With Formal Truce in Effect, GIs Turn Back Would-Be POWs : Cease-fire: U.S. troops prepare to pull out of occupied Iraq. Refugees worry about reprisals when Baghdad retakes the southern zone.

A young Iraqi soldier crossed over to Checkpoint Charlie on Friday, a U.S. highway post about six miles into southern Iraq with a sign on it that says “Freedom’s Frontier.”

He wore the black beret of a tank officer, but he had clearly fallen on hard times in Iraq. His hands were tied in front of him. He wanted to surrender, he said, to become a prisoner of war, like hundreds of Iraqi soldiers who have given themselves up to U.S. occupying troops in recent weeks to seek refuge with the enemy.

On Friday, however, there was no war. On the first day of a formal cease-fire agreement ending the Persian Gulf conflict, U.S. soldiers, prevented from taking any new prisoners of war, sawed off the man’s bonds and sent him walking back up the highway. He turned back once and waved.

“If he had his hands bound, they must’ve had him in custody,” said Sgt. Alan Maupin, watching the man’s figure become a pinpoint on the lonely road. “And if they had him in custody, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him.”

Peace felt much like war in the U.S.-occupied zone that covers at least 3,500 square miles of Iraqi desert as an estimated 40,000 remaining troops prepared for a final pullout and thousands of refugees, panicked at possible government reprisals when Iraqi forces retake southern Iraq, rushed toward crowded refugee camps on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.

At most checkpoints, American troops--carrying weapons but no live ammunition or bayonets--turned away the hundreds of Iraqi soldiers who sought prisoner-of-war status.

U.S. forces have been streaming out of Iraq by the thousands in recent days, and on Friday convoys of American trucks and tank carriers thundered along the six-lane highway that runs through the heart of southern Iraq, joining the cities of Basra and Nasiriyah before eventually snaking up toward Baghdad.

“Relief. Happiness. You got a lot of that out here. It’s like somebody finally says, ‘We got it done,’ ” said Maj. Roger King of the 2nd Armored Division Forward. “But in some ways it’s been just another day. The troops got up, shaved and had breakfast, and went out and started working the road again. It’s peace today. So we don’t take prisoners. That’s the big difference.”

“Things have gotten real mellow as far as what we do out here,” Staff Sgt. Jonathan M. Santy, manning another U.S. outpost deep within the American-controlled zone, said as a bulldozer loaded with 12 Iraqis headed for the refugee camp careened through the checkpoint. “Before, we were patting everybody down, looking for I.D. cards, checking for weapons. Now, we check for weapons and send ‘em on through. If they’re hungry, give ‘em an MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat).”

More than 300 refugees, loaded into cars, crammed into flatbed trucks with sheep, or simply walking in a haze of fatigue, passed along the highway in a single three-hour period Friday afternoon. A hundred more refused to budge at the roadside, fearful of going farther because of rumors--all untrue, but how could the soldiers say so in Arabic?--that Iraqi troops were shooting refugees on the road ahead.

For the U.S. soldiers who have lived with the enemy in their monthlong occupation of Iraq, who have tried to ease a whole nation’s hunger by passing out their extra meal rations and quiet its suffering by distributing Band-Aids and medicine in medical tents, a little of the same look of dead fatigue was on their faces.

“I don’t think I ever been any place anywhere in my life I wanted to be home so bad,” said Pvt. Kris Achtemeier of Sacramento, sitting glumly on a wall outside the Iraqi community of Zubair.

“I pray we’re going home,” added Staff Sgt. Anthony Mills. “This place has been a nightmare. A nightmare.”

“You see this?” asked Sgt. Santy, pointing toward a large truck with distraught Iraqi women and children in the back begging for food and sanctuary. “This is what we gotta look at every day. You wanna do that for long?” He paused a moment. “At least we ain’t getting the dead ones. We haven’t had a dead baby in four days.”

