“What is stopping somebody from attacking this COP?” I ask the 1st sergeant. “From driving up in a cement truck or two filled with C4 and blowing them up?”

“Apart from the physical barriers,” Braet responds, carefully cutting his steak into neat squares with plastic fork and knife, “not a whole lot. There is the wall, of course, so it’s harder to drive a VBIED” — a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, military parlance for a car or truck bomb — “into Saidiyah. But they can produce it in Saidiyah; we’re ignorant if we think they can’t produce a VBIED right under our noses.

“What I worry about is 12, 15 guys in suicide vests running up to the checkpoint up front,” he says.

Up front is a long, wide stretch of street lined with sprawling villas of merchants who used to live in Saidiyah. Most of the merchants fled the sectarian violence that peaked in the area last year, and most of the villas now stand abandoned, their once manicured gardens overgrown with vines and weeds.

“There are bushes in front that could definitely mask 12 to 15 guys,” Braet says.

So, in other words, this outpost can pretty easily be overrun?

“I don’t know about overrun,” he says. “They could inflict some casualties, certainly.”

Capt. Betson tells me that some combat outposts have been attacked, including COP Guerrero, a few miles west of us, where another 4-64 unit is stationed.

“When Guerrero was first set up they saw a significant amount of small-arms fire,” Betson says. “When they occupied the land it was literally occupying enemy territory that they had to stand up and hold.”

A combat outpost in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in northern Baghdad, was attacked during the recent fighting there, but no U.S. troops were killed, Betson says. He feels secure enough inside COP 821 not to require his troops to wear body armor: “The enemy is looking for means to attack any military base, but we have specifically designed our COP to mitigate the threat no matter what it is.”

The main mitigating force, says Braet, is the amount of money American troops constantly pump into Saidiyah.

“There’s a lot of influence on people who would attack us to not, and that has to do with how much money we’re giving out around here, and that’s also why Saidiyah is so peaceful,” he says. “Because if the money ran out, we’d have some problems.”

In addition to distributing $2,400 micro-grants to businesses that want to reopen inside Saidiyah, and occasionally handing out goodies such as school backpacks and soccer balls to the neighborhood children, the U.S. military here pays a monthly salary of approximately $300 to about 300 people, Braet says. Some of them work on the neighborhood council, and some of them are members of a pro-government Sunni militia called Sons of Iraq.

“I’d say 80 percent of these people we pay don’t do anything,” Braet said. “It’s just free money.”

“So, in other words, you are buying security,” I say.

“Pretty much,” he responds, and goes back to his steak.

May 11: For three hours, Hadi al-Athawi has listened patiently to fellow members of the neighborhood council discussing the slow reconstruction of a local school, the erratic electricity supply, the problems with clogged sewage pipes, the lagging trash pickup and the politically sensitive question of which of the mosques damaged in sectarian battles that raged in the area last year should be rebuilt first: Sunni or Shia.

The meeting is almost over when Hadi al-Athawi drops the bomb.

His long dishdasha robe flowing, his kuffiyeh folded perfectly around his bearded face, al-Athawi rises from his chair, points a long, manicured finger in the general direction of American Army Capt. Andrew Betson, Iraqi police Gen. Baha al-Azzawi and council secretary Faras al-Qabi, and says in a clear, loud voice, “Why are you accusing me of being a member of al-Qaida?”

Suddenly, everyone is up on their feet, shouting.

“Please!” al-Azzawi bellows, rolling his eyes. “Let us put these differences behind us. It’s over. Let’s forgive. It’s forgotten. Get over it.”

“We never said any such thing about you,” yells al-Qabi. “Why do you accuse us of accusing you?”

“Al-Qaida!” al-Athawi roars. “I am told that you spread rumors that I am al-Qaida!”

“Enough, enough!” shout fellow council members, grabbing each other’s hands.

“Stop! Please!” implores al-Azzawi.

