Well, so far so good.

In the last 48 hours I’ve stood and watched while soldiers uncovered three roadside bombs before they exploded; seen a meat market in Baghdad that consisted a dozen live sheep standing in a circle while a guy skinned another animal nearby; watched American guys play basketball outside, after dinner, in dusty 90-degree weather; ridden in three armored vehicles; and lost my way home just once.

I filed my first story tonight, and it felt good to do some work. There’s really not much else to do here, besides eat, play basketball and go out on patrol. Life is hard and grueling because of the heat and the stress, but the soldiers I’ve met so far are in a surprisingly good mood. It’s a shock, considering everyone knows someone who has been injured or died, and considering that I probed them for details in preparation for a Memorial Day story. I suppose there’s no other choice really. You wouldn’t be able to get out of bed every morning.

Getting here took a while. My “show time” at the military airport in Germany was 5:50 a.m. Our flight took off at 2:20 p.m. Apparently the back door to the plane (the large back door; imagine dozens of suburbans pulling out of the jet that accompanies Air Force One) wouldn’t close. It took six hours in the air, perhaps because they refueled in flight on the way, perhaps because it was a C-17 that most resembles a 100-ton caterpillar inching its way through the sky. Nevertheless, we arrived a little after 10 p.m. local time to a darkened, dreary airport.

My first glimpse of Baghdad was out the back of the military cargo plane. All I saw were spotlights and a slight outline of a darkened air tower. I found the tent that served as reception, but no one met me. Seems there was confusion about my arrival date. I had to wait a couple of hours for a ride and got a perfect introduction to my next six weeks. Soldiers covered most of the area, lying on the pavement, or, if they were lucky, on one of dozens of costs inside a tent. They were simultaneously bitching and trying to get some sleep while waiting to go on leave. Military flights go on space (and, apparently, flexible back door) availability, so some had been waiting for more than a day. That’s likely to be my lot when I get to leave.

After a couple of hours, a young soldier with the Louisiana National Guard picked me up, got me a trailer and some bedding, and, most importantly, carried both my bags from his armored vehicle to my home for the next two weeks. In the midst of trying to give me a tour in the darkness he also told me how many of his friends had died in the past few months. He graciously warned me not to worry if I hear yells from coyotes, cause this part of Camp Liberty is on a former hunting reserve built by Saddam. I crawled into bed a couple of minutes before 2 a.m.

By daylight, the base looked like a dusty parking lot. Gravel is the main road top the military has thrown down to battle flash floods. I’m living in a sea of trailers that look like a construction manager’s office, but have working air conditioning, thank god. The flushable toilets and showers are in a trailer down the way, so I feel pretty lucky. This corner of Camp Liberty (formerly Camp Victory) houses the 256th Brigade Combat Team, which is made up of reservists. Most are from Louisiana, so I’ve had several short conversations in the last couple of days about Ole Miss and LSU. I’m trying to remain neutral.

The base has a chapel, an Internet café, a laundry service, a PX and shopping gallery, a Burger King, a Cinnabon, and a Popeye’s is expected to open any day. Nearly everything except the PX and the main dining hall are in trailers, even the fast food places. There are also thousands of tanks, military vehicles and soldiers walking around with guns, even in their workout clothes. They can’t get into the mess hall for meals unless they have a weapon. Backpacks, however, are not allowed.

My first introduction to Baghdad was today, Thursday. I went with a group of soldiers whose job includes finding roadside bombs before they explode. I rode in a Buffalo, a huge, huge Humvee on steroids that supposedly can withstand almost a direct impact. Luckily, we didn’t have to test it. The four guys inside found three bombs and a bomb squad came along a couple of hours later and detonated them. Finding those three bombs took about 30 minutes. The entire tour of Baghdad, going through more than 30 miles of road at mostly 10 mph, took seven hours.

The corner of the city I’ve seen so far is west of the river. Grazing cattle with bony ribs are mixed with half-bombed neighborhoods and roadside shops. Most of the commerce I saw, however, was right on the street. Cigarettes, watermelons, tomatoes, cumquats, car fuel, potatoes, soda and fresh mutton were available at various makeshift stands. We passed one gas station, where the entrance line stretched for more than two dozen cars. At the exit of the station, guys were selling fuel out of plastic container, for what I’m sure was double or triple the price but certainly far faster.

