"Things are getting better here," says Captain Michael Scalia, 30, on his patrol surveying the street life and its tales of right and wrong since US forces rolled into Baghdad three months ago.

Scalia and his men from the First Infantry Division can bear out the claims of US overseer Paul Bremer that normality is creeping back to Iraq.

Barbers calmly cut hair, metalsmiths burn down brass pieces in smoking pits, the sight of families lounging on their frontsteps at 10:00 pm are proof the frenzied looting that terrorised the capital has mostly receded.

Three and four-year-old children who line the dusty hole-filled pavement of northwestern Baghdad's squalid Ur neighborhood still shout "We love you!" in testament to the fact the novelty of US troops has not worn out for all.

They wave and give thumbs up, even if most adults no longer fawn over them and gleefully honk their horns as they did when Baghdad fell in April.

For every little girl, piping up at the top of her lungs, men, in their twenties and thirties, stare impenetrably at the US vehicles.

Mountains of garbage line fields and fill the thick summer air with the stench of rot and filth. Windows of crumbling cinder block houses are pitch black, the owners too poor to afford power generators for lighting.

The US soldiers turn their eyes and say nothing as they watch a man and a boy fumble lifting a limp body from a puddle of sewage in the middle of the road. The convoy pushes on not stopping to investigate further.

A teenager, sucking a cigarette, pedals his bike by a line of tanks, and the heavily-armed Scalia braces for action, nothing happens.

His unit has veterans of peacekeeping missions around the world -- hotspots and killing fields like Somalia and the Balkans -- and Scalia says his tank battalion is ready to build Western-style democracy in Iraq.

However, the Virginia native, gripping his M-16 rifle, mentions the one factor cramping their plans.

"The difference between here and the Balkans is here people here want to kill us and see us fail," Scalia said.

A soldier from his battalion was gunned down Sunday night on patrol in the same neighborhood, he says, and they haven't caught the killers.

One Iraqi was shot dead and a second wounded in the gunbattle that followed.

Scalia and other officers say the two were probably civilians caught in the crossfire, even though the official version of the incident released by the military's press office described the pair as gunmen.

It is one more cloudy, blood-filled event in post-Saddam Iraq sure to fuel rage on both sides.

"I'd kill 1,000 of them for every one of ours that dies," says a lieutenant without giving his name.

But the soldiers often have to forget their wishes for revenge. They are, at times, uncomfortably transformed from warriors to jacks of all trade -- running power plants, supervising trash collection and making forays into city politics.

In fact, Scalia was missing the third regular meeting of a neighborhood council his troops had set up two weeks ago.

"I do what I can to assist them, so they can see we are bringing something better," he says. "We can't lose their faith."

But he makes no bones about where he prefers to be. "I'm a soldier. I want to be on the ground with my men," he says, glancing at his armoured convoy pushing through the darkened streets.

WAR.WIRE