BAGHDAD – “We want to use you as bait,” Sergeant Eduardo Ojeda from Los Angeles, California, told me before I embedded with his unit on what was shaping up to be a night raid.
“Excellent,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
This is what passes for black Army humor in Baghdad.
“Our TST [time-sensitive target] blew up a vehicle and killed four soldiers and an interpreter in the next AO [area of operations],” he said. “He’s somewhere in our AO now.”
He could tell by the frozen and dubious look on my face that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on the mission.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “These guys hardly ever fight back when we nail them. And they always lose when they do. Come on. Let’s go f*ck ‘em up.”
I donned my body armor and helmet, strapped my Nikon around my neck, and jumped in the back of one of the Humvees.
“I need your full name and blood type,” said First Sergeant Ray Fisher, from Keokuk, Iowa. “In case something happens.”
Everywhere in Baghdad is dangerous – even the Green Zone – but danger is relative. Not every place in the Red Zone is the same shade of crimson. The 82nd Airborne company I embedded with hasn’t suffered a single casualty since they arrived in Iraq in January even though they patrol their part of the city – the neighborhood of Graya’at, just north of the Adhamiyah wall – 24 hours a day. I comforted myself with the idea that if I’m the first to be shot here, God apparently hates me.
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