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The first one was lying on his side, about 500 yards away behind a brown building, baked by the unforgiving desert sun. His rump was pocked with bullets.

He was an Iraqi soldier, and he was dead.

The Americans, four of them, sprang from their vehicles. Silently, efficiently, each grabbed a limb and lifted. In one fluid movement, their fallen opponent was slipped into a body bag, zipped away, dispatched onto a truck. It drove off, leaving only the soldier's dark-green loafers behind.

They journeyed across the world to fight and, if necessary, to kill. And they did. But for U.S. forces on the battlefields of Iraq, the duty doesn't end there.

For those sent into battle, one of war's most emotionally difficult duties is burying the dead. And the simple fact that the bodies are enemy dead does not mean the task is easy.

"It has to be done," Lt. Col. Lee Fetterman, 41, of Cooperstown, N.Y., said Friday. "It's a responsibility we have. We're the only ones who can."

The notion is fast becoming familiar to soldiers from the 101st Airborne deployed at Baghdad International Airport, the renamed Saddam International Airport. For days, they have become intimately acquainted with body bags and their trappings.

Earlier this week, American soldiers fired weapons at Iraqis to defend the airport after it was seized by U.S. forces. Friday's mission was to collect the bodies of three dead Iraqis on the airport grounds and bury them according to Muslim custom.

"This is definitely the worst part of the job," said Spc. Pete Morton, 27, of Sonora, Calif.

A couple of soldiers broke the silence, cracking wise about the smell. "We're not insensitive," Morton said impassively. "It's just our way of dealing with it."

Capt. Mike Rightmeyer, chaplain for the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade of the 101st, advised the infantrymen to think of the bodies as hair on the barbershop floor.

"Just remember, that's not them," Rightmeyer said.

In a nearby building, two Iraqis lay dead in the bathroom, partially decomposed. It wasn't pretty, nor was it fragrant. Morton produced a gas mask to block the smell as he entered.

Within minutes, teams of five soldiers each holding a handle on a body bag had carried corpses to the back of the truck.

"Anyone have a cigarette they can give me? Please?" said a visibly shaken Spc. Raymond Kirby, 27, of Hickory, N.C. Somebody handed him one.

The Army has soldiers trained in mortuary affairs, but they are not always available. So it falls to other soldiers to handle the burials.

Fetterman, the battalion commander, said the bodies must be buried as soon as possible because of the health hazard and the possible psychological damage to the soldiers.

"It's war. It's a big piece of what you have to do. It's unpleasant and usually something you don't talk about," Fetterman said.

The locations where bodies are found are documented on a grid, along with details of where they are buried. Any type of identification is recorded, and personal articles are collected.

All information is turned over to the 3rd Infantry Division headquarters, which is maintaining the airfield. It will eventually be given to a new Iraqi government so relatives can learn of loved ones' fates.

"We try to do it as humanely as possible," Fetterman said. "Unfortunately, we killed them."

Some of the men have experience with dead bodies. Morton and his colleague, Pfc. Andrew Streib had to help flag body parts of Canadian soldiers killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in a friendly fire bombing last year.

"That was definitely worse than this," Morton said.

A bit later, Kirby still seeming tentative pulled photos of his 4-year-old son and 7-month-old daughter from a pants pocket.

"I hope they never have to have that experience," he said. "It's something that I never want to see again."

In the cemetery, laid out near an airfield on the airport grounds, the American soldiers used a bulldozer to dig 103 graves. Most remain empty. The others, unmarked, contain men who are unidentified and unrecognized, although likely not unmourned.

The bodies were buried according to Muslim custom with their heads pointed toward Mecca, Islam's holiest city.

For that final task, Fetterman gave his men one instruction: Lower them into the earth gently.

photo credit and caption:

United States Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines sign their autographs for some Iraqi children who approached them while on patrol through a neighborhood of Baghdad Friday, April 11, 2003. Marines began building relations with civilians Friday in order to lower tensions between the military and local population.(AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

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