Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Gary Rapoza, an Iraqi war veteran and 1993 Pahrump Valley High School graduate, said the media aren't showing many of the good things America has done in Iraq.

But another Pahrump veteran of the war, Army Sgt. Cahlan Bowman, thinks 90 percent of the Iraqis just want to kill us.

"Our mission in Iraq was improving the infrastructure for the health and welfare of all soldiers that were over there," Rapoza said. He crossed the Iraq-Kuwait border in March 2003 and was eventually stationed at Camp Anaconda in Balad.

One mission was to restore Camp Victory, one of Saddam's palaces that was blown up by U.S. forces and later used as a headquarters.

Rapoza said unlike the news reports, Americans also improved the lives of many Iraqis, who lived like many others in poor Third World countries, with sewage, trash, a lack of running water and no power.

"Our main mission was basically to help fix those kind of things for the Iraqi people as well as our actual base camps, improving the living style for most of the soldiers. When we first rolled in there, in Iraq, we were all living in tents in the desert. Life has definitely improved for soldiers now, most of them are living on the main bases," Rapoza said.

When he returned to the U.S., Rapoza became a recruiter for the National Guard, a job he admitted is more of a challenge in wartime. Before, he said recruits just wanted the National Guard to provide them with funding for education and didn't ask for much.

"What the news portrays on the television, things going on in Iraq, is not an accurate portrayal of what is going on there. That's things as a recruiter we have to fight all the time, mothers saying their sons and daughters are going to die," Rapoza said.

Rapoza said American troops are building schools, power plants and police stations for Iraqis as well as giving them a taste of freedom for the first time. But he admitted, "A year into the war is when a lot of things started going crazy. The reality is a lot of these people never tasted what it's like to be free."

When Saddam's brothers Udai and Qusay were killed in the summer of 2003, Rapoza said American servicemen thought things would quiet down. But instead, matters got worse during the first Ramadan he spent in Iraq in fall 2003, a period when devout Moslems fast from dawn to dusk.

"It wasn't until October, those IEDs were coming from all over the place and it was all terrorists and foreigners," Rapoza said. His base was subject to frequent attacks.

Retired Army 1st Sgt. Kenton Falerios became part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in April 2003 when Baghdad had already been taken by U.S. forces. Now home, he works at the Nevada Test Site.

"A lot of it was starting to calm down. We did receive some sniper fire as we were driving from Kuwait up to Baghdad. The biggest thing I'd seen, which was quite a shock to me because I was in Operation Desert Storm, was the number of destroyed U.S. vehicles along the way," Falerios said.

The 18th Military Police Brigade commander said they were being reassigned to Mosul, where they served under Gen. David Petraeus, now the top military commander in Iraq.

"He's an awesome man," Falerios said. "One of the missions General Petraeus gave us was rebuilding the entire Mosul police infrastructure."

Falerios said his men weren't trained to do that, but Petraeus told them to make it happen. Falerios said he developed a police curriculum.

"It was around the summer some of the insurgencies started picking up. Then towards the end of my tour, it was getting worse as time went on," Falerios said. "They brought a reserve major over from the United States. This reserve major and I were in charge of developing and putting together the police academy, the public safety academy, the emergency operations center for the city of Mosul.

"General Petraeus, I can't speak enough of this man," Falerios said. "He was able to pull the sheiks, tribal chiefs and the clergy together, and things were really good. Mosul, we still had attacks, sniper fire, but it wasn't as bad as Baghdad (or) Anbar province."

The media might talk about the five soldiers who were blown up that day, but Falerios said they won't mention the 25 new schools or 13 new hospitals that were constructed.

Army Sgt. Cahlan Bowman received his GED from Pahrump Valley High School in 2003 and joined the service. He left for Iraq in August 2006 and spent 15 months there. Bowman said he was part of an infantry scout team.

During the war, Bowman said he lost 17 of his fellow soldiers and was shot in the leg during a fire fight in Baghdad, after which he was hospitalized for three weeks and walked on crutches for two months.

"I never did a humanitarian mission, I never handed out bottles of water, candy. I went out after targets. So it was always pretty much dangerous for us. We got shot at, we got blown up," Bowman said.

"The danger's always going to be there. It's a war zone. It's a dangerous thing every single day you're over there. It doesn't matter what the news says. They (the Iraqis) don't want us there, but that's not for us to decide. We do our job. We do what we're told," Bowman said.

The scouts set up on roads or places where there had been a lot of IEDs planted.

Army National Guardsman Logan Gibbs, a 2001 Pahrump Valley High School graduate, served a year in Iraq beginning in July 2006, providing security as a truck commander for convoys traveling from the Kuwaiti border all the way to Mosul in northern Iraq.

"When you first cross the border and it's your first time there, your knees are knocking. You don't know what to expect, even though you've been trained for a long time," Gibbs said. But he said, "It's like a football game. Once the initial hit is on, it's game on."

They lost a soldier in their unit an hour into their very first mission, he said.

"You go a month or two without seeing anything, then you get slammed for two or three weeks straight," Gibbs said.

Gibbs said some Marines and Army ground troops began hitting Baghdad big time, making the roads a little safer. But speaking of the insurgents, he said, "The thing is, you push them out of one area, they move to another area."