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Channel One hadn’t bothered to rent me an armored vehicle, but they did get me a two-door Yugo. Not exactly an equal substitute, but it was better than nothing. I hired a local reporter named Vlado to show me around. He kept calling the Yugo a “soft-skin” car, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. The morning after I arrived, I came downstairs to find that someone had stolen the car’s windshield wipers. Just the wiper blades. They left the sticks that held them. They were bent forward, jutting out from the base of the windshield. As we drove, they rotated like spinning horns. It made us laugh at first, but after awhile there was something sad about them. The next day, Vlado ripped them off entirely.

The front entrance to the hotel was boarded up, and to get in you had to go through a side door. Vlado would drive us around the back of the hotel, trying to keep the car protected from snipers for as long as possible. Just before he reached the side entrance, he’d have to jump a curb, and every time he did, I was sure the tires would blow out.

The day before I left, I was out on my own, a few blocks from the hotel. I thought I was in a protected spot. I was planning on doing what TV reporters call a “stand-up”—in which they talk to the camera—and I’d just set up my tripod when I heard a loud crack. I turned and saw a tile fall off a nearby column. By the time it hit the ground, I realized that it had been struck by a bullet. Someone had taken a shot. I didn’t know if they were shooting at me or someone else, but it didn’t matter. I ran behind a nearby building, and the sniper peppered the area with automatic fire. I captured some of it on camera, and narrated what I was seeing. I was white as a corpse. When I looked at the tape recently, though, I saw something I hadn’t remembered. I noticed the faint hint of a smile on my face.

SOMETIMES THE PLACES that are the most dangerous don’t feel that bad at all. In Baghdad there are moments when you think nothing can touch you. Encased in Kevlar, puffed up like some B-movie cyborg, you peer through double-paned bulletproof glass at the dust and decay, the cement blast barriers. You watch people on the street and wonder who’s good, who’s bad, who’ll live, who’ll die. You’re surrounded by guys with barrel chests and ceramic plates hidden underneath their shirts, machine guns ready, safeties unlocked. Who knows what else they have in their bags?

You’re trapped in a bubble of security; you can’t break out—with guards and guns, and no time to linger on the street, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. Bulletproof glass protects but it also distorts. Fear alters everything.

It’s late January 2005, and I’ve come to Iraq to cover the interim elections for CNN. We’re driving in from Baghdad’s airport, on a road the army calls Route Irish.

“They say this is the most dangerous road in the world,” my driver says.

“They always do,” I say, and I realize I sound like a jerk.

Every war has a road like this one, the most dangerous, the most mined. I don’t know how you can judge.

Baghdad’s Route Irish connects the airport to the Green Zone. It’s an eight-mile haul but there’s a two-mile stretch that’s particularly bad. Snipers, improvised explosive devices, ambushes, suicide attacks—you name it, it’s happened on Route Irish. U.S. soldiers patrol the road and the surrounding neighborhoods, but the attacks keep happening.

After Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002, news companies began to take security much more seriously. In Baghdad most major American news organizations contract with private security firms. Big guys with thick necks meet you at the airport and give you a bulletproof vest before they even shake your hand.

The company that CNN contracts with provides former British Special Forces soldiers—tough professional men who’ve done things you can’t imagine, in places you’ve never heard of. They don’t talk much about where they’ve been, but they’ll tell you right away: Baghdad’s the worst they’ve