTOG: Photos/NATHAN S. WEBSTER