'Hotel journalists,' my...

An NBC camera crew and I were kneeling and sitting cross-legged in front of four brown Porta-Potties outside Baghdad International Airport.

It was midnight. We were eating.

Anwar Sabeeh Faktier, Haidar Jameel Ghafel and Atheer Ahmed Kakan had been up in Kirkuk for a couple days, where I'd been embedded with the 10th Mountain Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team. They were shooting 'B-roll,' backup tape, for an oil story along the pipeline up there.

In Baghdad they'd ventured into the big military dining hall while I watched their camera and bags. We were wolfing down, from styrofoam containers, a small pizza, corn on the cob, salad and some mystery meat.

The air was scented with bus and Humvee fumes, stench from the toilets and the odor of jet fuel from the nearby runways. Hordes of soldiers, rucksacks and automatic weapons slung on their backs, streamed by us in every direction.

We'd landed at 10:50 p.m. on a C-130 from Kirkuk. In the venerable work/warhorse aircraft, we'd sat, knee to knee, in narrow canvas seats attached to the webbing on the plane's fuselage. We wore our body armor and Kevlar helmets; mine weigh about 35 pounds.

We had sat on the runway after landing for about 30 minutes, then deplaned and marched a quarter-mile to a room where our IDs were checked, along with 30 or so other passengers, before we were allowed to grab our bags in the shadows of mercury vapor lights, after filing through a maze of concrete Jersey barriers knee-high to 12 feet.

We missed the bus to a transit barracks by a minute. The next one wouldn't come for nearly two hours.

We could've gotten to Baghdad by 4:30 p.m., but the earlier flight from Kirkuk was, for some reason, scratched. The Air Force blamed weather in Baghdad, but the NBC guys had called friends in the capital who said the skies were blue.

So we sat in a terminal 155 miles northeast of Baghdad for roughly eight hours (broken only by the kindness of the 1st Brigade's crack PAO folks--Maj. Sean Wilson, Capt. Bruce Drake and Staff Sgt. Margaret Nelson--who came by, loaded our gear into their SUVs and took us to chow in the huge dining hall at the forward operating base).

When the bus finally pulled up at Baghdad International, we threw some of our gear into a truck, then scrunched into bus seats with soldiers. Everybody was sweating. The city had reached 119 degrees that day.

Ten minutes later we pulled up to Striker Stables, the transit barracks. It was 2 a.m. when we got our tent assignments and blankets. I wound up in a tent full of Nepalese contractors. They got up at 4:30, so I did too.

The reason we had to spend the night away from the hotel where both the McClatchy and NBC bureaus are located is because our armored cars and bodyguards can't drive in the city at night.

Security.

Earlier in my tour here, I'd had five flights--out of both Baghdad and Kirkuk--canceled. I spent 11 days trying to get out of Baghdad to embed with a unit.

Anytime my McClatchy colleaues and those of any other Western news organization want to go anywhere in Baghdad, they must travel in an armored vehicle, with a chase car trailing to make sure they get there OK.

This is a long buildup to my point:

Which is to knock down, hopefully for once and for all, the notion of "hotel journalists."

That's one of the favorite attacks on press coverage of Iraq (less so in Afghanistan, at least so far) by bloggers left, right and libertarian: that the MSM (mainstream media) reporters in Baghdad sit in their air-conditioned bureaus and re-write what our Iraqi correspondents and stringers file from "outside the wire."

Some of this goes on, sure, because Iraqis speak the language, have networks of friends and sources and can get some news that any Westerner--absent fluent Arabic or Kurdish and able to blend in inside a head scarf--simply can't get.

(The superb story by our intrepid bureau chief Leila Fadel last week, about how survivors in Haditha felt about the dismissal of most charges against several Marines for allegedly killing a bunch of civilians there, came at great risk to her and three of our Iraqi reporters. It's an example of that kind of courageous enterprise. They drove there, Leila wrapped in a scarf, to interview the shattered families.)

But as the NBC crew's and my little odyssey shows, it ain't for lack of trying to get out of our offices. We must rely, for the most part, on notoriously fickle military aircraft to get outta Dodge and to other provinces. In the past six weeks, almost unprecedented dust- and sandstorms have kept a lot of flights grounded. (As I write this, the Baghdad evening sky is orange, a surreal reflection of what's in the air.)

Even big deals, such as this week's ballyhooed handover of control of once-deadly Anbar Province to the Iraqi government, are postponed, ostensibly because bad flying conditions kept several VIPs from attending the ceremony.

We ain't asking for sympathy--after all, we signed up for this deal. And as one Army mental health officer told me this week, talking about the acute mental stress some soldiers are affected with: "It's just Iraq. What else can you say? Sometimes, you've got to remind people to be realistic about where we are. It's not a spa here."

No, it ain't a spa.

And most Western reporters worth their salt routinely try to get stories in the Red Zones outside the wire all over this armed camp of a country.

So don't be brining' that BS round here about us being content to languish in hotels. It ain't true. And my Kevlar goes off to the journalists who, for more than five years running, have often risked their lives to bring you the facts on the ground.

Sometimes, as I hope the Kirkuk-Baghdad yarn shows, we can't. We try, but we fail.

Watching those three Iraqi NBC guys lug a 30-pound camera, all their battle-rattle and several heavy production bags proved that to me once again.

It's not a spa here.