Staff Photo by Gillian Bolsover -- Bill Swiderski sits on the couch with his daughter, Ashley, before leaving for the airport Friday to return to Iraq. Mr. Swiderski, a guard at Camp Bucca, came back to the U.S. for two weeks to care for his wife and daughter who had both just had surgery.

Petty Officer 1st Class Bill Swiderski thought the Iraq desert patrols he conducted with the Tennessee National Guard’s 278th Regimental Combat Team in 2005 were stressful.

As it turns out, says Officer Swiderski — who is deployed again, this time as a Navy reservist — hunting and capturing terrorists is a cakewalk compared to guarding them.

“It’s almost like baby-sitting dangerous teenagers,” he said of the about 450 prisoners under his command at Camp Bucca, a detention facility in the southeast corner of Iraq.

Bucca houses everyone from those caught out after curfew to convicted murderers and al-Qaida operatives on death row, Petty Officer 1st Class Swiderski said, so his charges range from an economics professor from Baghdad to a surly individual known simply as “Bull.”

The Navy law enforcement officer had the chance to break away from that surreal environment recently, having been granted emergency leave to care for his wife after her wrist surgery and daughter after emergency surgery to drain fluid from her brain.

At home in Brainerd, he reflected on the state of things in an environment many have compared to the movie “Groundhog Day.”

Like the Bill Murray film in which the main character is doomed to repeat the same day over and over, Bucca can be almost mind-numbing, according to Staff Sgt. Joel Nix of the Tennessee National Guard’s 1/181st Field Artillery Battalion. Conditions often are boring and repetitive, he said.

“I never really tried to keep track of the days, or how many days I had left or how long I had been there, because I’d blink and a month would have gone by,” Staff Sgt. Nix said after returning from Camp Bucca in May.

Petty Officer 1st Class Swiderski said he, too, feels the monotony. And that makes it hard to remain vigilant in the face of potential danger at the hand of prisoners who will do anything to get attention, including annoying or hurting the guards, he said.

It’s this constant threat that makes guarding prisoners so stressful, explained Chris Atkins, a Chattanooga-based marriage and family therapist who deployed to Baghdad from October 2007 to June 2008 as a combat stress counselor for the Army.

“Their distress is caused by constant demands and a constant threat to their own safety, being that they’re at arms-length of potential assassins,” said Mr. Atkins, who worked with a number of military guards while in Iraq.

Not only do the prisoners have the potential to cause harm, he said, they probably already have, and that can incite rage or a desire for retaliation among military personnel.

“Some of these guys have been verified to have planted bombs on roads that killed two, three or four soldiers,” Mr. Atkins said. “Those were (the guards’) buddies, and they know that. ... All of these feelings just well up from within them.”

And yet the guards must keep their cool and, according to the Geneva Convention, treat the prisoners as they would their own fellow troops. Bottled-up resentment can explode if the guards aren’t careful to find healthy outlets, Mr. Atkins said.

For Petty Officer 1st Class Swiderski, it’s a matter of remembering that he is there to do a job, and that’s it.

“My job is not to judge them,” he says very matter-of-factly. “It’s care, custody and control.”

Some prisoners, after being convicted through the fledgling Iraqi justice system, are taken to the gallows at Camp Cropper near Baghdad.

But just as often the prisoners ultimately are released, Petty Officer 1st Class Swiderski said. In that way, he said, it’s apparent to him that a truly just system is developing.

The officer relishes the chance to deliver a “happy bus letter” — a letter explaining that a detainee will be bused out of the compound and freed.

“There is an awful lot of them that get let go,” Petty Officer 1st Class Swiderski said. “I mean thousands.”

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