There was a third hill, too, where he had wintered once. Now the Taliban controlled it, and Uncle Satar, who had laid down his gun a few years back and was now working as a driver, was sitting cross-legged at the farmhouse of a relative, plying me with food. Eat, he said, and made little lifting motions with his hands, hands as familiar with the wooden barrel of a Kalashnikov as with a loaf of home-baked bread. Eat, he commanded: because I was too thin, because I ate too little -- but, mostly, because I was his guest and he wanted to show me a good time.

So what if his homeland was a war zone?

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The conservative Muslim militias that just a year ago fought pitched battles for control of Iraq are mostly gone from the streets. There are signs that the tight grip of the hard-line clerics who had exerted control over Iraqis' private lives for most of the past five years is loosening somewhat. But women here still feel threatened.

One can't yet see a pervasive shift in the way women dress. They continue to wear the conservative clothing that the militias began compelling them to wear after the U.S. invasion. Most women remain cocooned in shapeless, black abaya dresses and hijab scarves that covered their hair.

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Around the two men, Americans cheered -- not so much to celebrate the win of their peer as to congratulate the Iraqi for coming so close to victory. The Iraqi is one of 23 members of an elite Baghdad police unit that Soule and his soldiers are training to become one of Iraq's first SWAT teams, which, when the training is complete, will be hunting down suspected sectarian militia members, kidnappers and murderers. The sooner this SWAT unit and other Iraqi security forces are ready to fight the militias and gangs that have devastated this country, as U.S. government and military officials like to say, the sooner American troops can go home.

"As far as their level of professionalism, they're pretty good," said Soule, a member of the 2-4 Infantry Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. When the three-week training program is over at the end of August, Soule said, "they will be ready to operate on their own."

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What these men did prior to this work -- when sectarian militias and Iraqi security forces fought pitched battles through the Dora neighborhood, killing and wounding scores of people -- is unclear. When asked, the two looked at each other and shrugged. "There were no jobs," al-Samorai finally said. Maybe he and his colleague hid in their homes while sectarian fighting raged outside. But it is also possible that they fought alongside the Sunni militias, as did many Sons of Iraq members, according to American forces that patrol the area.

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The man's eyes darted nervously up and down the street, making sure the young Iraqi man smoking idly by a gate strafed with bullet holes wasn't listening.

"If they find out I told you, they will kill me," the man told Orona. But the people he feared were not just the absent owners of the grenades. He was also afraid to be spotted by any of the Iraqi authorities to whom he might have been expected to report the grenades, meaning those Iraqis who will be responsible for preventing violence when the Americans finally leave.

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It's 15 minutes into the first episode of "Generation Kill," the new HBO miniseries that starts on Sunday about a Marine battalion in Iraq, and I am already inundated with the familiar cacophony of racial and homophobic slurs, military jargon, graphic homoerotic passages and explicit diatribes you may not want your mother to hear. This is language I learned to understand well, if not speak it, during the time I spent as an embedded reporter with American troops in Iraq.

Such invective-laced tirades serve a purpose that is as much a fundamental part of the Marine Corps as "semper fi": The men spew out expletives and they bond. No one gets offended; this is just how they communicate with each other in their testosterone-loaded world, where swearing approaches an art form, almost any sentence uttered requires a translation into standard modern English, and the words "cocky motherfuckers," uttered by the battalion commander, are as close as it gets to terms of endearment.

The veracity of Marines' communication habits is not the only thing the creators of "Generation Kill" got right. For the most part, the miniseries' take on the Marines who helped invade Iraq in the spring of 2003 rings as true as a drill instructor's upbraiding of a teenage recruit about life in the Suck.

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Maliki said that the Iraqi government has earmarked $195 million to facilitate the refugees' return. "We welcome them and we will give them privileges," he pledged two weeks ago during his visit to Sweden, which has accommodated about 40,000 refugees from Iraq. American forces on the ground also encourage residents to go home, emphasizing that their return is critical to rebuilding stability in the war-ravaged country.

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Sahar al-Jawari, the unemployed, divorced mother who is slowly selling the last of her jewelry to survive in a city where gunshots are an everyday affair and electricity is not.

