The panic-stricken family had gathered their relatives together to try to raise some money. American soldiers on the ground eventually came to understand if they accidentally killed an innocent Iraqi then they would be the targets of a retaliatory attack a few days later. The US military commanders and their civilian equivalents were in a state of denial in Baghdad. Every few days they would hold press briefings in which they would describe the insurgents as either foreign fighters or the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, the "bitter-enders" in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary. Every escalation in attacks was described as the insurgents' last desperate convulsion. The chasm between this rosy picture of the war and the bloody reality became ever deeper. One day I heard a rumour that there was an uprising in Baiji, a Sunni Arab oil refining town north of Baghdad The US military had not said anything about it.

When I got there I found the police station and the mayor's office burnt out and the police fled. Thousands of people were on the streets chanting pro-Saddam slogans and setting fire to Turkish fuel trucks that they claimed were stealing Iraqi oil.During that first year after the fall of Saddam Hussein reporting Iraq was not as dangerous as it later became. When nothing was happening in Baghdad I used to drive west along the highway to Fallujah where I ate in a restaurant on the main street called Haj Hussein because my driver said it served some of the best kebabs in Iraq Local people were helpful. They said they saw journalists as neutral, or possible allies in their struggle against the occupation.The war was getting more intense. I was in Fallujah in November 2003 when a man who owned a shop selling musical cassettes and also worked as a freelance cameraman told me a Chinook helicopter had been shot down near by. We drove across an iron bridge over the Euphrates past fields filled with cattle and crops asking farmers the way to the crash site. Within minutes I was nervously peering through the bushes at the smouldering wreckage of the giant Chinook in which 16 US troops had just died and 21 were wounded.

"I saw two helicopters pass overhead when two missiles were fired at them," said Daoud Suleiman, a farmer working among the date palms. "One missed and the other hit a helicopter at the rear-end and flames started coming out of it before it crashed into a field."Above us half a dozen Black Hawk helicopters swooped and dived as if to avoid more missiles. The farmers passed around pieces of twisted metal they had taken from the helicopter. One of them waved a piece of wreckage derisively at the Black Hawks.