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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Africa Europe Latin America Middle East North America In Iraq, "young American male" yearns for action Reuters - Friday, July 9 Send IM Story Print By Matt Robinson JALAWLA, Iraq - U.S. Sergeant Jeremy Hare sat on the dusty ramp of his Stryker armoured vehicle and rattled off some of the meaner streets he'd walked during the darker days of post-invasion Iraq. "That was bad," he'd say about one firefight. "Boy, that one was bad." Thirty-two-year-old Hare's memories from three previous tours of Iraq were lost on the rest of his platoon. Most of them were first-timers eased into the tail-end of a conflict eclipsed by Afghanistan in the minds of the American public and from which U.S. soldiers are slowly withdrawing. "I thought we'd see more action. Not this dumb shit," said 26-year-old Lieutenant Jan Dudzinski. He and the platoon were sitting, sweating in the desert of Diyala province, watching as Iraqi police took the lead in searching for weapons after a suicide bombing 18 days earlier killed two U.S. soldiers. They found nothing. As Washington calls a formal end to combat operations in Iraq on August 31, Dudzinski's frustration as a young soldier speaks to the stifled role U.S. forces are left with, playing backstop to their Iraqi counterparts. U.S. troops now partner and mentor, and only sometimes take the lead. From September 1, their role should be further reduced. To many soldiers, that means they're in the wrong war. "Is Joe frustrated?" asked Major Halvorson of the 1st Squadron, 14th U.S. Cavalry, referring to G.I. Joe, a generic term used for U.S. soldiers. "Honestly, he's frustrated he's not in Afghanistan right now." "He understands why we're doing things the way we're doing them. He gets it. But he's a young American male. He wants to shoot things and blow things up. That's why he joined the army." Iraq is a far less violent place than it was three years ago when a sectarian war raged between once dominant Sunnis and majority Shi'ites. The U.S. invaders were targeted by all sides. Now, the sectarian war has largely faded, but a stubborn though weakened Sunni Islamist insurgency continues to carry out daily attacks and threatens Iraq's stability. "Three years ago, we would have crushed Jalawla," Halvorson said from behind his desk at Forward Operating Base Cobra in Diyala, talking about a volatile town on the tense frontlines between Iraq's majority Arabs and ethnic Kurds. "We would have freakin' gone in there and decimated the place, because that's where the U.S. army was three years ago." 'CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR' Despite the end of combat operations, U.S. soldiers after August 31 will still at times shoot and be shot at. There will still be U.S. casualties, like the two who died in Jalawla on June 11, blown apart by a car packed with explosives after they got out of their Strykers to check a tip-off about a weapons cache. Such operations will continue as U.S. soldiers partner Iraqi forces in trying to stamp out the insurgency. U.S. Special Forces will also continue to operate. But in Iraq today, success is not gauged by the number of towns pacified, or by kill numbers -- yardsticks that young soldiers can easily understand. The U.S. military mission in Iraq appears now to be largely judged by whether it can cut troop numbers to 50,000 by September 1 from 77,000 now and withdraw completely by the end of 2011, as dictated by an Iraqi-U.S. security agreement. "It's been a frustrating deployment for them, especially for the guys who've been here before," said Charlie Troop commander Captain Mark Adams. "They were able to act on targets and arrest a lot of people. That gave them a sense of satisfaction, a sense of progress, that they were achieving a goal. This deployment, the biggest thing I hear from them is that it's becoming harder to measure success and to see progress." Sergeant Hare said it was unlikely he would go to Afghanistan as he wanted to spend more time with his wife and three children. He estimated that 80 percent of the soldiers he worked with now "would say they wish they were in more action." "They hear stories from my previous rotations, firefights and stuff. But I tell them, 'be careful what you wish for'." 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