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The Green Zone is an unlikely place for a performance of Rossini. After years now as a besieged fortress, the seat of American power in Iraq is all but a wasteland: four square miles of empty boulevards riven with internal checkpoints and imposing mazes of adhoc concrete walls. Crumbling buildings and shelling damage linger unrepaired, and blowing trash scrapes along the shell-cracked sidewalks like tumbleweeds.

In the middle of it all is the former Iraqi Convention Center, which under the Saddam government was simply that, host to all manner of mundane gatherings typical of any medium-sized country– business expos, government announcements, and art exhibitions. Those kinds of events of course ended once the Saddam government was toppled. The US Army used the building briefly as the seat of its media operations, but soon after the elections of 2005 the building was given over to host the Iraqi government’s new legislative assembly, and they’ve been holding parliament there ever since. Oddly, despite this new reality even members of the government still call the place the convention center.

So, during my recent trip to Iraq, when I saw a communiqué from the US embassy inviting the press to cover a performance of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in this convention center, I made my way over to the Green Zone to attend. Tales of endless security checks are cliché to anyone covering Iraq, but the security before the show was heavy even by Iraq’s standards–in addition to the three or four body checks just to get into the Green Zone at all, metal detectors and body-searches were set up outside (and then again inside) the convention center itself. Just before the performance, the hall was cleared and explosive-sniffing dogs were led around by trainers, methodically checking row-by-row for planted bombs.

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Finally, the crowd was allowed to enter and began to take their seats in the hall. The audience milling about and chatting was an invitation-only group: mostly Iraqi government members, American Green Zone bureaucrats, and a few uniformed US military officers. The auditorium was about half-full: a number of the members of the Iraqi Parliament from Islamic parties boycotted the performance on religious grounds.

I was backstage with the performers, as they warmed up. I’m a classical music enthusiast and have hung around many musicians before recitals, and can confidently report that the members of the Iraqi Symphony act like classical performers do anywhere before a concert: the usual mélange of hair primping, reed soaking, bow-tie adjustments and much laughter.

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Woodwinds players idly belted out their upcoming passages, booming tonic-and-dominant chords sounding spare out of context. Violinists warmed up with fragments of Bach, apparently universal around the world. The mood was light, and the men and women of the orchestra mixed and chatted with an ease that’s rare in the new, more Islamic Iraq since 2003 under American occupation. Indeed, a number of the musicians told me they have to carry their instruments around town in black garbage bags, lest Islamic militants, who usually consider music to be sacrilegious, discover their profession.

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Before the performance there was an endless round of speeches, politicians and bureaucrats extolling the importance of music and reminding the audience that afternoon was being held in celebration of something called “World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development” by the United Nations. The power went out during one of the addresses, plunging the hall into darkness. The speaker gamely continued, shouting out his words until the lights came back few minutes later. Finally the musicians entered the hall in two files and took to the stage.

Guest conducting was British maestro Oliver Gilmour, whose brother happens to work for the United Nations mission in Iraq, and flew in via military transport for the performance.

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With a twitch of his baton he started the orchestra in the first number of the afternoon, Rossini’s Overture to The Barber of Seville. The opening chords resounded through the hall, and several toes tapped when the famous main melody came around. The orchestra was capable but (quite understandably) not well-rehearsed; the level of playing was perhaps similar to that a local community orchestra in the States.

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This held true through the other works on the program, the first movement of the Dvorak Cello Concerto (with the orchestra’s usual Iraqi conductor playing solo cello) and the rousing Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. Later the Iraqi conductor took up the baton to conduct some rhythmic works written by local composers. As the final notes died down the audience leapt to their feet with applause.

