Trained for War, a Marine Company in Iraq's Once Dangerous Anbar Tries to Adapt to Shaky Peace

Capt. Dallas Shaw, commander of the 2/9 Weapons Company, meets with members of the Ramadi council.

A few hours later, a lance corporal on guard duty accidentally fired his rifle when the trigger caught on his flak jacket. That's a far more serious infraction, in the Marine Corps's eyes—criminal behavior is unpredictable, after all, but negligence costs lives. It carries a standard punishment of a demotion in rank and the loss of a month's pay, spaced out over two months.

"It's hard to convey to these guys how difficult our job is here for the hearts-and-minds components and how much it's taken us to get this far," says Sgt. Brad Blevins, 26, one of the few in the company with real combat experience. He served in Afghanistan for four months before the Ramadi deployment and was accustomed to far less plush billeting. "These guys don't have the focused mind-set of 'I'm getting shot at' to make them concentrate."

It was the company's second so-called negligent discharge. Other companies in the same area when the fighting was tough didn't have a single such incident during their entire tours. "If we had a shooting war, maybe this wouldn't happen. But that doesn't matter," Lt. Andy Szwejbka, 26, told his platoon in the camp chow hall after the incident. "We're here together, and our mission is what it is. I need you all to press the 'I believe' button on this."

Continued training has been critical. Shaw says he was never fond of the dogmatic aspects of Marine culture, which sometimes encourages marines to greet each other in passing with emphatic shouts of "Kill!" "That might be fine for a conventional war—and the beginning of this war—where we are killing and needed our guys in the hyperaggressive mind-set," Shaw says. "These guys are diplomats, social workers, and marines all at the same time."

Before shipping out, Shaw and the other officers took questions from marines' families. One asked why her husband—a corporal—was forced to attend language classes when he could have been at home. "Wasn't that something reserved for the officers?"

Shaw told her about the 2003 invasion, when Iraqis approached soldiers while gesticulating frantically only to be ignored. "They were trying to tell us where the bad guys were, and no one could communicate with them," he said. The explanation to the corporal's wife was an easy one, he says. "I told her it was going to protect her husband and that if he learned, it would increase the odds he'd come back in one piece."

At first, the men resisted. "We didn't see the point and thought he'd forget about it," says one noncommissioned officer. Instead, they found themselves doing hundreds of push-ups when they couldn't respond to Arabic phrases they'd been ordered to learn.

The 2/9 Weapons Company still has translators, of course, and few of the marines are anywhere near being fluent. But all have used their Arabic on the streets, however limited. After all, Shaw and his men are the public and day-to-day face of the American presence here, interacting with average Iraqis and preventing violence—accidental or not.

• Click here to read about a typical day for marines in Anbar.
• Click here to learn about the factors that could plunge the area back into violence.
• Click here for more on Iraq.