Below is a portion of an email embedded reporter Scott Hadly sent to fellow reporter Zeke Barlow on Thursday. Because of the immediacy of the writing and the story it told, I asked Scott if I could add it as an entry to his blog and he agreed. He asked that we also add an afterward, which is below.

WARNING: Scott uses course language and profanity in the the email. And because he was dashing off a message to a friend, he didn't take his usual care with spelling and grammar. Both the profanity and spelling and grammar errors have been left alone.
Bruce McLean
Site Manager

Last night went out of another patrol with these guys. They set up an ambush around 3 a.m. near this abandoned village. During the thing one of the big MRAPs hit a mine and blew the shit out of it. No one was hurt seriously but the thing caught fire and started popping off amunition. With the smoke and the rounds blowing off it actually felt like combat for a while. Scared the shit out of me.

We ended up waiting in these reeds until 10 a.m. It was so fucking hot that I sweated through my clothes. My boots were soaked. Everyone looked liked they'd took a dip in the pool and that was before we started marching. Went through this village and they started clearing houses. Also scary shit becuase yesterday a guy got blown up and killed when he went into the wrong house. I didn't get blown up and killed however. That was good.

The hardest thing to see was after that we crossed this canal and went to a little farmhouse, compound really. This extended family was there, but the soliders had intelligence that it was an terrorist headquarters so they asked for all the adult males.

Four of em came out one was ancient the others were in their 20s-30s, and 40s. One guy just starts shaking all over and the GIs are like, 'he's guilty as shit.' So they decided to cuff em up and take them in for questioning. As they do that all the little kids, there were four or five of them and all were under five, they start wailing. The women start wailing. Then the interpreter starts yelling at em to get in the house and shut up and the GIs are getting all amped almost mocking the whole thing.

Then as we marched these guys out on a road we pass three fresh holes where IEDs blew up trucks including the one that day. It was a huge hole like 10 by 10. One of the detainees swirls his finger next to his head as if to say "that's crazy shit" and the other guy looses it. Starts panicing, and goes into convulsions. Falls into the road. We were all really, really beat nd close to heat exhaustion cause it'd been six hours or so of this. Anyway I think, oh shit he's going to die so I go over and start using the rest of my water to try and cool him off and then he starts doing this serious jerking around on the ground to the point where it was pretty clear he was faking.

"Get up mother fucker" they're yelling. "Get up or we're going to drag you." needless to say the guy got up and we made it to the MRAPs and turned the three over to the Iraqis.

I'm glad I'm not a soldier.

AFTERWARD: The three guys turned out to be either al Qeda or al Qeda sympathizers, according to Lt.Col. Robert McAleer, a 2nd Stryker battalion commander. The commander said they had what amounted to a sealed indictment against the guys showing that the farm house had been used by members of of AQI in their effort to lay mines. But the operation and how they were arrested wasn't how his men usually do business. Usually they remove the men from the women and talk to them separately. And explain to the women what is happening. As with all detentions, he will send his men back to the farmhouse where the situation will be explained to the family. That the men are being held by the Iraqi Army, that they face prosecution for aiding al Qeda and how they can contact them.

If you look past all the guns slung over people's shoulders, the big armoured personnel carriers, humvees and Blackhawk helicopters, you can almost forget there's a war going on.
On the big bases in Iraq there's a certain normalcy that makes you forget there are still people fighting and dying here. But you get reminded real quick. Sometimes it's sombering, like yesterday when one of the soldiers here in Diyala was killed when he chased an insurgent into a house that then blew up.
At every mess hall there's a place set for fallen soldiers and a memorial wall to remind you about those who've died.
Sometimes the reminder comes in other ways, like what happened to me last week while waiting for a helicopter flight out of Balad, a huge base north of Bahgdad.
While flipping through an old Business Week and half glancing at Good Morning America, I was startled to hear a woman's voice come over some hidden P.A. system say "incoming."
I looked up wondering what was up and on the television a message scrolled on the bottom of the screen saying there was a mortar attack.
I looked around from some cue about what to do, but all the soldiers waiting just kept on watching television or reading. I figured they must know what to do under these circumstances so I tried to go back to reading, but just looked at the page and waited. Then I heard a muffled explosion and rumble.
"OK you've officially been fired on," said James Lee, the photographer I'm traveling with.
Two days ago at a base in Diyala province, where the war is very much front and center, I was awoken around 3 a.m. by a load explosion.
The little shack I'm staying in shook and the windows rattled. Over the next hour there were about half a dozen more. I thought they were a volley of mortars hitting the base. "Should somebody do something about that," was all I could think of. Again I had no idea what to do.
The next day I asked a few soldiers who all said they slept through it. A captain later told me that it'd been outgoing artillary. The battery was firing illumination rounds for a group of soldiers on patrol. I nodded as if I knew that all along.

