The only helicopter tour I'll ever get.
It would be great if the recent ebb in violence in Iraq meant you could fly into Baghdad International Airport and hail a cab to go downtown. But despite attacks having slowed in the last month with fewer Americans being killed in May than in any month since the war began, Iraq is still a very dangerous place.
Coming to Iraq for an embedded reporter involves an elaborate choreography of transportation, planes, helicopters or Rhinos, a sort of monster truck armored plated kind of bus. For photographer James Lee and myself it amounted to three days of slight discomfort, boredom and no sleep. For someone like me who can't sit still for very long, it sometimes felt tortuous.
Our time here will be dictated by the courtesy of the military. We are their guests and as such that limits the kinds of stories we can do. The war itself, where everybody is a potential target is most limiting of all, making it very difficult to talk to talk to Iraqis who don't have a connection with the military. Beyond that it also changes what you see.
Like most Americans I am woefully uneducated about the rich history that traces itself to the beginning of civilization. This is where the Biblical tree of life grew, where the first prophet Abraham was born and Noah buried. It is where the tower of Babel stood
It is where Alexander the Great died. Once referred to as Mesopotamia, or the land between the two rivers (the Tigris and Euphrates).
I'm not going to even attempt to do a thumbnail history of the country and it's unlikely I'll take any sort of historical tour. The best I got so far was a view of Baghdad from rooftop level aboard a fast moving Blackhawk helicopter swooping over the squat brown outlying towns, an orchard of date palms and then the rows and rows of brown block buildings and apartment complex that make up the grid of neighborhoods around the Green Zone.
I couldn't see and wouldn't have been able to identify it if I could, the Khulafa Mosque or Tahrir Place or make out ramshackle shops of Rashid Street.
But as a chopper skirted over the city, occasionally dropping decoy flares, I got my first and only view of an ancient once great city.