Eighty minutes to Baghdad

Jordanian Air lounge No. 7 in Amman, Jordan, waiting for flight 816 at 9 a.m.

An hour and 20 minutes to Baghdad International. Some 70 passengers wait, all but about 10 of 'em men. I guess the group of crewcut dudes with tats and bipolar biceps are some of the 160,000 private contractors working in Iraq. The smaller guys in baseball caps may be Filipinos also heading for the Big PX in the desert. A lot of Arab speakers, of course, a few Euro and American businessmen. No other obvious newsies. One woman and a little girl, both veiled.

Arabic music--piano, strings, flute, drums---plays overhead as we board. Oddly, the smell of cinnamon wafts through the air--but not so odd once I see the Cinnabon shop around the corner of the terminal.

Already learned a rookie mistake: I'm carrying a laptop shoulder bag, a black nylon Nike bag (filled with Ghiardelli chocolate for the Baghdad bureau and a dozen or so books for them and me) and another bag, Borden's cloth, with a half-dozen books on Iraq.

Lesson: Get one of those economy-sized backpacks with all the tight pockets and straps worn by the guys who seem to be Blackwater returnees or recruits. Gotta leave both hands free. And a Border's bag ain't exactly hard-core.

How I got this far is a testament to McClatchy's Washington, D.C., and Baghdad bureaus' planning, plus the refreshingly capable hands of Derar, Hamid, Faidel and others from Amman traders--our long-time fixers in the Jordanian capital who breezed me through Customs and Immigration last night and again this morning.

I flew 5 1/2 hours from Dulles Airport in D.C. to London Tuesday night, literally laid around Procrustean benches at Heathrow Terminal No. 1 for eight hours till the Amman flight was called. By then my Mercedian mercadian rhythms had fled somwhere into the jet stream over the Atlantic.

Earlier, three nights in Washington to be briefed by managing editor/international Mark Seibel, who's studied Iraq for five years as if it were a pre-med course) and bureau chief John Walcott, my old foreign and national editor at a magazine where we both worked in the '80s and '90s. Both raised six or seven Big Questions about Iraq and American involvement that I hope to answer while in-country.

The flight from London to the Middle East left an hour late, so we didn't land in Amman till around 10:30 p.m.; I think I slept about an hour since awakening Tuesday morning in D.C.

Managed about six hours sleep last night after e-mailing Leila Faidel, our ace Baghdad bureau chief, my flight number and arrival time.

Amman Trader's Faidel (not to be confused with Leila) drove me to the Amman airport. He lives with his mother, brothers and sisters in Amman, a city of about 2.2 million, one-third of Jordan's population.

He was the foreign correspondent's archetypal First Source upon parachuting into foreign territory for the first time. Roughly 1 million Iraqi refugees have sought refuge in Jordan, "most of them rich," he said. Good? "Good and bad. Good for them, but the prices have gone up." An ordinary Jordanian saving to buy an apartment, for example, would now find the price has risen to 70,000 to 80,000 dinars from 30,000 three or four years ago.

And a dinar is worth...

".703 dollars--approximately."

"Approximately?"

We both laugh.

We don't laugh at his take on Iraq: "I think it will be the way it is for a long time."

Well, I think but don't say, that oughta keep a lot of journalists employed for awhile.

We're getting ready to take off. I'm in 6D, a window seat. For the first time in a long time, my 6'3 frame doesn't gripe about a window seat. I want to see what my home for the next six weeks looks like from the air.

Without, hopefully, going through what one of the heavily inked WWE-types in the queue called "the cyclone"--an evasive corkscrew-like action by an A-300 jet to avoid insurgent missiles and rockets.

Inshallah!

If God wills!

The guy in the aisle seat turns out to be Eric, 31, from the San Fernando Valley. He served two tours in Iraq with the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, and now he's headed back to put his talents as an 11-Bravo (infantryman) to work for a private outfit for a lot more bread than Uncle Sam ever paid him.

"Watch out for everything, and keep your eyes open all the time," he replies when I ask for any tips. "Take it all in, absorb it all, but stay alert."

Works for me.

More after we land....