Xzibit, the 19-year-old military translator from Baghdad who uses the name of his favorite American rapper as a pseudonym to protect his identity, and who has watched people kill and be killed during the year he has worked for the Americans.

The young U.S. Army specialist, who was pacing around his combat outpost the other day, counting out loud the time he has left to serve: "Thirteen months and 29 days, 13 months and 29 days." Stiff western wind carried his voice into streets chocking with trash and rubble.

The Army Reserve sergeant in his late 30s, who has made up his mind to start an antiwar group when he comes home.

According to Capt. Andrew Betson, who commands Alpha Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad, the soldiers are exaggerating their disillusionment with Iraq.

"They may be saying 'I hate this place,'" he said, "but they really want it to succeed, they really want to see progress here."

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It is a place where the soldiers of Bravo Company, 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, who are stationed in an abandoned school in Baghdad, can stay in touch with friends and families back home.

It is the room where hearts break.

"Now, about those other male friends," a young soldier says into the phone, his voice rising. "I am shocked and awed to hear ..." -- and his voice turns to a near whisper. There are six other people in the room, barely 4 feet away from him. Everyone hunches even more over laptops, not wanting to hear what is about to follow. They will hear it all anyway, later, in the classrooms the soldiers share at night, in the Bradleys that are often so cramped you can feel the man next to you breathe, or in the school's hallways, where one soldier tells me how he got married before his previous deployment, in 2005, and got divorced when he went home on leave six months later.

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Above the roads, low-slung electric wires hang like an enormous web woven by some apocalyptic spider, strung from street generators to poles to homes, from one street to the next. Yet, most Baghdadis receive less than four hours of electricity a day. Running water, too, is a rare commodity. As far as safety is concerned, a quiet neighborhood is one where gunfire and explosions are something residents only hear, not see.

But whenever American soldiers ask the locals how they live, the Iraqis' first response is typically: Much better, thank you. Then they list the basic services they do not have.

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Finjan gives local residents what no one else apparently can: electricity.

Finjan is the owner and operator of a street generator, hundreds of which have sprung up on Baghdad's street corners since the war decimated whatever crippled power grid the Iraqi capital had before 2003. The government power lines feed between zero and four hours a day of electricity to Risala's homes, usually closer to zero. Finjan's generator feeds seven.

His services are expensive. The electricity the government is supposed to provide but doesn't costs next to nothing. The 150 or so households hooked up to Finjan's generator pay between $35 and $65 a month. This is more than most families in a city where the average income hovers around $200 a month can comfortably afford. But they also cannot comfortably afford to let their food go bad in unplugged refrigerators. Seven hours of power a day is just enough to keep most things in the fridge from spoiling, one American civil affairs officer told me.

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Saidiyah, the mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood next door, is an experiment in building a gated community in war-torn Iraq: after the area was decimated by sectarian fighting last year, US forces built a wall around it, swept every street for militia members and weapons, and, having established a relative calm, are now trying to facilitate the return of the residents who had fled the fighting by resurrecting the basic -- and I mean, truly basic -- services: four hours of electricity and running water a day, sewage that doesn't spill out into people's backyards in putrid pools, and garbage cleanup that keeps the streets sort of clean.

The shithole is Risala, where Captain Chase is stationed. Like Saidiyah, the neighborhood once housed Sunnis and Shias, then succumbed to a spate of block-by-block sectarian fighting. But unlike Saidiyah, Risala has never fully recovered from the fighting.

"That sectarian cleansing is almost done with, but there is still a taste," Chase said when I arrived at his combat outpost in the middle of Risala this afternoon. "Sunnis don't really trust Shiites, Shiites don't really trust Sunnis. We had a Sunni guy who was afraid of going into a hospital to check on a sick relative because he was afraid of being executed at the hospital."

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Anyone who needs anything in Iraq goes to the same place: the Americans.

Five years after the war in Iraq began, the country's army and police force are still not ready to effectively provide security for the country, and its government is unable to provide such basic services as power, running water, and fully functioning sewage and garbage cleanup. Hospitals are overcrowded, and many doctors have left the country. So most Iraqis look to Americans, whom they see as the source of ultimate authority.

