GIs Find Hunger, Panic at Kurds’ Camp : Relief: U.S. troops struggle to bring food and order to Iraqi refugees at a Turkish border settlement.

It was a bad drop.

The big twin-engine American Sea Knight helicopter, the ninth of the day, came on time from a clear blue sky Thursday into the soft mud atop a devil-touched mountainside.

From a rear ramp, crewmen cleanly tumbled out a 1,100-pound pallet of rations. The thin line of American soldiers protecting the landing zone could not hold back the crowd of Iraqi refugees. They came with a swiftness born of hunger and desperation--men and boys pushing, shouting, clawing.

The helicopter left immediately, driving hundreds of scrabbling figures to their knees with its downdraft. In one minute, at most two, the pallet was gone, and knots of fighting youths wrestled for the cardboard boxes of MREs--meals, ready to eat. The sweating soldiers in combat gear regrouped to await the next shipment.

“As bad as it looks, it’s better than it was when we got here,” said Air Force Sgt. Troy E. Long of Hanover, Pa.

Thursday was the third working day at Isikveren for a small detachment of American troops.

They are struggling to bring life and order--and to retain their sense of humor--in this, the worst of a dozen concentrations of hapless refugees from Iraq, totaling nearly half a million, trapped along Turkey’s mountain border. And--at last--they are making a difference. The helicopters are coming regularly now.

“We had four or five organized drops today; then order broke down,” said Chief Warrant Officer Tracy-Paul Warrington of Simi Valley, Calif., commanding a detachment of Special Forces troops at a landing zone 7,000 feet high in the snowcapped mountains.

“But yesterday there was only one good one, and we nearly lost the helicopter to the mob. We’re working for order in a place where order is measured in minutes. Tomorrow will be better.”

The work of the Americans here at Isikveren, an encampment that is two weeks old and already notorious for its squalor and disorganization, is echoed in other concentrations that sprang up overnight from the mountainside as Iraqis, most of them Kurds, fled from the rule of President Saddam Hussein.

Acknowledging the warnings of relief specialists that the crude, high-altitude refugee camps cannot be maintained without massive loss of life, the United States has promised to move the Iraqis to new, organized camps at lower elevations inside Iraq itself.

“This is an interim solution to give back dignity and the will to survive. They are way down, and we are trying to build them back up,” said Staff Sgt. Clark Allen of Huntington Beach, Calif.

In interviews conducted Thursday with refugees in English, Arabic and Kurdish, only one rejected outright the prospect of returning to Iraq. “Never, never, never,” said Rakib Mahmoud, a 25-year-old driver, as he struggled uphill with a case of crackers and a tin of cooking oil.

Most of the other refugees said they would be satisfied to return to camps in Iraq under American protection, but all evinced a fear of the wrath of Hussein and a ferocious desire to see him deposed.

“Every people don’t believe Saddam Hussein. . . . We’ll go back if we are protected,” said Youssef Ali, a 65-year-old retired Iraqi army sergeant major.

“We’ll do whatever Bush says,” said Salaam Hassan, a medical orderly who fled from the Iraqi city of Zakhu.

The presence of the strapping young soldiers--wearing American flag patches on their shoulders and displaying a can-do spirit--has combined with the daylong clatter of the helicopters to lend a strong, if belated, sense of reassurance in Isikveren.

“They call us ‘Amerikees.’ When we walk up, they start cheering,” said Sgt. 1st Class Gilbert Shatto of Milwaukee, chief engineer of the Special Forces group that built the landing zone and cleared a flat, muddy space next to it for a hospital. The refugees themselves built a fast-filling graveyard a few yards away.

Such contrasts are almost too much for some of the Americans, moved by the tragedy before them and bemused by the heroic stature ascribed to them by a nominally enemy people who, not long ago, they barely knew existed.

“I hear them clapping, and I feel like Elvis Presley,” said Allen. “This place is like a combination between Woodstock and California Jam. To keep from going crazy, we’re beginning to call it Kurdstock.”

The refugees are clearly happy over the strangers’ presence. One after another said how pleased he was that the Americans had taken over organization of the encampment from hard-pressed Turkish conscripts trained to fight Kurdish guerrillas, not to manage refugee camps.

Often sharing the same living conditions as the refugees, the Turkish soldiers have reportedly helped themselves freely to international aid that began arriving by airdrop April 7 and continues to be trucked up steep, rutted tracks to the camps.

“I think what gets to me is the people smiling. Even in a few days you can see their morale is up,” said Sgt. 1st Class Rick Morris of Seminole, Fla. “The worst of it, the hardest thing for me, are the babies. They are so hopeless; they die so easy.”

Free-lance writer Hugh Pope contributed to this article.