Baghdad was extremely busy: it reminded me of Seoul’s traffic, though it was much more orderly. For the most part, people waited patiently at massive traffic jams, especially those caused by U.S. and Iraqi troops. There were thousands of cars on the road, and I kept wondering: where are they going? Work? School? The gas station? Our vehicle was completely isolated from the smells and sounds of Baghdad, so much of the day felt like a watching a silent movie in browns and yellows. Most of the people waved at the convoy I was in, giving a thumbs up or a victory sign. I’m guessing that no waving from an Iraqi is an equally telling greeting, though I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Tomorrow I go to a military ops briefing and then out on patrol again. This patrol will be more general: looking for tips and bad people, showing signs of law and order. I’ll see much more of the city and the people. I’ll also be in a slightly less protective vehicle which probably won’t have as good an air conditioning system. In the next few days I’ll probably travel outside of Iraq for some stories and spend a little time with some Iraqi soldiers who the Louisiana units have been training.

That’s all for now. I’m safe and cool, and well-fed after a 12-hour work day with only two granola bars. It’s really too hot to eat here anyway. But the mess hall has a surprising selection of fresh vegetables, especially if you like broccoli. Last night for dinner there was red leaf lettuce. How on earth do they get that? Tonight I settled for cafeteria-style mac and cheese. There’s a reason they call it comfort food.

Flip flops, sun tan lotion, a helmet and a flak jacket

So it's Monday in Germany, and I'm getting the last few things set for my Iraqi assignment. I'll likely leave Tuesday, and I'm glad. Better to get going than to wait around.

On Friday I finished a week-long training in England for first aid and working in hostile environments. A group of retired British Marines teach the course, and in the past 10 years they've taught more than 10,000 journalists, including folks from the Associated Press, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and on and on. One guy was leaving this week to go consult with Al-Jazeera in Qatar. They really know what they are doing, and perhaps even more importantly, they understand what journalists are trying to do on the ground and teach measures that are applicable to our work. They also make the first aid seem logical and achievable, and it's amazing to me I haven't learned any of this as an adult. The instructors said that many of their students use the lessons during vacations or with family, rather than while on assignment, which makes sense to me. There were only five students in my group: two from AP, one from AFP and a television producer from a German television network. A few of us were going to Iraq and Afghanistan, but one woman was the main health writer for the AP for Europe and Africa, so she's often sent to far-flung places where disease outbreaks occur. We learned a lot from each other.

My first assignment in Iraq will be with the 256th National Reserve Guard from Louisiana. It'll be nice to hear some familiar accents. They guard the airport road in Baghdad and, for the most part, live at Camp Victory, one of the largest camps in Baghdad. It's a good introduction for me, I think. Two guys died in a drive-by (of all odd things) over the weekend. Their deaths will be a rude segue into this weekend's Memorial Day. My trip actually will be bookmarked by two holidays, Memorial Day and July 4th. The ceremonies on bases and in the middle of nowhere will make obvious stories, but emotional and eerie ones, too. I'm anxious to see how I feel about going from mourning to celebration in about six weeks' time. I can't imagine, in the end, that I'll feel like celebrating much of anything.

For now, I feel pretty good. I'm sleeping good, still have my appetite and feel pretty confident. It's all I can hope for, cause I'm sure that comfort will change rapidly in the next 24 hours. Last night I finished reading "Love Thy Neighbor," a book by Peter Maass, who now writes for the New York Times Magazine. He worked for the Washington Post during the Balkans war, and his book is about the genocide of Bosnia. It's fascinating, and gives a pointed view of both the flaws and challenges that journalists face while covering war. He's pretty honest, too, I think about the mental and physical exhaustion of it all, and the exhaution of readers as stories about bombs, prison abuses and civilian causalties become routine.

That's one of my challenges, too, to avoid becoming a cliche. Joe's already told me: no stories about families serving together, about pets adopted by soldiers, about soldiers re-enlisting in the field. The rest, however, is all up for grabs. I can't imagine that I'll have any shortage of stories or ideas.

So that's all for now. I'll try to update as much as possible, and send pictures when I can. Send e-mails to yahoo or work, if you want, rather than posting responses here. I won't have time to check them on blogger. Any if anyone wants to donate his or her chateau in Southern France for a week in July, please don't hesitate to come forward.

The stories we tell

Some of you have heard, but I thought I'd make it official: I finally got my orders for Iraq.

I leave Seoul in less than two weeks and go to London for a short vacation with Amy. Then I'm off to a boot camp for journalists outside of London, then back to Germany to wait for a military flight to take me to Iraq. I'll be in Iraq, roughly, from about the last week in May to around July 4. Then I'll get to take some vacation in Europe afterward. I won't be back to Seoul until July 17, or at least that's what my plane ticket says now.

