It had been a slow morning at the hospital, until they arrived. One by one, bloodied and crying, carried in the arms of men and women with wounds themselves — a child, her mother, two more of her children, a man, another child, an uncle and others. Medics of the 28th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone grabbed them from the Iraqis who had carried them in and ran them the rest of the way to the emergency room, laying them gingerly on the pale blue sheets of the Army gurneys.

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In fits and starts, the story came out: this family had been gathering for a clan funeral in the Dora neighborhood a few miles away. A US convoy was traveling through; as it left, mortars rained down on the neighborhood. One landed nearby and sprayed them all with shrapnel. I could tell from their injuries that it wasn’t in their midst; in that case they’d all be dead or maimed beyond imagination. Most of these wounds were superficial but still terrifying.

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The mother of three was bleeding from her left temple, but was far more worried about the traumatic scene in front of her: three of her children screaming and cut, surrounded by medics. She flitted from one gurney to the next, holding hands, giving comfort, kissing foreheads. A doctor tried to stop her and get her to accept treatment, she batted his hands away and went back to the next child’s bedside.

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Two of the children were stabilized; the oldest, a girl of ten, was soon positively Churchillian in her stoicism, replacing her tears with wide-eyed wonder and only letting out a yelp when confronted with the needle for the IV. But the youngest, a boy of only a year old, would not stop crying. Eventually the mother crawled on the gurney with him and he calmed some.

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“Where’s the interpreter?” a doctor called out. An Iraqi who works at the hospital stepped up and gently tugged the mother off of the gurney and into a bedside conference.

“Okay,” the doctor began, “tell her we have the X-rays and there’s a piece of shrapnel in the base of the boy’s head. It seems to have lodged in the lower brain.”

The translator winced, then translated. The mother clenched her fists and swayed.

“No, wait, wait,” the doctor continued. “It’s very small and not very far in. He probably wouldn’t be able to have carried on the way he has if there was any damage. We’re going to do some more tests but I think he’ll be okay.”

The translator nodded approvingly and turned to the mother.

“Zehn, zehn,” he told her in Arabic, simplifying the prognosis. It’s good, it’s good.

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Sometimes I jog in Iraq, outside my hotel, but only at night. This seems impossible, but it can be done. The hotel where I live is in a relatively calm neighborhood of Baghdad, and is in any case protected on all sides by well-placed concrete blast walls and a small miltia of security guards who grimly mark out the night in barricaded booths, shifting their assault rifles from hand to shoulder while they stare out into the dark. I circle the hotel on the streets surrounding it just inside this security perimeter. Four laps is about one mile.

I have to run to music, the environment is too macabre and strange otherwise. Even protected by an envelope of sublime Beethoven or bombastic Mahler, it’s still unnerving, and I never really relax until I am getting so tired I’m more worried about my lungs than Iraq.

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I start next to the Time magazine armored truck, always parked on the corner. I pass by the Time house, then by their roaring generator the size of a small car, belching fumes. I hang a left at a series of blast walls 10 feet high, down a darkened back street for a hundred yards, then left again, passing the guard in his pillbox, watching the night. Just past him is an extra-heavy blast wall and a series of destroyed houses; the aftermath of when two suicide bombers tried to ram their way into the compound with a truck bomb about a year ago. But the hotel’s defenses held even if every window was blown out, and while no one in the hotel was seriously hurt, dozens of Iraqis living in those houses were killed. All of the tenants of the hotel poured money into a fund for the families.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images - Restuarant in Baghdad after 2003 car bomb

Another left and finally down the main street to return back to the hotel. I remember this street just after the war ended in April 2003. I came here to pick up a friend to drive the six hours down to Kuwait and out of the region together. There were no concrete walls then, no guards, no belching generators - just a mid-class Baghdad hotel, 10 stories tall, that was a bit cheaper than al-Rasheed or the Palestine downtown, yet had bigger rooms and better service. Now it’s a barricaded fortress.

When I finish the run I don’t linger on the street, but rush inside and go straight to bed.

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I watched ethnic cleansing today, and it wasn’t pretty.

I’m in Gazaliyah, a neighborhood that was predominantly Sunni Muslim until recently, when Shia militants have been taking over, block by block, forcing out longtime Sunni residents. These kind of things can stay abstract when you read about them, but today I watched it, as the Iraqi Army, which is mostly Shia, decided to tear down a block’s worth of concrete shops belonging mostly to Sunnis.

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I’m traveling with Bing West, the former Marine in Vietnam and assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan years, who’s in a third career as an author on war. We listened together to the Iraqi Army’s justification for the razing–the shops were being used as firing positions by Sunni militants–and it made Bing almost immediately explode into laughter.

“These little shops, firing positions? They’re low and exposed; you’d have to have a death wish to fire on someone from these.” As a bulldozer pulled up and revved it’s engine ominously, flabbergasted Sunnis residents across the street emerged in protest, and the likely real reason of the demolition became clear: this wall of shops protects their houses from the gunfire and attacks from the encroaching Shia neighborhood on the other side. Purely a question of firing angles for future purges.

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As the bulldozer moved into position, Iraqi Army soldiers pilfered through the shops, choosing items to steal casually, as if they were browsing at a mall. Most took radios and other electronics. I watched the sad spectacle, so brazenly unfolding before me, and began to photograph it. One soldier looked up, grimaced, and then ran up to me and stood nearly chest to chest and shouted in Arabic. Another Iraqi soldier who spoke some English, seeing the trouble, bolted over and said, “He does not want you to take his picture. He says to erase the pictures you have taken now.”

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The bulldozer went to work, simply ramming the little concrete buildings until they collapsed, sometimes driving the massive scoop of the machine into a wall even as the Iraqi Army soldiers were busy looting inside, sending them scurrying outside with laughter as the building came down behind them. In less than an hour it was done; the rows of shops were now just a pile of concrete blocks. Water mains spurted like exposed arteries and the area started to flood. Neighborhood boys started showing up, rummaging through the piles for salvageable wares. One boy found a bent ten-speed bicycle and gamely grabbed it, wading through deep mud to get it out.

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