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The performance, it seemed to me, was more about Iraq’s past than about its future. In the orchestra’s tuxedoed men and uncovered women lies a tantalizing snapshot of the Iraq that was; an authoritarian state that nonetheless was secular and Western-looking. Indeed, the Iraqi National Symphony was once one of the best in the Middle East, and called the convention center’s auditorium their home for many years–before the US invasion. Now, the orchestra is homeless, and plays furtive gigs at secret locations around Baghdad lest they all get car-bombed in mid-performance by militants. It’s a melancholy reminder of how far the Iraqi tapestry has come unglued from its former self, and how different the society that eventually rises from these ashes is likely to be.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - MAY 09: Sgt. Kwame Williams of Aurora, Colo. of the 3-89 Cavalry in the 10th Mountain Division stands guard during a night patrol in the tense eastern suburbs of Baghdad in the early morning hours of May 9, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. Sgt. Williams is a member of a small scout squad that patrols under cover of darkness in advance of large teams of soldiers that work main thoroughfares at night, searching for roadside bombs and other insurgent activity. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

It’s dark, nearly pitch dark, and that’s the way the soldiers like it. They use no light on this midnight patrol; they stride down the sides of streets in the shadows. If they pass a glowing florescent tube, they disconnect it or break it. Their footfalls pad the sandy pavement in quiet crunches. Nothing else makes a sound.

I’m with a small squad of the 3-89 Cavalry in the 10th Mountain Division, three men roaming the empty alleys of a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad after the midnight curfew. They’re part of a larger operation, but no one has clearly explained to me exactly what we’re doing; I think these men are tasked with searching empty buildings and fields for weapons, while protecting the flank of other soldiers who are absorbed in mine-sweeping on an important main road. Staff Sgt. Dale Ogden is the squad leader. He’s not happy to have me tagging along at first, but warms up progressively as he discovers I’m not going to slow him down as he makes his way through the dark. He takes a knee briefly behind a low wall and we’re able for the first time to talk, our voices kept low.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - MAY 09: Members of the 3-89 Cavalry in the 10th Mountain Division stand watch with night vision equipment in the tense eastern suburbs of Baghdad in the early morning hours of May 9, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. These members of a small scout squad patrols under cover of darkness in advance of large teams of soldiers that work main thoroughfares at night, searching for roadside bombs and other insurgent activity. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

“Kind of eerie out here,” I say.
“Not to me,” Ogden says. “I’d rather be out when it’s dark.”
“You would?”
“Oh yeah. We own the night,” he says, with whispered confidence.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - MAY 09: Members of the 3-89 Cavalry in the 10th Mountain Division scope out unknown men in the distance with night vision equipment and lasers mounted on their rifles in the tense eastern suburbs of Baghdad in the early morning hours of May 9, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. Members of a small scout squad patrol under cover of darkness in advance of large teams of soldiers that work main thoroughfares at night, searching for roadside bombs and other insurgent activity. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

And they do: the soldiers peer through night-vison goggles attached to their helmets, which allows them to see even in complete darkness. And each of their weapons has laser sighting, projecting a beam invisible to the naked eye but deadly clear through the goggles, a small point of light they can place on any target up to half a mile away. Because of this US soldiers are most accurate with their weapons in the black of night.

An Iraqi man is walking down an isolated road in the distance, flouting curfew as he makes his way between two farm houses. The soldiers see him and cautiously raise their rifles and aim. I’m not wearing night-vision equipment but I know what’s happening; three ominous invisible laser points are marking his chest and head as he casually walks, completely oblivious to the fact there are US soldiers in the area and that he is a trigger-pull from sure death. A sudden move to grab a weapon on his part and he’d instantly be shot in half. But the man simply walks, and eventually disappears into the next house. The soldiers lower their rifles with relief, and continue the patrol.
Throughout the night they march on, from place to place in this jumbled neighborhood of houses and businesses. One house is empty. The next is a carpenters shop; they search around for weapons in a large bin. Another is a small school; the courtyard is brightly illuminated by overhanging streetlights. The soldiers climb through a window and find the fuse box, and shut off the main switch; suddenly it’s dark again. I click pictures without flash, using the highest light settings on my camera. Most I know won’t come out. Some will catch tiny stray beams of illumination and be usable.

