Baghdad, Iraq – The days were getting longer, running together in a yellow, dusty haze as the mission of rooting out Iraqi fighters obscured all else.

Pvt. Allen Burns set his chin on his hand and just stared, “trying to zone away from this place.”

A 19-year-old tank loader from north St. Louis, he was leaning up against a concrete barrier that blocks potential suicide bombers from a base-camp phone center where other soldiers were talking with people back home. Tent tarps flapped in the distance and the sun rose, pushing temperatures above 90 degrees.

“I hate it here,” Burns said. “I run my life through my head. This is not how my life was supposed to be.”

He wouldn’t have to be here in Iraq, with the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, if he hadn’t messed up.

He made counterfeit U.S. money – new $20 bills – using a fancy home printer. It was “easy to get away with” – an addictive habit that Burns said brought him up to $1,000 a week for clothes, video games, Reeboks, Nikes. In January 2004, federal authorities closed him down.

His probation officer told him Army service could clear his record. Otherwise, he could lose rights such as voting, Burns said. “I didn’t want to give up those rights.”

So he signed up for four years, snagging a $4,000 bonus.

“But,” he said, “I’d rather be in college doing my electrical engineering stuff.” That had been part of the dream that sustained him while growing up poor. He tinkered with circuits and frequencies. In high school, he concentrated on math up to calculus.

The other part of his dream: his fiancée, Shanetta. She recently had a miscarriage. Burns still yearns to create a stable family with her.

But he wasn’t calling home to anybody on this day. He felt deeper woes, too, he said. A sense that everybody he has ever known has betrayed him, that nobody can be trusted.

His best friend betrayed him by spilling the beans about the counterfeiting. And a few years back, his own mother had betrayed him.

Burns recalled how he had hidden $100 under a dresser “trying to save it.” She was deep into drugs then, he said. She knew about that money. One day it was gone. When he confronted her, he said, he knew.

“That messed my whole world up,” he said. “It caused me not to trust people. If you can’t trust your parents, how can you trust anybody else?”

He paused, then added: “I still try to hold on to the love I have for my mother.”

His father, an assembly line worker at Ford, often wasn’t around. But “he whupped me and grounded me” after U.S. Secret Service agents came to his house about the phony bills.

Among fellow soldiers here at a base camp south of Baghdad, Burns stays to himself.

He slept alone on his tank at first. He often eats prepackaged meals rather than joining others in chow lines. He watches and rewatches “The Incredibles” on a small DVD player and plays the computer card game FreeCell.

Before rolling north from the desert in Kuwait this month, commanders put Burns through a rapid-reaction training course to hone urban combat skills. He excelled. They recognized his skills by awarding him a red- and-white coin he keeps in his pocket. He did call home about that, telling his grandmother Rosie, who raised him.

“She was, like, telling me how she was living her life for me, and when she prays for me, she prays to God I’ll be OK,” he said. “It just made me cry that she cares so much for me.”

There’s one person here he reveres, too: Sgt. Ralph Johnson, 44, of Anderson, S.C., a 20-year military veteran who runs his unit. Johnson is someone “I’d take a bullet for,” Burns said.

The feeling from Johnson is mutual. “I keep an eye out (for Burns),” he said. “Good kid.”

Commanders have the soldiers making house calls south of Baghdad, an area heavy with insurgents.

“Hot as hell. Raiding houses and stuff,” Burns said.

The tankers start at dawn and finish about 9:30 p.m. Burns’ tank once teetered along a crumbling canal wall – and he thought it might tip.

This is dangerous work “putting our lives on the line,” Burns said. “Whether I live or die, I just want to get through with it. I just want to not be here.”