For marines on raids, an eerie silence

Down the road, Alpha Company was making less progress. The unit - with 48 people in eight vehicles - pulled into Musayyib, a grindingly poor Shiite town southwest of Haswah, to make an arrest. The target was a man who had sold a remote-detonated bomb - the kind that has taken a frequent toll on US and Iraqi forces - to an Iraqi "source" for $100.

Racing on foot past a street barrier, the marines found the building and burst through two doors - thinking the house was linked inside. They shot the chain off one door to gain entry, an irregular step the platoon leader later quizzed a marine about, saying it could have been removed without firepower.

Inside, a terrified family watched as they ransacked the rooms for evidence. During the raid, the man of the house was spreadeagled on the floor; the complaining but cooperative mother rushed to find her black shawl to cover her night clothes; children were led to a back room. Another boy was found with his head in his hands behind the bed.

After a short time, the marines realized the family was innocent. "Oh, this is the wrong one," groaned Nicholson.

They shook hands with the quivering children and apologized. "Tell the children not to play with this in the street," a marine told a translator, holding a toy assault rifle. "If they were holding this when we came in, we could have shot him."

The next door was the right one. Inside, marines found several women, a boy, an elderly man. The family said the target man had been gone for two days.

Disappointed, the marines finished by interrogating two suspects found in a grimy parking lot. One man turned out to be a guard, sleeping on post; the other was drunk and had stopped to sleep.

A loudspeaker blaring at 2:40 a.m. was taken by one marine as a call to arms from a mosque - not uncommon in such raids - until he was laughingly corrected: The sound was in fact a US psychological operations unit blasting pro-coalition messages.

The marines then turned the raid into an impromptu foot patrol, setting off down a street brightly lit with strings of bulbs, toward the town center. Two blasts from a whistle gave them pause.

The source was another security guard, this one awake. The marines didn't believe his story till they saw his ID card. "Who are his friends?" Nicholson asked the man through an interpreter. "Ask him: 'Who did he signal?' "

As time passed, bakers began their predawn work and vegetable sellers came to the muddy central market. Local allegiance was not in doubt: every wall seemed to have a poster of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Marines removed a few posters and took photos of others with longer messages. And, in a sign of new permanence, images of Mr. Sadr were spraypainted onto walls using a template, just as Hizbullah honored their revered clerics and martyrs in southern Lebanon.

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