There are phones here, plenty of computers and Internet connections. But the effort to file stories from Iraq and to blog has been difficult to say the least.
The cell phone I got with coverage in Iraq was useful for about a day while in Baghdad. But I haven't made a call on it since.
My laptop's great if I can get a connection but even then it's been so slow that it's taken a half of a day to send even small files.
There are plenty of people who blog from here and do just fine, but bopping from place to place, as we have been over the last three weeks, has required a constantly changing set of resources.
Beyond the computer stuff, the stories themselves take a lot of work just to get some of the basic reporting done.
We often do not know what we're going to get before we get to a place and once there we've had stories sort of fall apart.
Just before leave Ramadi we were scheduled to head with a convoy to a new and very remote outpost in the desert. It was supposed to take six hours. We'd stay about 12 and then turn around and drive all the way back and then onto our next destination.
It sounded good but we ended up waiting in the convoy for about five hours with one mishap after another delaying us before the trip was ditched.
Physically I'm feeling every one of my 44 years.
A lot of the travel has been in MRAPs, these big lumbering mongrel vehicles that are part Brinks truck and part Humvee. They're pretty safe, but very uncomfortable. Especially when you're driving in them for six hours, wearing a 40 pound kevlar vest with armor plates and a helmet. It's the same get up you wear in the helicopters and cargo planes. Doing this for 24 or 36 hours at a time takes it's toll.
I've also come to marvel at how much sweat the human body can produce. It's very hot, of course, but in your kevlar and long pants and long sleeves under an intense sun the body just starts shedding water. After a patrol through a small town in Diyala my shirt, pants and socks were soaked through. As they dried they left white powery salt stains.

Sometimes in reporting I'll take random notes of details with the hope of sprinkling them into a story, but mostly they stay in my notebook. While reporting over the last week or hanging out with some Seabees, marines and a few soldiers I scribbled short lists of stuff they had with them in their pockets, rucksacks and stuffed in the corners of an MRAP.
Nothing came of the notes, but here's my list:
Stridex pads
Maxim magazine
A commemorative Operation Iraqi Freedom mug
Protein powder
Oil of Olay
Jolly Ranchers
A creased stained copy of a wife's college biography
Peanut M&Ms
A folded white handkerchief with five pictures of a week-old baby girl he's never held Pirated copy of the movie 300
Divorce papers

'We're here to help you'
Nuha and "Zak" sat on a concrete block smoking in the dark.
From this little perch on a rise in the camp, you can look down on the tents and SWA huts below. You see the desert bluffs outlined in the dark set off by a chandelier of stars in the sky. A low rumble from two huge generators and a steady deep thump from a .50 caliber machine gun being test fired in the distance drive off any quiet.
Both of them are Jordanians and had put in a long day working with the Marines in western Iraq.
Jordanians, they'd come to Iraq to work as interpreters, or Terps as the military called them.
Most Terps have nicknames, because using their real name can end up being deadly for them and their families.
In Jordan, Nuha had run an Internet café, while Zak taught high school math in high school.
"I'm here for my family, my mother, my father and my son," said Nuha.
The money she makes keeps them afloat.
Out on a remote base, the interpreters must stay at least three months and often can't get vacation. They work as subcontractors. An American company with the government contract, subcontracts to foreign firms who go out and find Arabic speakers. Everyone takes a cut of the money on the way.
They're here for the money, but would never be rich. They're paid about $1,500 a month for risking their lives every day.
If they had Green Cards or were American citizens with higher security clearances, their pay would be more than ten times that amount.
"They make $200,000," said Zak. "I'm not saying I should make $200,000 but that's not fair."
His job is one of the riskiest in Iraq.
The danger is even greater for Iraqis who have worked with coalition forces. If identified they or their families are at risk of kidnapping or assassination and the list of those who have been killed is long.
Zak isn't really worried about dying.
"In my culture we believe it is already written what will happen," he said.
He'd like to go to America, where he has two brothers. One working for Google, the other an engineer, but he can't get a visa to visit.
Nuha too isn't worried about the dangers.
"I love this work," she said. "I just love this kind of work. I love going out and helping people 'cause my job is just communication between civilians and Marines in a good way."
She likes the officers she works with, and admires their efforts at getting to know the locals. One captain has started smoking because he is so often offered cigarettes when he visits and he doesn't want to be impolite.
If she's sitting around too long, she goes and asks if she can go out on patrol with a squad. She's taken to teaching a handful of Marines Arabic. They're a bit obsessive about learning swear words and putdowns.
For a time her 23 year-old son was here working too, probably the only mother-son interpreting team in the country. He went back to Jordan to finish his studies. Now she wants to go back for a vacation, but hasn't been allowed to.
"Seven months I've been here and I haven't had a vacation," she said.
Her own mastery of English curse words emerges when she talks how she's been treated by the company that has the interpreter contract. They've imposed new rules on how she behaves and her training. It's little rules, like not being allowed to wear shorts while off work, and taking morning classes in military-speak and being asked to pick up trash around camp.
"I didn't leave my family and my kid just ot come pick up trash," she said.
And she's disturbed by how she's treated by the U.S. authorities here. At one point she had to go to the dentist at the big military base at Al Asaad. It turned into a 12 day ordeal, where because of security issues with third country nationals -- and there are a lot employed by the U.S. here -- she was kept in a room and could only leave with an escort.
"We feel like we live in jail here," she said. "It's like, 'guys, we're here to help you.'"