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - MAY 09: Sgt. Shawn Hummel of the 3-89 Cavalry in the 10th Moutain Division reaches up to disable a light bulb during a night patrol in the tense eastern suburbs of Baghdad in the early morning hours of May 9, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. Sgt. Hummel is a member of a small scout squad that patrols under cover of darkness in advance of large teams of soldiers that work main thoroughfares at night, searching for roadside bombs and other insurgent activity. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images) 

“How can you take pictures out here, when there’s no light?” Ogden asks.
“It’s hard,” I tell him.

By four in the morning the first glimmer of day is glowing on the horizon. By four-thirty the dusky gloom seems radiantly bright. A distant mosque sounds the first call to prayer. Night patrol abruptly ends, and Ogden shepherds his men back to their base.

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Iraq, many people might be surprised to learn, has a functioning court system. Well, “functioning” might be too strong of a word, but it does have an array of non-religious criminal courts run by the Iraqi government. A few days ago I had chance to see a small one operate, up close.

The chance came up suddenly. I was on the ground at an Iraqi-run jail, photographing the conditions there, when one of the Iraqi guards called out a series of names. One by one prisoners hopped up from their spots on the floor to assemble in the courtyard outside. An Iraqi translator working with the US Army was with me; he keeps his real name secret, like all the Iraqis working for the Americans, though his nickname was emblazoned on his US-style fatigues: Slim. I asked Slim what was going on.

“They are calling them to appear in court,” he said.

“Well, I better go with them and see what it’s all about,” I said, after a pause.

“Why not?” Slim said.

The ten or so prisoners all seemed to know what to do: they grabbed orange jumpsuits and blindfolds from a pile in the corner, and started to don them over their clothes. Then they silently lined up for the trip. They were surprisingly docile, with the vacant stare of prisoners resigned to their lot.

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The prisoners were loaded onto the back of a truck to head to the court building nearby. They removed their blindfolds themselves long enough to scramble down from the truck when they arrived, then put them back on. Each prisoner laid a hand on the one in front and they were led in a long file into the court building.

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This court building clearly wasn’t designed as such; it was a just simple small structure, the size of a small house.

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The prisoners were brought into a room in the back, and then one by one brought into a makeshift courtroom. Two judges, balding men in ties, sat behind small desks, with a stack of prisoner dossiers by their elbows. A middle-aged woman in black sat intermittently in a chair across from them; she, it turns out, was an Iraqi lawyer and acted as a sort of public defender. A TV was on in the corner, quietly playing Lebanese music videos.

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A prisoner was brought in before the judges; I asked Slim to translate what was going on.

“The judge is telling him that he is accused of being in a kidnapping ring,” he said.

“What is the prisoner saying?” The young man in orange was rambling in Arabic and gesturing wildly.

“He says, ‘No, I am not.’”

“That’s all he’s saying? Look, he’s still talking.”

Slim cocked his head toward the prisoner.

“Okay, he’s saying: ‘No, I don’t know any kidnappers, I am innocent, I just own a simple shop in Ameriyah,’ things like that.”

The judge nodded, took a few notes, and then sent the prisoner off. Once he left I talked to the judge.

“So the guy says he’s innocent?” I asked.

“Yes, he says he is not a kidnapper,” the judge said, still writing. “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“How many people admit to guilt here? Does anyone come here and say ‘Yes, I did what you say?’ “

The judge thought a few seconds. “It happens sometimes. Maybe five percent of the time.”

“What’s going to happen to this guy?”

“He will go back to jail, until he has a trial.”

“When will that be?”

The judge smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometime.”

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Each of the prisoners was seen in this way, most of them accused of either kidnapping-related crimes or of insurgent activity. One was allegedly found with a bomb in his trunk; he was the most quiet. Most of the others animatedly engaged the judges; some of the prisoners seemed relaxed and smiled a lot, like they were giving a sales pitch.

By lunchtime all the hearings were finished, and I headed back to the US portion of the base, which was so close I walked there. I wasn’t sure if what I’d just seen was an example of justice, or a perversion of it. I’m still not sure. Like any photographer I strive to get to the center of what’s happening, but sometimes even when you get there it’s difficult to ascertain the truth behind what you see. Especially in Iraq.