"A lot of Iraqis expect that Americans can touch something and make everything work," says Capt. Andrew Betson, whose company patrols the streets in southwestern Baghdad.

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"What is stopping somebody from attacking this COP?" I ask the 1st sergeant. "From driving up in a cement truck or two filled with C4 and blowing them up?"

"Apart from the physical barriers," Braet responds, carefully cutting his steak into neat squares with plastic fork and knife, "not a whole lot. There is the wall, of course, so it's harder to drive a VBIED" -- a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, military parlance for a car or truck bomb -- "into Saidiyah. But they can produce it in Saidiyah; we're ignorant if we think they can't produce a VBIED right under our noses.

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"You squash up against Travis, I squash up against you, and you squash up against Anna.

"And you," he says to me, "squash up against that fucking thing up there."

"That fucking thing" is the fire extinguisher and the first-aid kit. I feel a little safer.

Bradleys were once thought to be almost as impregnable as M1 Abrams tanks, which were thought to be entirely unassailable. Then Iraqis started setting up EFPs, explosively formed projectiles that are elaborately made to penetrate armor. The Apache Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, has lost five men to the projectiles since March. All five were in Bradleys when they were killed. Four of them were from the platoon with which I'm going on patrol today. Their charred bodies were found pressed against the hatch in the back of their Bradley, trying to get out. The mechanism that allows the hatch to open had melted into the body of the vehicle during the explosion.

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Two of the soldiers walked up the tiled stairs to the second floor. Another asked the woman if she kept any weapons in the house. Another asked if he could have a drink of water. One soldier walked into the empty living room where the TV was on, slumped down on the couch, and stared at the screen, his mouth slightly open.

"They're clueless," spits out U.S. Army 1st Sgt. James Braet, who trained Iraqi troops in Baghdad during his previous deployment, in 2005, and who interacts with them during joint patrols here now almost daily. "They are worse than the ones we trained. They don't hold their weapons right, they don't have the discipline."

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Military travel is often frustrating. I was supposed to leave the Green Zone on a Black Hawk flight bound for Forward Operating Base Falcon, just across the Tigris River. It was supposed to be a 10-minute flight, but instead the helicopter was in the air for almost half an hour and then landed in Camp Taji, a sprawling desert U.S. military base outside the city. The crew told all passengers to get off. It was hazy, there was a chance of a sandstorm and the crew decided it wasn't safe to fly. We were stuck in Taji's spartan helicopter terminal -- a few wooden benches nailed together under a makeshift awning -- and it was unclear when we were going to fly.

Sgt. Brian Carman was stuck, too. He had a black bruise under his right eye from a sniper bullet that entered his face during a fight with the Shiite Mahdi army in Sadr City two weeks ago. His left cheek, where the bullet came out, was swollen. The front of his flak jacket was splattered with brown blotches of his own dried blood. He had been waiting for two days for a helicopter to take him to Baghdad International Airport, where he would catch a plane to Kuwait, and from there, another plane home to Missouri. He was going on home leave for 14 days. Then he was going to return to Sadr City to fight the Mahdi army again.

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I am on board a big-bellied C-17 military airplane headed for Baghdad. A member of the crew tells me and my fellow passengers that we are about to take off, and instructs us how to use the oxygen masks. Mine, disconcertingly, is a bag that I'm supposed to put over my head and then tie tightly around my neck -- sort of the opposite of what I'd expect to do if I wanted to breathe, but the Air Force guy promises that "the air will flow." Then he warns us to stay in our seats, with our seat belts fastened, for the duration of the flight, because most of it will be "over the combat zone." An Iraqi man sitting across the aisle from me opens the palms of his hands and mouths a silent prayer.

I examine the people around me. They are U.S. State Department officials, defense contractors and Iraqis who work for the Defense Department and for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. A gray-haired man is wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the words, in English and Arabic: "Danger. Stay back." Another man has brought along his Martin acoustic guitar -- solid rosewood sides and back. There is an Iraqi woman, probably a contractor, with three kids, and for a moment I think: "Now here's something to remember -- flying on an American C-17 as a child." Then I realize that they, like all of us, are flying into a war that has ravaged their homeland. They will have childhood memories, and most of them are not going to be nice.

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