I've been rushing around, trying to find out about vaccines, camping gear, plane tickets, all while finishing some stories here. It's been hectic, but not too bad. I was really nervous about Iraq in Janaury, but as it gets closer, I'm getting more excited and less nervous. I'm certain that will change. But I'm not going to sit around and wait for my teeth to start chattering. That will come later, I'm sure.

I'll be embedded with troops all the time, probably mostly around Baghdad, but if it seems plausible, I might request to spend some time with troops near Ramadi or other parts of the country. I'll be able to choose my assignments and my locations, so I'll have to use my own judgment. And Joe (my old editor from Seoul who is now in charge of our war coverage) will tell me what to do, too. He'll also tell me what not to do. He's honest with me, which is good. He's already told me he might not let me go to Ramadi, for instance, even though we all want to have a reporter there. We'll probably get to talk on the satelite phone nearly everyday.

Most of my stories will be about the troops: on patrol, working and fixing equipment, looking for roadside bombs, listening to their Ipods, eating shitty MREs, missing home. Some of them have been there so long, a year or more. I don't know how they do it. It'll be hot, and there will be bugs (and other awful crawly things), and I'm sure I'll lose my mind over that several times. I've been told to bring lots of Deet and a mosquito net. And "waterless" shampoo, which is made for invalids, I'm told. All part of my shopping spree at Boots pharmacy in London.

I'll probably have a trailer or tent (or maybe just a corner) to myself to sleep in most nights, with a cot or the floor for a bed, I think. The established camps (the ones near Baghdad, for instance) have lots of amenities: Burger Kings, huge mess halls, showers, stores, movies, internet cafes, workout rooms, even swimming pools. And definitely air conditioning. If I go farther out, it will get less fancy. In Ramadi, for instance, where Joe was in Janaury, the camps were newer and didn't have permanent latrines. Buckets and a plank of wood, I'm told (though the men pee in tubes. I told Joe I'd try). They're lucky to get one cooked meal a day. One night Joe came back from patrol, and dinner was cooked carrots. That was it.

So it's a mix. I talked to one of our reporters from Japan who was there most recently. He said the worst part for him was the U.S. military's planned explosions of ammunition, rather than the enemy fire. He said it was awfully loud and bone-rattling. He said the food at the mess halls was great. I think I might be pickier than him, but it's good to know he didn't starve. Joe suggested not eating meat there. Juliana, my friend who works in our Japan office and who also once worked at the Syracuse Post-Standard, suggested always eating the darkest green vegetables whenever possible. Interesting strategies to think about.

I'll have a lot of decisions to make once I get there. Joe said he might put me with the reservists from Louisiana (who shot the Italian journalist, and who also had that group of guys from Houma who died) when I first get there. They monitor the road to Baghdad airport. Then, we'll see what's next. I think I'll be able to send updates to my blog, maybe once a week or so. I might not be able to send many individual e-mails, cause I won't have much time online. But I'll be able to download them, and will love hearing from everyone, especially if it's about important and fun stuff like losing pants in another state or proper etiquette for wedding invitations, especially those weddings that involve pigs and tractors.

I'm in Seoul until May 11, so if you want to call, I'll be here. I'll try to call as well. It's easiest for me to talk when it's night for me and morning for you, cause when it's the other way round, I'm always running late for work. Like today, for instance. It's Sunday, but I have two stories to write and then have to go shoot an event on base. I'm also waiting to see if the Pentagon identifies one of the soldiers from Korea, now in Iraq, who got killed this weekend. If so, I'll write that, too.

But instead of work, I thought I'd figure out this amazing technical feat instead: web links. Well, it's amazing for me. It took me four months to have enough patience to figure out how to post pictures, for christ's sake.

Here's some examples of what we write about in Iraq, and what I expect my work to encompass. It's also some examples of good stuff from there, I think, and work I hope to emulate.

Sandra Jontz, for instance, has a story today about some Marines and Iraqi soldiers finding a rusty missile launcher hidden in a mosque. That's the kind of story after a day, or night, of patrol, that we usually write. Joe wrote a couple of process stories, one about claims that Iraqi people make to the U.S. for damages, and another about the developing Iraqi court system, in which the Americans are teaching the Iraqis how to serve justice to the insurgents. I like these stories cause they are short, simple and show how the mesh of war, law and order goes on in a awful, broken way. Juliana's story about life at Anaconda shows a little bit about the surroundings the servicemembers (and the embedded reporters) have on a large, established base.