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Seen in this handout photo, photographer Eddie Adams poses at the Republican (GOP) National Convention August, 1992 in Houston, Texas.

Filmmakers have their Cannes; policy wonks have Davos; opera buffs have Beureuth. American photojournalists have the Eddie Adams farmhouse, a simple dark wood shelter situated at the top of a verdant hill in tiny Jeffersonville, New York. It’s the site of “the Workshop“; more fully, it’s The Eddie Adams Workshop, a yearly retreat for the nation’s top photojournalists and students, started by the celebrated photographer twenty years ago. The 100 students who pass the competitive portfolio cut are split into ten teams of ten, and each team produces a visual essay in the course of four intense, sleepless days of shooting, editing and instruction. Pancho Bernasconi, Getty Images‘ managing editor for news and I were asked to lead one of these teams, along with Leah Latella, a young and talented editor at Newsweek magazine.

I was a student there myself, a long time ago, in the first few years of the workshop’s existence. I saw in the students’ faces now much of what I remembered from my own experiences: shyness, exuberance, amazement, and a good bit of fear. I chose to have my group illustrate the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It–perhaps an esoteric choice, but Pancho was good enough to accept it without hesitation when I suggested it at a pre-workshop meeting.

Our students pursued the topic with gusto, ambling around through the rural byways, finding subjects that explore the concepts Shakespeare outlines in the soliloquy: infancy, childhood, careerhood, retirement, death. One of the seven ages is soldier, and as befits our times our students photographed several. One was a young man just back from Iraq, living his daily life now with a telling sense of isolation. Another was a “soldier of God,” a woman in a Christian biker group. Yet another was only present in memory: Pfc. Anthony Kaiser, born and raised in the next town over from Jeffersonville, who fell in combat in Anbar province just six months ago. Pancho and I sent student Brian Sokol and multimedia producer Bob Sasha out to visit the family, and together they produced a sublime piece of work, a narrative intercutting Anthony’s father recounting how his son was killed in action with the young man’s widow reminiscing about his life and personality. It’s an elegant three minutes that reminds us all anew about the enormous human consequences of our current wars.

Monday night, after the end of the workshop, after the presentations and awards, the students and faculty let loose in a big party in nearby hotel. There was much hugging and high-fiving among our group, lots of giddy exhaustion and justifiable pride. The whole experience was a privilege: not only to be able to meet a talented crop of young photographers, but also as a reminder of the precious window we as photographers are afforded into people’s most personal lives. It’s a lesson I learn and relearn, and one that never really loses its power, every time I’m reminded of it.

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I wasn’t sure where exactly to go this morning. The memorial ceremony itself was held adjacent to Ground Zero, but only a handful of photographers are let in down there. So I walked in a circle for a few hours, back and forth between Broadway at the famous St. Paul’s Chapel that survived 9/11, and the plaza on the edge of Ground Zero where tourists come to peek through the fence and photograph themselves next to history.

9/11 was of course a quintessential American tragedy, and we continue to commemorate the day in American ways. A street musician blew sonorous tunes on some sort of traditional African horn, then gave out Christian tracts to those who would stop to listen. A large gang of conspiracy theorists, complete with custom T-shirts, alleged that the attacks were commissioned by the US government. A woman bowed her head next to a sign that appealed for world peace. Three young women that were identical triplets donned costumes and began a work of performing art. Cops shouted for people to move along when they lingered in a lane of traffic.

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Booming in the background while I walked around and photographed was the sounds from the memorial ceremony itself, especially the annual rite of reading all the names of those who died from the terrorist attacks. I’ve photographed this unhappy anniversary a few times before, and the names recitative still hasn’t lost it’s power; the sheer enormity of the list is more clear when you hear the names over course of four hours, sometimes seeming like it will go on forever. The names were read over a background of music, much of it Bach: the D minor partita for violin, one of the flute sonatas, others. Somehow Bach is perfectly appropriate in times of crisis across the centuries; those simple scales and chords speak to the implicit emotional truths of our lives, truths that words cannot tell.