Farther up the road, an American soldier grabbed an unconscious toddler from an Iraqi couple and made his way toward a roadside tent. An Iraqi Bedouin motioned to a car of visiting journalists, asking for help for his camel, which had been hit in the stomach by an unexploded cluster bomb. As the party watched in horror, the camel quietly sat down in the middle of the road, a pool of blood spreading around it, then laid its head on the pavement and died.

According to unofficial estimates from military officials in the field, about 40,000 of the 100,000 U.S. troops originally in southern Iraq already have left, even before the arrival of a team of U.N. observers scheduled to deploy in the next several days and set up a permanent zone extending six miles into Iraq and three miles into Kuwait.

The head of the force, Austrian Maj. Gen. Gunther Greindl, was to arrive today in Kuwait city for consultations with the Kuwaiti government before traveling on to Baghdad for similar meetings.

U.S. military officials say they have maintained their demarcated zone within southern Iraq, but have drawn down the forces within the zone over the past several days and maintained control of the territory through aerial patrols and small forward observer posts.

The 1st Armored Division’s estimated 18,000 troops, which had been extended along a 50-mile front south of the Euphrates River, completed their pullout Thursday and were replaced by the 4,000-man 2nd Armored Division Forward Brigade. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment farther west underwent a similar redeployment earlier in the week.

Some officials said the pullout is likely to be remarkably rapid once the final order comes down.

“We’re thinning the lines, drawing down the sector, but we anticipate it will be more than a week that we will be here,” said King. “You keep on driving up and down that road over there,” he said, “and you might catch us leaving, or you might find us gone. We just pull up stakes and go. We’ve been getting very, very proficient at it.”

The prospect of the departure of U.S. forces has sparked alarm in the refugee camps and among the fleeing Iraqis, who are afraid they will not reach the camps at Safwan before the American troops pull out. In interviews at the camps, now crammed with more than 15,000 refugees, most Iraqis expressed doubts as to the ability of the United Nations’ 300-member observer force and 700 troops to protect them from the Iraqi secret police.

The situation had become so desperate Friday morning that military police at the Iraqi border warned incoming visitors that they had received radio reports that some Iraqis were said to be considering taking an American hostage to force the U.S. forces to stay.

“Saddam is going to murder us as soon as the Americans go,” said Mohammed Nasser Jaffer, owner of a date factory in Basra who fled to the U.S. Army-controlled camp in Safwan when Iraqi forces began retaliating against citizens following the uprisings in Basra and other Iraqi cities. “We are willing to go anywhere. We are even willing to go to Israel. Wherever you can find a spot in the world, we are ready to go. But we don’t want Iraq. It is a curse to be an Iraqi.”

“They are scared to death,” admitted Maj. Tom Grubbs, who heads the civil affairs team managing the camp. “These people have quite a bad experience with the U.N., because they have witnessed its operations during the Iran-Iraq War. They report to the U.N. about who starts the fighting, but they can’t provide protection to the people.”

Grubbs admitted there are limitations to the protection zone the United Nations will administer once U.S. forces withdraw.

“It’s better than nothing,” he said. “I don’t know how adequate it will be. I would say the people here are marginally safer than they are in the area north of the zone. Marginally. The question is, will the Iraqis assert civil authority over the area, which they have the right to do? And what does that mean? Does that mean restoring water and electricity in the area? Will it mean the Iraqis assert law enforcement authority here? I don’t know. What is law enforcement in Iraq?”

He looked on as thousands of Iraqis pressed against the coiled barbed wire encircling the U.S. Army’s headquarters at the camp, inside which a few Army officers stood protected against a potential mob of frightened, hungry people. Many of them, he said, have demanded political asylum to protect themselves from the Iraqis when the Americans leave.

But Grubbs shrugged. “There isn’t much the U.S. Army can do about it,” he said. “It’s not our mission to give political asylum to people, and yet that’s what’s being thrust on us by virtue of being here.”

Outside the camp, carload after carload of new refugees pulled in, seeking a meal and a place to pitch a tent. A tall U.S. Army soldier at the checkpoint pressed his hand to the back window of one of the cars, where a tiny Iraqi girl was holding her fingers to the glass and shouting urgently.

“Goodby,” he said. “I love you, too.”