Lance Cpl. Russell L. Pope, scout, Company D, 1st Light

Lance Cpl. Russell L. Pope, scout, Company D, 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, posts security near a small village, Nov. 11. It wasn't long after breakfast the very next day that Pope, 21, Livingston, Texas, was sitting in the cold in the back of a Light Armored Vehicle thumbing the safety of his loaded rifle. He wasn't nervous, he said, just on edge. Like the Iraqi people seemed to be in the market of the seemingly anti-coalition town of T'all Uhwaynat, a main trade hub leading from Syria to Mosul. "Your spider senses, they kick in, and you're a lot more alert, you're paying a lot more attention to everything around you," said Pope. "We rolled in and the whole market stopped, everybody stopped, and they all started staring at us." Luckily Pope's thumb never switched the weapon off "safe." That punch never came. Any enemy, if present, stayed low and skipped out on Bibeau's beat down. Though the "Diablos" may not have fired a round, they still considered their mounted patrol through T'all Uhwaynat a successful strike against the enemy. Until the Marines arrived, there was little coalition force presence in the town. It's likely that an insurgent cleric may be preaching anti-coalition rhetoric, or that insurgents have threatened the town's people.Whatever the reason villagers gave Marines the cold shoulder, the Marines intend to free them from any oppression. If the town is a resupply route for the insurgents, it won't be long before the Diablos take it away. The Marines of Company D, 1st LAR, make up one element of the first Marine Air Ground Task Force outside Anbar in Iraq since 2004. They traveled to the Nineweh province to kick off Operation Defeat al-Qaida in the North II, an operation aimed at stamping out the insurgency just west of the restive city of Mosul.