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Chris Hondros/Getty Images 

I rode in a Bradley again the other day, for the first time in a few years.  Bradleys are a rather old-fashioned Army armoured troop carrier; they have treads on them and look like small tanks.  They are increasingly getting supplanted around here by newer, roomier, and sleeker Stryker transport vehicles, which get around better in urban terrain.  Nonetheless, hundreds of Bradleys still grind and roar around Iraq every day, each containing up to seven or eight soldiers, riding uncomfortably inside. 

The sealed-off cabin of a Bradley on a summer day in Iraq is almost unbearably hot; within moments of the huge back hatch swinging shut, you’re covered in a sheen of sweat.  At least mine wasn’t crowded; only two soldiers, an Iraqi translator, and me.  One of the soldiers across from me was an energetic young man from near Missoula, Specialist Winn. 

Talking is nearly impossible in the roar of a moving Bradley, but the impossible didn’t stop Winn, who managed during our ride to shout out to me all about his life in Montana: his fondness of the mountains, for horses and hunting, and his many guns, each of which he described to me in detail.  (He politely asked about mine and was greatly surprised that I owned no guns at all). 

Conversation drifted over to the newly-installed automatic fire extinguishers in the Bradleys - apparently soldiers often have survived the initial blast of roadside bombs, only to burn to death inside.  “They’re great for putting out the fires, but they suck up all the oxygen, so we gotta get out quick if we get hit or we’ll suffocate,” Winn shouted.  He motioned next to me. “You know how to open the escape door on a Bradley?”

I looked down and noticed for the first time a small round door was carved into the larger hatch.  A heavy metal release lever was next to my elbow.“Actually, no,” I yelled.  “Just pull this?”“Yeah, but it sticks sometimes.” His sweaty brow furrowed as he considered some options.  “Tell you what,” he said, finally, “if we get hit, look over to me.  If I’m still alive, move over and I’ll open it.” “Good idea,” I said. “Will do.” But there were no explosions this day, and our escape plan went unused.  It was a long day, though, and finally around sunset the convoy arrived back at the main base and dropped me off, some distance from my tent.  As I walked back I saw other Bradleys lumbering back from or heading to patrols, some navigating fields full of dusty desert powder four inches thick, like the surface of the Moon.  When they crossed these they seemed to be almost floating as they parted the dust, like tiny iron ships, sailing across sandy seas. 

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A few evenings ago, I rode in a Blackhawk helicopter over Baghdad in the dead of night. The Army flies dozens of loosely scheduled Blackhawk runs here every day, ferrying troops and sometimes civilians around Baghdad. Sometimes the trips are just a few miles, but they save soldiers from the dangerous convoys down bomb-studded roads.

The side door of the helicopter was open as we flew; I stared out into the hot darkness, lost in thought as the rotors beat and the motor whined and I was whipped by the wind. How many helicopters have I been on in Iraq? Hundreds? On how many trips? Ten?

Is that right? Ten trips to Iraq? I worked it out…the first was the invasion itself, March 2003, an ill-fated jaunt into Iraq in the middle of a war, in a rented SUV that got shot out from under me and that I had to abandon under fire on the side of an Iraqi highway; second was in November 2003, when things in Baghdad were safe enough to go out for dinner and drinks every night at local restaurants; third was June of 2004, a trip strategically timed to miss everything important that happened in Iraq that year; fourth was January 2005, when I covered the elections and a horrible checkpoint shooting accident; fifth was June 2005, a hot summer with the Marines in Anbar province; sixth in February 2006, another, less sweaty trip with the Marines; seventh, a stint at a US Army hospital straight out of MASH; eighth, a stay in west Baghdad with a brilliant young colonel, and two weeks covering the Saddam trial, ninth, in February of this year, hopping between small firebases around Baghdad, covering the “surge,” and then, finally, now, trip number ten. Ten trips to Iraq! And for what?

