I protest.

"We're here to help them!"

And then there are our troops: "Heat and violence hits US troops." The kids, and they are kids, almost all of them no older than 21, are confused and surprised that the hostility they are facing.

Even though they are an army of occupation, many soldiers I have spoken to are surprised at the upsurge in violence against them. They were told that the people of this country would greet them as liberators. "We're here to help them!" said a soldier on duty at a checkpoint near my hotel. Her commanding officer does not allow interviews with the media - but she did agree to speak to me anonymously. She's only 21-years old, a newlywed from Oklahoma, but Iraq is proving no honeymoon. "Of course I'm scared," she says "I wake every morning and wonder if I'm gonna still be alive by nightfall."

Despite having been lied to, they are just trying to do what they are told, like any good soldier.

An echo of Viet Nam is in the way the war is being fought now, with guerillas being supported by the civilians the soldiers are theoretically supposed to "protect."

Another anonymous soldier spoke to me through the window of his humvee armoured vehicle. … "I don't want say anything bad about these people, but the way they're attacking us is just so...sneaky," he says. "Shooting at us from rooftops as we drive by ... and I wish they'd just like, stand up and fight us." Street children are playing around us. … "It's like with these kids. Some of the Fedayeen get them to distract us, then they attack us. I mean, using kids!"

Then there are the physical conditions. Our soldiers, at least the rank and file, work and sleep in the intense desert heat of Iraq. Today it will be 115 degrees. Tonight it will cool to 83.

It was midnight, two hours past curfew, but the heat was almost as impressive, and oppressive, as it had been in the daytime. The soldier stepped out of the humvee, his face sweating. The US troops who work on the streets and the checkpoints wear their body armour at all times. He revealed a little of the conditions the army were working under. "It's terrible. We're sleeping in this heat without any air-conditioning. I just wake up in a puddle of sweat every morning... and they're not giving us enough water, just a bottle a day!"

They expected gratitude from the Iraqi people and they expected to be home in a few weeks. Instead they find a people who resent having foreigners occupying their country and running their government, badly. They find themselves performing duties for which they are not trained and to which they are not suited, forced to stay in a place they dislike for month upon month. They find themselves targets in a slowly disintegrating occupation of an increasingly hostile country.

And still their leaders lie to them.