Michael Gisick/Tribune

Army Lt. Kyle Trottier (right) shares a laugh with Sgt. Cedric Shelbon after an uneventful overnight patrol near Ramadi. Trottier, a 24-year-old Los Alamos native, is in the middle of a 15-month deployment in Iraq.

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OUTSIDE RAMADI, Iraq — "Du . . ."

"Du hast . . ."

The little radio thumps away quietly next to Army Spec. Jeff Smith, piloting his way through the dark empty desert.

"Du hast mich . . ."

The stifled rattle of the Humvee's gas pedal presses against his right foot.

One of the soldiers tells a ribald story involving a sergeant and a one-armed woman, a tale they have laughed over many times, trying to stay awake.

This is how 2nd Platoon rolls, listening to Rammstein, Iron Maiden or Def Leppard and recounting the famous exploits of their mates to combat tedium as they cross and recross a 35-kilometer stretch of desert highway at 3:30 in the morning.

The highway, the only major route from Syria to Baghdad, was once a major conduit for insurgents and arms headed to Ramadi and beyond. But as much of Anbar province has gone quiet, so has the road.

"We've searched more than 500 vehicles since May, and we haven't found any contraband," says the platoon's leader, a Los Alamos native named Lt. Kyle Trottier.

Still, patrols from the platoon in C Company, 2/7 - the Army's 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment - head out of their dusty base early every morning for five-hour sojourns up and down the road. They make four round trips on this night, stopping by the checkpoints manned by Iraqi forces and passing the same, slow American supply convoy several times.

They stay awake with stories and dietary supplements. Trottier, 24, begins the patrol with a mug of coffee, a package of Pop-Tarts and two cans of Rip It Energy Fuel - a heavily caffeinated beverage that forms a staple of the military diet.

"This is," he confirms, "how we roll."

When not upon the lost highway, the soldiers spend their time at their outpost, which they built mostly by themselves. While many U.S. troops in Iraq live on giant bases with more amenities than some American towns, these soldiers have little to amuse themselves but themselves. They have no Internet or TV or phone service, though Trottier recently scored a satellite receiver and is working to get it hooked up.

They have no running water. They burn their own waste.

"Trust me," Smith says. "You've never lived until you've burned your own feces."

They make do. One of the soldiers rigged up a sort of shower stall. They assembled some weight equipment and built small arms and tank ranges. They are a tank platoon, but these days their M1 Abrams rarely leave their posts guarding the entrances to the camp.

It wasn't always this way. The unit saw hard fighting in central Ramadi when they were based downtown early in the year, before things went quiet. Now those days are stories, some of which rarely get told.

"We started finding a lot of mass graves out in the desert, where insurgents had dumped the bodies of uncooperative Iraqis," Trottier says. The graves were often lined with improvised explosive devices.

"The smell was horrible," he says. "The sight was horrible."

Still, Trottier says, it was easier to stay focused when the unit was facing death every day and not just driving a dark highway. Like many other junior officers in Anbar province, Trottier now spends much of his time working with tribal leaders from the area, arranging cleanup of the highway and training security forces.

"I'm very aware that while I'm in there drinking chai for two hours with a sheik, the soldiers are outside pulling security," he says, using the Arabic word for tea. "I think the soldiers understand it, but I don't think they enjoy a lot of it. I think it's a much harder mission for the soldiers than it is for the leaders."

Lately, Trottier has taken to reading one of the books chronicling the failure of military leaders to plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or to adjust to the insurgency that followed. He says he finds the book, "Fiasco," by Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks, both convincing and devastating.

"I kind of don't want to give it to the guys who did tours here before, because it's basically telling them that what they were doing was counterproductive," he says. "It wasn't their fault; they were just following orders. But it's frustrating. We lost a lot of credibility, and we've had to build trust here from the ground up."

Out on the road, Smith guns the engine, and the Humvee rattles past the long, slow supply convoy. The air conditioner is broken, but the truck is reliable and the little radio is working. A reporter in the back seat lolls off into a half-sleep plagued by post-modern German pop music. "Sprockets," he says to himself.

"Du hast mich . . ."

"Du hast mich gefragt . . ."

"The last time out," Spec. Smith says, "I think we saw three or four cars the whole five hours."

Smith says he's thinking of getting out of the Army. He dreams of being a railroad engineer in the Pacific Northwest.

Trottier still has two years left on his initial four-year commitment to the Army and hasn't decided whether he'll stay in. He got married in September 2006, four months before he deployed.

"Some days I'm very happy and very proud of what we've accomplished here, but some days I feel pretty burnt out," he says. "I want to commit some time to my wife. Most of our marriage, we've been apart."

The slate-gray morning is dawning over the highway and the patrol returns to base. A sergeant is coaxed into another telling of the story of the one-armed lady. He didn't notice she only had the one arm when they met at a club, he says.

"She introduced me to my first wife," he shrugs.

A thin-looking band of brownish clouds rolls in and raindrops fall on the sand.

"Everything's going to turn to mud," Smith muses.