Sorry for the delay in posting.  Wednesday I found out the convoy I was supposed to take out west was rescheduled, and had already left.  I wasn’t really surprised.  Getting around Iraq as an embedded reporter is pretty much a process of bumming one ride after another.  I will never be anyone’s priority, so the public affairs office simply wasn’t notified of the change of schedule until it was too late.

I can’t say I was devastated; driving for hours and hours through Iraq’s western desert in the back of a Humvee would be an appalling prospect even if there weren’t bombs planted in the roads.

Instead I moved Thursday night from my comfy can to an unusually filthy barracks tent next to the al Asad airfield.  The idea was to get up at 7 am to sign up as early as possible for a flight to al Qaim.  If you don’t show up for a chopper flight, they’ll just give away your seat and fly without you.  That happens to soldiers, Marines and contractors, not just reporters—it’s partly the chance to steal someone’s seat that keeps forlorn crowds in the grim passenger terminals hoping to fly Space Available.

I got lucky—in spite of over-sleeping by 45 minutes and being 37^th on the list of space A passengers I got on one of the massive Marine choppers ferrying men and supplies out west.  The back hatch was left open and in between stretches of beige desert I got a great view of, I think, the only truly stunning scenery in western Iraq.  We flew over a giant lake, with ruddy stone shores and rocky islands.

It was the lake created by the Haditha dam, massive concrete barrier on the Euphrates.  It looked to me, from the air, like any big damn you’d see in the American southwest. Sometimes, after I’ve spent too much time driving through dirty little villages and seeing vast expanses of nothing from the air, I forget that in many ways Iraq is a modern country.

Modernity isn’t much in evidence in al Qaim and the surrounding area.  Even the train depot around which the American base sprang up seems like a throwback to a different kind of war:  a war of clashing armies and captured territory, a war in which taking control of a rail hub was a strategic coup.  There are still some trains on the tracks here; they look like they were new in the 40s or 50s.  They sit on the maze of tracks that’s now also home to the Marines’ barbershop, chapel and post office.

It’s easy to lose track of time.  Today is Sunday, which is a slightly slower day for the military, but for the most part days of the week don’t matter and there’s no weekend.  It makes everything blur together.  I didn’t do anything Friday or Saturday nights, and spent most of Sunday over on the Iraqi side of the base interviewing American advisers and sitting in on meetings.

Aside from the basic embed ground rules, which mostly deal with common-sense issues (don’t print classified information, don’t name wounded or killed soldiers before their families have been notified), there aren’t any set procedures in the military for dealing with the media.  Embeds are easy or difficult, and reporters see things or don’t see them, largely at the discretion of the officers running a particular base.

I’ve lucked out in al Qaim.  The commanding officer here is a lieutenant colonel named Nick Marano.  He tells me I can stay as long as I want, and I’m not walled off from the stories I want to cover.  I’ve spent the past few days driving around al Qaim and the other villages in this area in the colonel’s convoy.

This is tribal Iraq.  The villages clustered along the Euphrates near the Syrian border are old smuggling towns, and there was tribal rivalry and tribal violence before the US came, before Saddam, and before the creation of the modern state of Iraq.

Now that I have my bearings I’ll be back to blogging everyday.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to write a bit more about this area and the counter-insurgency strategy the Marines are using.