Michael Gisick/Tribune

U.S. Marines talk with a taxi driver after pulling him over during a vehicle patrol in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. After a brief search of the cab turned up nothing suspicious Tuesday, the Marines chatted with the man about gas prices and how his business was going, and then let him go. Marines who fought battles on every patrol in Ramadi in past years are now involved in rebuilding and street-level diplomacy.

Michael Gisick/Tribune

A U.S. Marine surveys a trash-strewn street in Ramadi during a recent foot patrol. Some troops in Ramadi have found themselves dealing with basic problems and services like garbage, sewers and the electricity grid.

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The small convoy of Humvees swings out through the darkness and heads down one of the newly paved roads traversing the heart of the city.

The road runs where a line of shops used to stand, before they were reduced to rubble.

The driver, wearing night-vision goggles and driving without lights, picks his way around the manhole covers that, in last year's Ramadi, might have concealed a roadside bomb.

"The guys who are here for the first time, they know why we're careful like that but only because we've told them," says Marine Lt. Jason Copeland, a 26-year-old New Mexico native.

"They've never had their noses rubbed in it. They've never seen an exploding sidewalk."

Copeland's two tours in Ramadi have taken him through two very different cities, laid out over the same half-demolished geography like a palimpsest.

The new layer is a grid of political connections and electricity lines - his primary responsibility in the rebuilding effort. Underneath lies the reality from his first tour - a network of choke points and no-go zones and targets.

A glass factory where a suicide bomb tore through dozens of police recruits is coming back to life now.

For Copeland, Ramadi is a city of hard memories and small, strange miracles.

"My best friend was killed here," Copeland says. "Now I can go out and stand in the street where he died and say, `Hey.'

"That's kind of nice."

Many of the other members of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, find themselves in a similar situation in this city of about 400,000, the capital of Anbar province and a former stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.

The battalion was deployed in Ramadi from mid-2005 until early 2006, when nearly every mission into the city came to fighting.

The battalion returned in March 2007 and found a city of waving, needy children and broken infrastructure.

Copeland's company, designed as a quick reaction force, wound up taking over the electrical grid. Other companies took over sewer and trash, while still others deployed to small bases across the city where they work with Iraqi police and military units.

When Copeland, who was born in Albuquerque and lives in Roswell, found out he was coming back to Ramadi a year ago, he spent a night with a bottle of whiskey, he says. But then another lieutenant who had come to the city as part of an advance scouting party called with a strange message.

"He said, `You're never going to believe this (expletive,)' " Copeland remembers. "`There's some kind of deal with the sheiks, and they just stopped fighting. I haven't seen anything.' "

Marines like Copeland say they've adjusted to the new reality but haven't forgotten the old one, and they know some of the people they're working with now might have been fighting them last year.

"It's kind of weird, but I got over the fact," shrugs Cpl. David Chavez, a 22-year-old Santa Fe native who has been on both deployments.

"At first I didn't really believe it was how it was, but it's a different city now. People change."

Chavez is a vehicle commander in a mobile force operating out of one of the bases in the center of Ramadi. In addition to escorting the unit's commander to meetings and running supplies and men to and from the main post on the outskirts of the city, Chavez runs a patrol out of his home base.

On one such patrol this week, the Marines stopped five vehicles - three improperly marked Iraqi police trucks, a taxicab, and one car on their list of vehicles to be on the lookout for. They surrounded the vehicles with their Humvees, but the Marines got down armed and smiling, extending their hands and speaking in basic Arabic.

Searches of the vehicles turned up nothing, and the Marines turned their conversations to pleasantries, asking after gas prices and living conditions. They made an effort to smile, as much for the people they'd stopped as for those watching from the sidewalks.

In the layer underneath, some of these people were probably their enemies. That's something the Marines know generally, and sometimes it's something they know specifically.

Copeland says his Humvee was hit with two improvised explosive devices last year outside the house of one of the sheiks he works closely with now. A man was captured nearby with mortar plugs. The sheik had to have known something, Copeland says.

But it's not a grudge he wants to hold. The people were under immense pressure then from the al-Qaida forces who'd taken over Ramadi, Copeland says.

There was the glass factory and countless other blood-soaked threats. Bombs and choke points and targets. The other city in the rubble under the road and in the faces across the table.

"The way I look at it is, I've got this immense abundance of energy, and I've got this seven months to make a difference," Copeland says. "If you want to fight me, that's fine. I'll fight. If you want to work with me, then we can work together."