WELCOME WAGON

The infantrymen were at the gates of the Justice Ministry just after first light Wednesday. They crept in, listening to scraping noises inside the nine-story concrete building on the west bank of the Tigris River.

Before the soldiers had reached the lobby, they were raising their rifles at the sound of footsteps.

And there, emerging from the shadows, were two smiling boys hauling plastic buckets brimming with stolen desk blotters, staplers, pens and paper clips.

Iraqi looters have beaten the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division to many of the key government ministries in central Baghdad. They have pried open gates and smashed windows to seize the most prosaic of items that had helped keep the organs of power running: desks, phones, computers, copiers, calculators.

The scraping sounds emanating from the ministry were caused by a woolly-haired man dragging a huge air conditioning unit across the rough floors. Grunting and sweating, he politely asked two American soldiers for help. The soldiers laughed and stepped aside.

Their relaxed attitude was a measure of the very different feeling in the air here Wednesday. There was a sense that the pulverizing U.S. armored thrusts into the city center that had defined the previous two chaotic days were nearing an end.

Snipers were still firing on American positions, and an armored column was pounding Iraqis trying to hold two bridges across the Tigris. But the downtown government complex was secure enough for Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, the 3rd Infantry Division’s commander, to inspect armor positions.

“Pretty quiet?” the general asked Staff Sgt. Charles Wooten, whose sturdy frame was framed against the barrel of a tank in the thin morning light.

“A lot quieter today than yesterday, sir, thank God,” Wooten said.

In the warren of slums surrounding the complex, hundreds of people were in the streets, waving and smiling at the Americans and cursing Saddam Hussein. The pall of black smoke from burning Iraqi vehicles and equipment was lifting. Birds were singing, and children’s voices floated in the springtime air.

Over radios came a welcome warning for front-line troops firing at Iraqi fighters on the east bank of the Tigris. They were ordered to control their fire; U.S. Marines were closing fast from the east and were just a few miles away.

Down the wide boulevards, beneath murals and statues of the Iraqi president, American tanks moved at will, almost parading as they rolled along, the crews relaxed and smiling. Looters waved casually as they toted their booty home.

Blount spoke to a few men who, unknown to the general, had just looted the Justice Ministry. They greeted him by chanting in English: “Welcome, America!”

Soldiers strung concertina wire to keep civilians away from combat positions but did not stop the thieving -- though many assumed that some of today’s looters were yesterday’s soldiers, now in civilian clothes.

“I don’t even feel like stopping them now that I see how they live,” Marine Maj. Mark Jewell, who got his first look at the slums when he spent Tuesday night here in a Bradley fighting vehicle, said of the bereft residents.

Some civilians seemed ready to kiss Pfc. Desmond Lackey and Spc. Robert Blake as the troops stood watch at a bridge over the Tigris, occasionally firing on snipers across the river.

“They’re all yelling: ‘No, Saddam! Yes, Bush!’ ” Lackey said. “These people are really happy to see Americans here in Baghdad. It’s not like those towns in the south where they never come out of their houses.”

Some of the 3rd Infantry soldiers, who had moved from the Kuwaiti border to the center of Baghdad in less than three weeks, began wondering aloud whether they might be going home soon.

“Nope,” Blount said. “This battle is not over yet. We still have some fighting to do.”

As some of his troops listened in next to their tanks, Blount said American forces have Baghdad “essentially surrounded.” The 3rd Infantry controls all approaches from the north, south and west, he said, and Marines were closing fast from the southeast. They were practically within shouting distance from where Blount stood, beneath a mural of Hussein wearing judge’s robes and holding the scales of justice.

U.S. troops in the city center will not cross the Tigris to pursue Iraqi forces pressed against the east bank by other 3rd Infantry soldiers and Marines, Blount said. And the Marines, he added, would not push to the river across from the city center. They plan to link up with the bulk of the 3rd Infantry farther north at the Tigris, he said.

“We want to avoid street-to-street fighting,” Blount said. “We’re trying to rein back in the combat to help minimize civilian casualties.

“We’re not out looking for” Iraqi fighters, he added, “but if they engage us we will go after them.”

Noting the sudden presence of civilians on the streets, Blount said: “We’re trying to convince people the regime is no longer in charge, and people have nothing to fear from the regime.”

The greatest threat now to U.S. troops, he said, is from suicide bombers and terrorists.

“Unfortunately, the terrorists wear civilian clothes to get into crowds and try to detonate bombs,” he said. “We have to be very careful now.”

Army Col. David Perkins, who escorted Blount to the ministry, said his troops Wednesday were focused on “making sure all these people [Iraqi fighters] don’t come back over the bridges.” One officer said U.S. troops had sunk six small boats carrying armed infiltrators across the Tigris.

By nightfall, Perkins said, he hoped to have his 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry, which controls the city center, link up farther west with the division’s 3rd Brigade to tighten the noose around the capital.

Iraqis who are still fighting, most of them east of the Tigris, are a mixture of Special Republican Guards, special operations forces, Fedayeen Saddam militia, irregulars and suicide bombers, according to Blount and Perkins.

U.S. forces are chipping away at the holdouts.

“Every day, it gets a little better,” Blount said.

As Blount and Perkins ducked into an armored vehicle and pulled away from the complex, trailed by bodyguards, the looting continued unabated.

Someone had tossed thousands of Justice Ministry files and documents to the courtyard below, creating a blanket of white against the dusty gray concrete.

It was a treasure trove for Sgt. Spencer Willardson, a Utah National Guardsman with the 141st Military Intelligence Battalion. Part of his job is to collect Iraqi documents.

With Willardson was an Arabic-speaking interpreter, who called through a bullhorn for people to stay at home. When they ignored him, he appealed to their integrity, saying items in the ministries belonged to the Iraqi people and should be preserved for any new government. The looters brushed past him, heavy with plunder.

Every ministry office had been ransacked. Desks and chairs had been overturned, carpets rolled up and hauled away, file drawers ransacked. Iraqi flags lay on office floors, trampled.

New computers and printers had been ripped from their boxes. Sofas blocked stairwells, abandoned by looters who couldn’t maneuver them to ground level.

All that remained on office walls were the ubiquitous photos of Hussein in all his guises -- young freedom fighter, middle-aged father of the nation, avuncular national best friend. They were disregarded in pursuit of finer spoils.

In the front courtyard, where Iraqi military positions had stood, dozens of uniforms, boots and helmets lay scattered where they had been abandoned. On the roof, with its majestic view of the palm-lined riverfront, an antiaircraft gun lay crippled, its twin barrels mangled by a tank round.

Along the riverbank, American soldiers rounded up tons of weapons and ammunition recovered from fleeing Iraqi troops. They gathered the ordnance in a big mound and laced it with explosives.

The mound blew with a deafening release of energy that shattered windows on the top floors of the Justice Ministry.

Rounds began “cooking off,” whistling into walls and trees and buildings with a low hiss and then a sharp clang.

Soldiers climbed into armored vehicles for protection. On the streets, men and boys dragged boxed TV sets by ropes, oblivious to the explosions around them, focused on their post-combat work.