I first saw them among the hieroglyphics of obscene graffiti in the bathrooms on a base in Kuwait.
Scribbled in there with graphic cartoons and misspelled bad words were "Chuck Norris Facts" -- the War on Terrorism's version of "Kilgore was Here."
The satirical Facts first took hold on a website dedicated to Norris, but the sayings have found their true forum on walls, stalls and Post It notes in Iraq.
The facts are silly haiku about just how tough Chuck Norris is.
Last year visiting Al Anbar province he told the Stars and Stripes newspaper that his favorite was, "There is no Theory of Evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to Live."
The first one I saw was "Chuck Norris Can Believe it's Butter."
I didn't get it.
But at the time I had not yet seen the significance of Chuck "Walker, Texas Ranger" Norris.
I didn't know this almost 68 year-old television and B-movie star, who was the World Karate Welterweight Champion way back when the war was in Vietnam, held such sway.
I didn't know some young soldier had proposed renaming Iraq, "Chuckistan."
While waiting for a helicopter to I read through a list of them posted anonymously on a bulletin board.
Among them were:
"Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because he only recognizes the element of surprise."
"Chuck Norris doesn't kill two bird with one stone. He kills two stones with one bird."
"Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad Chuck Norris has never cried. Ever."

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.

I'd been warned.
My co-worker Zeke Barlow, who reported poignantly on how the family of a Seabee officer dealt with his deployment to Iraq, said it was the unspoken secret among military families.
And then last month while waiting on a tarmac for a battalion from the Navy Mobile Construction Battalion to return home after six months in Asia one of the wives, with her 2 year-old and 10 year-old daughters clinging to her, boiled it down for me.
"It sucks," she said. "That last two weeks before he goes all we do is fight."
It's the way all the stress and anxiety of the separation comes out.
In those final days before leaving with emotion so close to the edge and departure looming like the scary part of a movie everything inside that you try and hold back starts bubbling up in strange ways. Instead of milking the last few days for all there worth, you and the ones you love are snapping at each other.
For me it came out in stupid last minute home improvement projects and a lot of cursing. For my wife it came in waves of tears, interrupted conversations and having to leave the room to collect herself.
My 7 year old daughter Isabel seemed fine until two days before I left and then broke down holding onto me for an hour and asking me why I had to go. My son Finn, 5, didn't seem too troubled. Especially since I promised we'd have a little vacation when I got back. But the night before I left he wanted me to lay down with him as he tried to go to sleep and he asked me to stay home now instead.
At some point my wife said she couldn't see how all those military families manage. A year away, or six months seemed like an eternity. At least spending a month in Iraq embedded with troops would give me a taste of what they had to go through during their time overseas.
It's not as if I didn't know that. One of my first memories as a kid was of my dad coming home from Vietnam after his second tour. I was sitting on the basement floor as my mom was folding laundry and I saw this tall, skinny guy who hadn't shaved tip toeing down the stairs to surprise her. He looked over me and put his finger to his lips, but at the time I didn't recognize who he was.
An Naval officer told me about a month ago, that all his deployments were hard. He ached for his family and for lost time, but the separation had also made them stronger.
But all that feeling is a bit too much to handle in the final days before leaving.