To enter Iraq with US forces, journalists normally travel through Kuwait. This time I flew from Singapore to Kuwait, where I toured military facilities critical to maintaining war-fighting equipment, then to Qatar to continue exploration of the same, and finally back to Kuwait to enter Iraq.

I plan to spend the entirety of 2007 with our troops at war, until sickness, wounds or worse send me home, or the military tires of my presence and catapults me over the wire. Having spent most of 2005 in Iraq, I know what this means. “Drive-by reporting,” as some commanders call it, is worse than no reporting at all. The only way to approach describing what our troops experience, and what is really happening in Iraq, is to go the distance...