Getting Out the Vote

The chief stands up, dramatically slamming his hand against the wall.

"Seventy percent of my men are here only for the paycheck," he says.

Norris stares at the chief, his face set.

"It is the goal of our mission to assist in election security for the Iraqi people," Norris replies. "We are all putting ourselves in danger, but that is the price that must be paid for progress. The burden is on all our shoulders for a successful election, a democratic Iraq."

After five more minutes of discussion, the meeting ends. The police chief agrees to check out the polling sites tomorrow to see if he can secure them. Norris assures him he can.
       
En route to a second police station, Norris gets a call over the radio: his recon platoon found a weapons cache and has detained four men. Minutes later, the back of the Stryker drops and Norris jumps out on the street in the testy Al Sinaa neighborhood, where the unit had seen its heaviest fighting three weeks before. On that day, the gun battle lasted eight hours and left 18 Iraqi soldiers injured and one American soldier without a leg. "Be careful," Norris tells a NEWSWEEK reporter. "This is how it started last time." Four men stand with hoods over their faces next to the Al Rahma ("Mercy") auto shop. Twenty feet away, the soldiers laid out their find: a pistol with a silencer attached, an AK-47, a manual on how to make bombs, explosives, and a half dozen of IEDs, one already made and ready to go. "We heard there were bad guys in the area," says 1st Lieutenant Jeff Marshburn, the 33-year old platoon leader from Jacksonville, Ala. "They were giving us the evil eye." Norris asks his interpreter, Cooper, to start interrogating the men.

In a split second, Norris makes the jump from "city manager"—as he describes his work—to chief of a combat operation. It's perhaps the hardest challenge his men face everyday, transitioning between helping and fighting, sometimes by the hour. "We're trained to clear rooms, to kick down doors, to kill," Norris says. "One minute, you're picking up a dead body, the next you're handing out candies to kids. One day I'm in a kinetic combat operation, the next day I'm trying to figure out to help the Iraqis open a polling site."
       
The next day the first item on Norris's agenda is a local radio interview on the Iraqi Media Network. The IMN has the biggest tower in Mosul; a "beacon for mortars," as one soldier puts it. According to the officer manager, Haiman Fadhil, 47, nine employees of the station have been assassinated since 2003, seven in the past year. The most recent victim was a 50-something female engineer, Ahlam Youseef. She was shot to death with her son and husband two weeks ago, says Fadhil. The office manager has received death threats many times, including a video sent by the insurgents showing three masked men saying he would be killed if the station continued working with the Americans. During Ramadan last year, the station was assaulted by armed men. The police fled and Fahdil and his colleagues fought them off for 30 minutes until an American helicopter arrived. So why does he keep working? "I love my job," he says.