We now flew over a Baghdad neighborhood, high in the sky. Baghdad doesn’t have street lights, but instead uses regular fluorescent tubes, mounted vertically on the sides of poles and houses, to light neighborhoods. These all shone beneath me like a field of cold blue stars, spread out as far as I could see, the enormous city sprawling forever. It was a rare moment of real beauty in this land of heartbreak and pain.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: A street in the Green Zone is seen through a U.S. military Humvee window March 8, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

I won’t be running in the Green Zone anymore, though it made perfect sense last week. I was stuck there (I had planned to be there for one day working for Newsweek) after the shrine in Samarra had been bombed and a 24-hour lock down had been enforced on Baghdad.

Without much else to do, I jogged every morning around the Green Zone, down its wide boulevards lined with trash, concrete blast walls and empty fields. Newsweek employs a South African security man, I asked him if running there was safe and he gave his reluctant approval.

“Just watch for mortars,” he said with a sigh. I nodded, we both knew that wasn’t possible.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: The Iraqi flag flies over an Iraqi government building in the Green Zone, on June 28, 2004 in Baghdad, Iraq.

The runs were tense. I’d stretch at the front gate at the Newsweek house, then head out onto the main streets. The Green Zone was the neighborhood that held Saddam’s palaces and housed his cornies; so the streets are broad, as wide as an interstate freeway, and yet are lined by only the occasional opulent house or tacky monument. There are no real sidewalks, so I ran on the side of the road, passed by dusty American Humvee convoys or pickup trucks bolted with ad hoc armor and filled with Iraqi “police,” brandishing weapons. Sometimes a convoy of some VIP or another would go by, a long string of anonymous, armored SUVs, brand new and clean.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: The Hands of Victory monument, erected by Saddam Hussein, is shown February 21, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

I ran by the famous monument of the crossed swords everyday. The third day, I noticed a familiar blast pattern scored into the sidewalk that wasn’t there the morning before. A mortar must have hit and exploded in the night. I wondered if it got anyone.

Finally, on Saturday, I was able to leave. I took off to be embedded with the military. When I arrived at the Army base, I checked my email and had one from a friend staying with Newsweek. A few hours after I’d left, a huge and unprecedented fusillade of daytime mortars had crashed around the Green Zone, and one had landed at the front gate of the Newsweek house. Everyone in the house was shaken but fine, though their generator had been destroyed and an Iraqi man who’d worked across the street was killed. “It’s pretty bad when you feel safer out on the streets of Baghdad than in the Green Zone,” she wrote me.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ - JUNE 14: The streets just outside the Green Zone sit empty June 14, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

So that’s it for the Green Zone jogging for now. Good riddance. I’ve seen some grim places but the Green Zone has got to be one of the most strangely depressing four square miles on Earth.

It’s easy to fly to Iraq. There are three flights a day from Amman, Jordan on the country’s national carrier, Royal Jordanian Airlines; it’s about a 90 minute trip, soaring over the saffron sands of Anbar province en route to Baghdad.

Incredibly, up until a few months ago you didn’t even need to secure an Iraqi visa first: it was possible, if you knew what you were doing, to simply show up and get an “emergency visa” in a small office in Baghdad airport, filling out a form while surrounded by dozens of diminutive Sri Lankan manual laborers flown in by Halliburton and other US government contractors. I’d been doing that for a few years; but for my latest trip the government of Iraq (such as it is) has started to crack down, necessitating a trip to an Iraqi embassy in another country first to pick up a visa before arriving. There’s an Iraqi embassy in Amman, so I spent an extra day there to get the visa.

The nightstand in my hotel in Amman - it points the the way to Mecca.

I walked down from my hotel to the embassy Sunday morning to get it (Sunday, of course, being a regular workday in a Muslim country).

The embassy, a single floor building with several rooms and offices, was packed. Mostly it seemed to be Iraqis getting various paperwork related to their stays in Jordan. Though it’s hard to say; Jordanians and Iraqis don’t look or act much different, at least from a foreigner’s perspective. It wasn’t that long ago that they were all one land, of course: both part of the Ottoman Empire. Only in the 1920s, picking through the remains of the once-mighty caliphate that dissolved after WWI, did the British famously (and arbitrarily) draw borders and create all these new countries. Iraq was specifically formed to encompass the northern and southern petroleum fields; in a way, Iraq has been about oil from the very beginning.

