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Newsday's Dionne Searcey describes the voting scene.

Violence on Election Day

Ecstatic voters dropped oversized ballots into plastic bins, their fingers still dripping with the purple ink that will mark them for days to come as participants in elections that insurgents view as too heavily influenced by the Americans.

In Mosul, where flyers have warned of beheadings for anyone who votes, those who turned out risked their lives for democracy. Elderly women in black gowns, college students, men in wheelchairs and on crutches all lined up to cast ballots. Couples brought their children to show them democracy in action.

But many people said they were too scared to vote and stayed home or lined the streets to watch others on their way to the polls. It had seemed that when 5 p.m. came, and polling sites closed largely without incident, everyone was in the clear.

But that was exactly when someone tossed a grenade onto the roof where U.S. snipers were keeping watch over a nearby schoolhouse the Iraqis were using as a polling site. Seven paratroopers were injured.

Inside the house they had occupied for their mission, one of the hurt men sat dazed on the floor, a pool of blood collecting underneath his injured leg. Soldiers carried down a flight of stairs another of the wounded who was shrieking, "My foot!"

As he shepherded the injured men to a military hospital, Lt. Col. Chris Gibson checked on his radio to make sure the Iraqis had collected the ballots and they were safely headed to where they would be counted as he simultaneously fielded calls about the wounded.

The ban on vehicles kept other cars off the road and the Army Humvees sped to the emergency room. Doctors there unloaded one man who was lying on his stomach on a stretcher, smoking a cigarette, with the back of his pants cut open.

"He got me in the" rear end, he said to a friend. "Right in the back of the leg."

Gibson, pale and looking absolutely drained, sat in the emergency room, until he was certain the most seriously injured was going to be ok. By 9:30 p.m. he was back at his headquarters, preparing to head into the streets again. "Everyone is going to be fine," he said. -- Dionne Searcey