Vince's story about white lies is the kind of issue story that I hope I'll find after a few weeks. It's a good idea for a war story that any paper should do -- looking at the lies servicemembers send home to protect their families what Iraq is really like. Here's another larger story, one Joe wrote about who's fighting in this war. I love the story Jason Chudy wrote about where the American flags fly and don't fly in Iraq because it seems like the kind of thing he just noticed, thought was crazy, and began asking soldiers what they had to say about it.

And if you really feel like reading, you can look at the series Stripes did a couple of years about poor morale among troops, called Ground Truth. From what I hear, Stripes was getting flooded in mid- to late-2003 with letters to the editor from miserable soldiers and Marines in Iraq. So Stripes sent a group of reporters to as many camps as possible throughout Iraq with paper surveys to let as many servicemembers as possible tell how they felt. They tallied the results, put out a seven-part series and got attention from other media, Congress and won an award.

There's talk of doing an update, two years later. The reporters (for us and for other papers, I've noticed) seem to think morale is not as bad now, though I'm not exactly sure why. Some news stories indicate there's a sense among some servicemembers that they are seeing progress: they are working and patroling with Iraqi soldiers that they are beginning to trust; the Pentagon brags each day about building schools, and hospitals and sewers, and delivering goods to people who need it; the soldiers have things like swimming pools that might life slightly tolerable. For much of Iraq, the election did seem to boost people's hope. But that was only one day, and the rebels (Sunni Iraqis, the U.S. government says) still fighting the war didn't show up to vote and now seem to be losing what little voice they had in Baghdad's new government.

To me, it seems the bottom line is it's much safer, relatively, to be an American in Iraq than an Iraqi in Iraq. Baghdad gets hit with suicide bombers every day that injure and kill scores of Iraqis, and those stories don't resonate with American audiences, I think. Even more forgotten are the Iraqi people who get kidnapped everyday. The blond, friendly and passionate aid worker from California who got killed last month drew a lot of attention, and rightfully so. She was a friend of many journalists in Iraq whom she helped with stories, and her own aid work really did help some Iraqi families and get Congress' attention. We don't get to learn that much detail about the Iraqis who also die or suffer wounds, and, of course, therein lies the problem that she was trying to fix.

For the servicemembers, their worst daily hit since the war "ended," I'm pretty sure, was in January at the mess hall in in Mosul, where about two dozen soldiers died. Otherwise, the count among servicemembers deaths seem to average at a couple a day. Most die from sniper fire, homemade bombs that are hidden in trash, soccer balls, moving cars (what the Pentagon calls Improvised Explosive Devices), vehicle or helicopter accidents, or suicide. There are almost 150,000 U.S. troops there. I'm not arguing those are acceptable, or even comforting, odds. But just being able to look at the math adds some perspective for me here in Seoul.

And of course that's the problem. I'm in Seoul, and all of this is my educated guess. But it's as realistic a guess as I can make right now. And, as for what I don't know, well, that's why I'm going. I said most of the Iraqis appeared happy on their Jan. 30 Election Day. Joe was one of four western journalists who braved sitting in a polling place in the so-called Sunni triangle on Election Day. Other than the Iraqis who ran the polling place, only four people voted all day long. The streets were deserted, and the election was a complete failure there. It means, I think, the election failed altogether, because the rebels will still continue to shoot, bomb and kidnap, despite the new, democratic government. It's a civil war that will go on for a long time. I hope I can write a few stories that show that, even in a small way.

I can't wait to go, and I can't wait to get out. Last week, I read one of Ernie Pyle's World War II columns that he wrote toward the end of his career. He was sitting with troops getting fired at in Japan, and after so many years of sitting in so many firefights, he wrote, simply: What the hell am I doing here? I know I'll be asking myself that so many times I won't be able to count, whether I'm in an armored vehicle on patrol in Baghdad or watching Ali G DVDs with 19-year-olds who haven't showered in a week.

The soldiers still don't have enough equipment, enough armor or enough people, I've read and I believe. One platoon leader told a news photographer recently that a successful patrol in Iraq is going out with 15 men and coming back with 15 men. That's it. No other real objective, just bring everyone back alive. The next question is easy: why go out in the first place? That platoon leader doesn't have the ability to press for the answer. That's my job.