Several attractive Iraqi women in Western dress were working behind the glass in the visa section of the embassy, set up almost like tellers in a bank. One, a dyed blonde with features like the actress Cameron Diaz, told me that they normally stop handing out visas at 11 am; I was half an hour late.

“Please?” I asked, waving my passport around. “I have to fly out tomorrow morning.”

“Well, leave it here, and we’ll see what we can do. Come back in an hour.”

I went across the street, found a coffee kiosk and ordered a strong Turkish coffee, boiled by hand in a small steel decanter by a Jordanian teenager with a hip haircut and skinny jeans. An hour later, back at the embassy, Cameron Diaz smilingly handed over my passport, the ink still drying on the visa. I thanked her and headed out.

The view of Amman from the back of a cab.

I tried to hail a cab but they were all full, so I walked up the hill, back to my hotel, not terribly far away.

As I walked, I thought about how easy it is for a society to come unglued. Amman and Baghdad, very similar cities, in a lot of ways, populated by the same kind of people. And there I was, casually doing things in Amman that would get me killed in an instant in today’s Baghdad - walking the streets alone, speaking in English, waving an American passport around. Twenty years ago, Baghdad was the cosmopolitan capital where you went to get a whiskey and do business; Amman was the backwater. Four years of a power vacuum has utterly transformed Baghdad, once one of the Middle East’s safest cities, into a nightmare of blast walls, bombings, organized crime and deadly insurgent checkpoints.

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The chapel of Forward Operating Base Falcon was packed; the pews were full of soldiers, from generals to privates, and more men stood alongside the walls and in the back. At the front, on a chancel made of plywood, was an assault rifle, mounted vertically, a helmet on its stock, and tan desert boots at its base. From the weapon hung dog tags — the dog tags of Staff Sergeant Karl Soto-Pinedo, who was killed by an insurgent last week in Baghdad. The memorial ceremony began precisely at seven-thirty, as planned.

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Five speakers took their turns at a lectern next to Soto-Pinedo’s memorial stand. One by one they extolled the virtues of battlefield bravery and of Soto-Pinedo’s drive and initiative in particular. Raised in Puerto Rico, Soto-Pinedo needed to take an English proficiency course as soon as he joined the Army in October 2002, just out of high school. He was good with people and obviously well-liked; a slideshow of snapshots projected on a screen showed him arm and arm with his buddies, many of them now sitting red-eyed in this room. He towered over most of them; his nickname was Big Soto. He’d just been promoted to Staff Sergeant two months ago.

After the speakers were finished, an Army chaplain said a prayer. Then, suddenly, there was the Last Roll Call: a gruff-voiced First Sergeant somewhere in the crowd bellowed out the name of one of his men; that soldier called back in a sharp retort. The sergeant called another man; he called back instantly. Then the sergeant called out “Sgt. Soto!”.

The room was quiet.

“Staff Sgt. Soto!”

More silence.

“Staff Sergeant Karl Soto-Pinedo!”

Absolute quiet, inside and out. Iraq, the land of constant cacophony, seemed to hold its breath in tribute.

Then, piercing the stillness like the sudden shot that felled Soto, three volleys of gunfire from outside the chapel. A trumpeter, also outside, played Taps, legato, hushed.

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Finally, in pairs, the officers in the room approached the memorial stand. They saluted in unison. Major General Fils, the commander of Soto’s First Infantry Division, reached out and touched the helmet, gently, as if it were a newborn baby’s cheek. More officers followed; many were crying. Then the enlisted men approached, more informally; they stood sometimes six or seven abreast; saluting slowly, not always in sync. Several of them grabbed Soto’s dog tags, pulling the chain taught, and prayed or wept or both.

Karl Soto-Pinedo was killed last Tuesday, felled by a bullet during a routine patrol in Baghdad. He was 22.