On the deserted Baghdad rat-run, lit only by a full moon, the 25-year-old National Guardsman is not rude or hostile, just tired and cynical. Like the rest of his 3/124th Infantry foot patrol, he has heard too many lies and excuses for breaking the 11pm-to-4am curfew, in a culture too distant from their own Florida upbringings to make real engagement possible.

“This is Kid Alley. They come up asking you for things, bugging the hell out of you. Some of them are nice. The kids like us, but the older ones have a peculiar look in their eyes. I wouldn’t trust any of them,” he says.

“The children are everywhere around here. I don’t know how many women I’ve seen in labour. These people shit out kids like turds.”

Passed like a basketball from armoured to US Marine to infantry divisions during the war, the 124th, a National Guard outfit of reservist policemen, students and businessmen, now polices the aftermath of war.

They have not been here as long as the celebrated 3rd Infantry Division, who had their long-anticipated return home postponed again this week. But few expect to be back in Florida before their year is up on January 7.

“Man, I am ready to go home,” one private sighs, leafing through a handful of glossy magazines: Country (music) Weekly, Cigar Aficionado and, incongruously, Spirituality and Health.

Dear John letters have ended marriages; students see little prospect of returning in time for the next semester; and sitting back at the fetid, darkened headquarters, there is little to do but sleep or sprawl in the large auditorium, where a television blares out cable news and Eminem videos.

Back on the streets for another patrol, another 124th unit mans a traffic checkpoint, stopping the handful of curfew violators for searches and a lecture. The company, which is 90 per cent college students, prides itself on having more wit and initiative than regular army units, and certainly operates with a relatively light touch.

Any car approaching at high speed gets four M16s in the windscreen and a lecture. But Shia pilgrims late back from the southern holy cities are waved on their way after a cursory search.

There is universal scepticism, however, about the main excuses for lateness: pregnant women and sick parents.

“Baby, baby,” complains one soldier as another vehicle approaches, predicting the lament from the woman clad in a black abaya clearly visible in the rear seat. “They can’t all be pregnant.”

They are not. The woman has a worm in her ear and needs urgent hospital treatment because she is in pain, the driver tells The Times interpreter, the only Arabic-speaker present.

There is no hatred or anger for Iraqis, just wariness and some disdain. Two nights ago an Iraqi fired a rocketpropelled grenade at the unit’s headquarters, the size of an ocean liner, and missed completely. The tone is not so much relief as contempt.

“How can you miss a building that size,” one grins. “Mind you, that guy was cross-eyed. I mean his eyes were really skewed and his RPG was bent like a banana. How dumb can you get?” Others simply cannot understand the dirt, squalor and poverty that they see around them and have little desire to see more of the country than their own sector. “I think the Iraqis aren’t the brightest,” one mutters, cradling his M16. “Their work ethic is for shit. They work from ten to one, and their moral values . . . man. They are supposed to be orthodox Muslims, but we arrested eight dudes the other day who were drunk all day long.”

Others are more focused on the unit’s own performance. Although their sector is one of the quietest in Baghdad, everyone feels the growing Iraqi frustration.

Dawn at a newly opened petrol station, and that frustration has just increased. Encouraging the garage guard to puncture illegal jerry cans with his bayonet, the unit found one of the petrol station’s own attendants with three canisters in his car.

Handcuffed in front of his children, he is now being frogmarched down the street in a show of anti-black market rigour that dismays some.

Sergeant Raymond Branch, 33, a prison officer in real life, groans and points to the now surly children who would normally run up shouting ‘Good Bush’ ”. “We have spent a month trying to get them to like us and now they hate us again. Why didn’t we put him in a car and drive him back?” A veteran of the first Gulf War, he says that his men will carry on. But there is no doubting their desire to return home. “They are holding their own at moderately pissed off, with a lot of teeth-gritting going on.”

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