Michael Gisick/Tribune

Army Spc. Samuel Ramos (left) and Spc. Rob Elliott catch a few winks while riding in an armored vehicle on patrol in the streets of southeast Baghdad.

Michael Gisick/Tribune

Army Spc. Rob Elliott (right) and Staff Sgt. Benjamin Nenno move out on patrol in southeast Baghdad. Elliott, who has more experience in Iraq than his new squad leader, often calls the shots as the squad feels its way through potentially dangerous situations.

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BAGHDAD — Army Spc. Philip Story walks carefully through the rubble at the edge of a backyard, what's left of the house next door. He has been through this block before.

He spots a length of hose coiled among the shards of concrete, covered in white dust. One of his best friends, Cpl. Gilberto Meza, stepped on a piece of hose on Oct. 6. It contained small metal plates. When the plates were brought together by Meza's boot, they closed a circuit. A bomb exploded.

Meza, 21, died. The four other squad members were injured, including Story, the only one well enough to go on.

"You never want to step on a hose," he says, knowing that now. "One of my best friends died that way."

It's a new squad walking through southeast Baghdad this week. It has a long name - 3rd Squad, 4th Platoon, G Company, 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment - but it's still feeling for its identity.

Except for a driver and gunner, who stay with the vehicle, Story is the only holdover. Spc. Rob Elliott and Spc. Coleman Tucker, a sometime Roswell resident, came over from other squads in the platoon.

The new squad leader, Staff Sgt. Benjamin Nenno, 28, arrived from a desk job at Fort Benning, Ga. Pvt. Anthony Harrington, 20, came from basic training. Mostly, he still goes by "new guy."

Elliott was a team leader in his old squad, and he tends to give instructions - and then ask squad leader Nenno whether that's what he wanted to do. Nenno tends to say yes.

Unlike the new guys, Elliott and Story have been through what is often referred to as "the (bleep)."

Hell, to use a printable four-letter word.

And, a lot of days, hell was fun - fun and costly like a bender in a bad city, without the girls or the alcohol, just the fighting and the insomniac hours and the high.

It usually started around 1:30 in the afternoon, once the insurgents finished lunch. Or at least that's the way Elliott figures it, because that's when it started.

"Like clockwork," he says. "You could look at your watch and know you were about to get shot at."

Usually the bad guys would pop off a few rounds and disappear, but this one day the insurgents holed up in a building and fought it out. Soon the Americans were pouring in whatever they had - rifle and machine-gun fire, shoulder-mounted rockets, the works.

"It was pretty sporting," says Elliott, a 24-year-old Kentuckian. "We got pretty spoiled here for the first three weeks."

But the costs walk with them every day.

They are referenced as reason for caution. When the squad is about to enter a house that has been flagged for possible explosives, Elliott tells an Air Force dog handler along for the ride to be careful.

"This is pretty much an all-new squad, and I'll just leave it at that," he says.

The stories also serve to keep time as the days run together. When the soldiers come across a car outside an abandoned house, Elliott remembers that the vehicle was not there before, because he remembers chasing goats from the house the day the old squad got blown up.

"This was the goat house," he says. "I remember it clear as day."

As they walk through the occupied homes along their patrol route, Elliott is the most talkative.

His Arabic is limited to operational phrases - hello, do you have any weapons - but he's picking up new words.

With his olive skin, Iraqis sometimes mistake Elliott for an Arab and come to him pleading their unintelligible cases.

He learned how to say, "I am not an Iraqi," but he still listens, trying to pick out words, resting his hands on the rifle strapped to his chest.

He was raised on a farm in Mount Sterling, in eastern Kentucky. When he was 3, he decided to quit eating meat, and he's still a vegetarian. Much later, he quit drinking.

Story, 21, is a quieter presence. He warms to the subject of baseball but doesn't have a whole lot to say about it. It has been a few years since he could really follow a season. He plans to go home to Tucson once his enlistment is up in about a year.

Sitting on a couch in an Iraqi's living room, he says he'd prepared himself to be a soldier since he was a kid, so he knew he might lose a friend one day.

The squad is moving on, and he stands up, saying, "Obviously, it still sucks."

For a few missions, the joke for the new squad was that Harrington and Nenno had brought good luck with them - cooler weather and no explosions. That lasted until late last week, when their armored Stryker vehicle hit an IED, an improvised explosive device..

It wasn't a bad one - took out the wheels on one side and knocked the platoon sergeant up in his hatch out cold, but that was it. Spc. Samuel Ramos, a medic, slept through the whole thing. It's not as if it was just some routine event, but he's a heavy sleeper.

"I was asleep because I usually go to sleep when we're rolling," Ramos says. "I wake up, and there's all this commotion and a big cloud of dust. I'm, like, we just got blown up."

They all laugh. Ramos slept through getting blown up.

For the new squad, stories like that are glue. It's not as though it's the first day of school and the soldiers have a whole semester to get acquainted and work out social positions and cliques and loyalties.

When the truck stops, four of them - Nenno, Elliott, Story and Harrington - walk out into the city.

Later Tuesday night, the soldiers wait in the courtyard of an abandoned house. Nenno keeps watch at the gate while the others lie against a wall, the open-faced moon casting its pale shadows.

Hell was all right, but it's quieter now. They are a sober band.

"Time goes by slower," Elliott says. "But the way I look at it, I got a wall to lean on and nobody's shooting at me. That's a good thing."