PROTECTING CPT PATTI

They probably don't know it...but that's the way I see it as she is now at Camp Victory North.

Do good, guys!

But McCarver must control the area abutting Camp Victory North to the east to deny sanctuary from which to attack this division headquarters on the edge of Baghdad’s international airport.

“One way or another, I’m going to own this,” he said, sitting in his Humvee and surveying the area, which includes a former veterinarian college, a one-time Iraqi air base and a bombed-out middle-class neighborhood. “This is the right way to do it.”

The expedient move, McCarver said, might have been to evict the 1,500 or so Iraqis living in his Victory North sector, headquarters for the 1st Cav’s 2nd Brigade Combat team.

But the right thing — for the moment — is to work with the varied pockets of people spread over an approximately 10-square-mile area in hopes that both Americans and locals can benefit in a symbiotic relationship.

Evicting the people — all squatters — has its own risks, said Capt. Matthew Hintz, a civil affairs officer for the FSB.

“CNN doesn’t shape public opinion. Rumors do,” Hintz said. If the Gamblers had pushed them out, that would have been 1,500 more people spreading anti-American hatred, he said.

This way, dispossessed people get security while 1st Cav gets a built-in early warning system.

But this is not, McCarver is quick to say, naive “Hands Across the Desert tree-hugger stuff.”

He says his soldiers always are asking themselves, “Are we being played?”

Still, there is altruism at work. Why, McCarver asked, can’t this area, which soldiers have dubbed “Compton” after the troubled Los Angeles suburb of the same name, be the first brick in the foundation of a new society?