"Big gun shoot!"

DIYALA PROVINCE, Iraq - We were just sitting down to a lovely tea with an Iraqi officer after having taken off our flak jackets in the supposed safety of his small town Army station when his men started running back in the hallways and forth and yelling in a way that didn't shatter stereotypes about the Iraqi Army's professionalism.

One of the U.S. soldiers I was with asked our visibly anxious interpreter what they were saying and he said, "Shotgun!" which didn't make much sense and then, "Big gun shoot!" (Pretty appalling English at a crucial moment for a man paid to know English, but I digress.)

We ran to the front door and it sounded like World War III outside. Staccato bursts of automatic weapons and the metallic ping of ricochets filled the night air. It was right on our doorstep and I half expected to see insurgents round the corner gunning for us.

The most terrifying part was having no idea where it was coming from as I followed the soldiers sprinting back to their Strykers (eight-wheeled combat vehicles that look like a combo between a tank and a WWII amphibious Duck).

It turned out the firefight was next door, at a polling station (Iraq's provincial elections are Saturday and tensions are high). The story was a little sketchy, but the 19-year-old Iraqi police officer manning the giant rooftop machine gun on the school said it all started when a dog began to bark near the school. Naturally, the kid tried to shoot the dog with his machine gun.

Apparently the dog was barking at some nearby insurgents who opened up on the polling station after the police officer unsuccessfully tried to kill the dog.

No one was hurt, which is amazing because it sounded like there were dozens of rounds going back and forth. I won't pretend I wasn't scared, but I did pretty well, considering. I kept cool and stuck with an even more cool-headed soldier.

This brings me to the photo, a bit of a non-sequitir, but not really. The guys up there are part of a new program the Iraqi Army started. They hire young men to protect their towns at makeshift checkpoints along rural roads. The recruits are as young as 15, have no formal training and, maybe most importantly, have no uniforms. But they do have Kalashnikovs.

Most guys that age carrying automatic rifles raise some suspicions, to say the least, when U.S. soldiers spot them. The recruits we talked to were quite nice and the program offered them jobs in an area where there were none, but now American troops have to sort out who is part of the Iraqi Army and who is someone who wants to kill them.

(I've got a story coming out soon on the program)