Baghdad -- The images will be with me forever.

They are images of a short war that seemed to last forever, a war that was fought by Charlie Company of Task Force 1-64 for nearly a month.

Each soldier in this Fort Stewart-based tank company will carry his own images of war with him for the rest of his life.

These are mine.

The woman in red stockings, dying in the middle of the street.

The night the dogs dug up the dead.

The young Muslim wife so fearful of someone seeing her naked foot she would not allow a medic to treat her wound.

The donkey in the middle of a field of exploding weapons and ammunition.

The suicide bombers fused in death by fire.

The thanks for a pack of cigarettes.

A wounded soldier gripping my hand in pain, thanking me for being there to help him.

The images unfold in random order, triggered by a sound or a smell or the dark loneliness of a sleepless night.

Watching her die as we ride on by

The woman wore red stockings. The left one was torn down past her knee, revealing a fleshy thigh that was exposed by her hiked-up black abaya.

She was probably in her 40s, but I could not be certain. But it was certain she was dying.

She lay in the middle of Highway 8 leading into Baghdad, her head and upper body in the median, her legs in the roadway. Blood slowly spread from her midsection onto the asphalt.

She lifted her head and left arm in supplication, as if to say: "Help me. I'm dying."

On the other side of the median a small white car was burning furiously, the body and windshield pocked with bullet holes.

Next to the car were two people. I could not tell whether they were male or female, they were so badly burned. They were moments from death, their clothes burned off.

The armored personnel carrier in which I was riding, part of a long convoy of armored vehicles racing into downtown Baghdad, paused briefly. The woman raised her arm and head again and appeared to look at me.

"Help me. I'm dying."

Then we turned and I lost sight of her for a moment. When I looked back, her head was on the median and she was still.

The dogs of war exhume the enemy

We lived with the dead for two days. The bodies -- of soldiers and gunmen, Baath Party members and Fedayeen fanatically loyal to Saddam Hussein -- lay scattered around the intersection near Najaf in various grotesque poses of death.

The local citizens would not claim them. They said they were from Baghdad and Karbala and wanted nothing to do with them. So the dead lay where they fell with their AK-47s and their rocket-propelled grenades, self-made martyrs in a futile cause.

Their faces and hands took on a waxy look in death, almost like mannequins.

Finally, the soldiers took it upon themselves to bury them in a common pit. The soldiers covered their faces with handkerchiefs and used ropes and surgical gloves to move the now stiff corpses.

That night, cramped and bundled up against the cold in our armored vehicles, we heard the barking and growling of a pack of dogs. We thought they were fighting over remnants of Meals Ready to Eat that had been thrown into a nearby trash pile.

When we awoke, we saw arms and legs sticking out of the dirt, partially gnawed by the dogs. The soldiers reburied the bodies. We moved on.

Culture clash on a bloody road

The Muslim girl could not have been any more than 14 or 15. She came hobbling down the road, blood oozing from a shrapnel wound to her right foot. A soldier held one arm while her husband, not much older than she, helped an older blind man.

The soldiers gave her a box of MREs to sit on and indicated they wanted a medic to treat her foot. She pulled her black abaya over her face and began crying. A civilian interpreter with us said she did not want anyone other than her husband to touch her. He said it was their custom.

It took about 10 minutes of negotiations before she reluctantly agreed to allow the medic to cut away the white hose, clean off the dirt and blood and clean the wound. Then she, her young husband and the old man were gone.

The donkey and the ammunition

The donkey had been there all day as troops rolled south of Baghdad on Highway 8, blowing up Iraqi artillery, anti-aircraft weapons and trucks loaded with ammunition to prevent reinforcements from reaching the capital.

Tethered in the middle of a field next to a crate of ammunition, the donkey was surrounded by exploding weapons and ammunition. Bullets and pieces of metal whined through the air and explosions rocked the ground.

For more than two hours, as Charlie Company tank crews tried to replace the tread on one of their tanks, we watched the donkey graze, seemingly unaware and unconcerned about what was going on around it.

After a while, the soldiers began pulling for the donkey, willing it to survive in the midst of the chaos. And when it came time to leave, one of the soldiers asked 1st Sgt. Jose Mercado, 40, of Quebradillas, Puerto Rico: "Shouldn't we blow up those crates of ammo by the donkey?"

"I don't want to kill that donkey. He didn't do anything to anybody," Mercado said.

Deadly game of checkpoint roulette

Suicide bombers would come every day out of nowhere, speeding into the checkpoints, avoiding traffic cones and concertina wire and aiming directly at the tanks. When warning shots from the soldiers of Charlie Company failed to stop them, the soldiers fired directly at the vehicles.

It was difficult to tell the civilians from the suicide bombers at times, but the soldiers were ordered to take no chances.

In the streets of Baghdad, the suicide bombers were even more numerous.

At one checkpoint at a major intersection just west of the Tigris River, a white minivan with four men in it came speeding at one of the tanks. The soldiers fired, and it exploded in a mass of flames just a few yards from their tank.

The driver got out first but died on the sidewalk a few feet from the van.

The other three men scrambled to get out through the driver's door, but they died in the flames, their bodies fused together by the fire. In death, they were almost unrecognizable as human. They were little more than charred skeletons.

Gift of cigarettes for new smokers

By the time Charlie Company soldiers reached Baghdad, they were running low on water, spare parts for their tanks and cigarettes. People who had never smoked began puffing away after the Saturday "Thunder Run" into downtown Baghdad, when several soldiers were wounded and others narrowly avoided death from the barrage of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Task force officials could do little about the water, spare parts or the mail, which soldiers had not seen for three weeks. But task force Sgt. Major William Barnello, 44, of Syracuse, N.Y., found a local merchant who would sell cigarettes to the soldiers.

He bought 20 cartons at $1 a pack and told the senior enlisted soldier in each of the five companies in the task force they would get four cartons each.

"Have your soldiers pool their money and have the first sergeants come get the cigarettes," he radioed the companies.

When I heard the radio call, I pulled out $90 and told Mercado: "Go buy as many as you can get for that."

He came back with enough cigarettes to last the company for several days.

"You can't believe how much this helped morale," said Staff Sgt. David Richard, 38, of Belfield, N.D.

The best $90 I ever spent.