“No one is accusing you of anything!” screams al-Qabi.

Betson remains in his seat, watching the meeting of a council created to foster reconciliation in the war-torn neighborhood descend into a 10-minute shouting match.

Then everyone gets up and goes to a burger joint to lunch together.

“They like to show their concerns and frustrations,” Betson says after I inquire whether the argument suggested that the neighborhood council needs to focus on reconciliation among its own members. He stresses the word “show.”"When something bothers them, they make it very visible. And very audible, for that matter.”

Bradleys were once thought to be almost as impregnable as M1 Abrams tanks, which were thought to be entirely unassailable. Then Iraqis started setting up EFPs, explosively formed projectiles that are elaborately made to penetrate armor. The Apache Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, has lost five men to the projectiles since March. All five were in Bradleys when they were killed. Four of them were from the platoon with which I’m going on patrol today. Their charred bodies were found pressed against the hatch in the back of their Bradley, trying to get out. The mechanism that allows the hatch to open had melted into the body of the vehicle during the explosion.

I think about that as the hatch of the Bradley I’m in closes. Sgt. Lee mouths a prayer. As the Bradley begins to rattle out of the combat outpost where Apache Company is stationed, he yells at one of the soldiers over the roar of the engine: “Did you pray?”

Outside the sunlight is almost blinding, but inside the Bradley it is dark. Very little light seeps in through three tinted windows, each the size of a Coke bottle. The windows are too high for me to see what’s outside. I guess our direction by the gentle pitch left and right of the track.

Because we can’t see out, when the Bradley comes to a stop and the hatch opens the soldiers run out of the vehicle holding their M4s at the ready, prepared to fire. It is an impressive show of force, and we scare some kids. But the rest of the patrol is mellow, and soft-spoken Lt. Rusty Mason talks to the Iraqis in a friendly manner, asking them how they live, where they get food, how many hours of power they have. In return, they offer freshly baked, crunchy flatbread and cold soda. In the house of sheik Nasr al-Taee women offer the soldiers rice and a dish made with okra and tomato sauce. We stand around the kitchen table picking at the food and introducing ourselves to the sheik’s numerous children, nephews and nieces. The lieutenant takes off his helmet and lets 12-year-old Thoha try it on. Another soldier rolls up his sleeve to expose, to the girls’ amazement, a collage of color tattoos. Another soldier is outside, pushing around a soccer ball with the boys.

“You know,” al-Taee finally says to Lt. Mason, “every day I fix curb in front of my house, and the Bradleys break it.”

Everyone laughs, uncomfortably.

Then we get back into the Bradleys and drive back to the base, running over curbs and medians, breaking off palm fronds and frightening kids.

“They’re clueless,” spits out U.S. Army 1st Sgt. James Braet, who trained Iraqi troops in Baghdad during his previous deployment, in 2005, and who interacts with them during joint patrols here now almost daily. “They are worse than the ones we trained. They don’t hold their weapons right, they don’t have the discipline.”

For three years, the White House has been repeating like a mantra that the ability of the American troops to cut their presence in Iraq depends on the readiness of the Iraqi forces to handle the Sunni and Shiite militias. As the Iraqi army stands up, American commanders and officials like to say, American forces will be able to stand down.

But five years after the Iraqi army was disbanded by the coalition forces and then put together again, from scratch, the Iraqi forces are far from ready to stand up. During the ill-fated attempt of the Nouri al-Maliki government to pacify the Shiite militias in the southern port of Basra, 1,000 Iraqi officers and enlisted men deserted their posts. A Time magazine article recently described how an Iraqi army unit that was supposed to go on a joint patrol with U.S. troops simply slept through the link-up time with their American counterparts. All despite the $20.4 billion Congress has spent on training and building up the Iraqi security forces since 2004, and despite the fact that the Iraqi army has graduated from driving around in pickup trucks and using decades-old Kalashnikov rifles in 2005 to having armored Humvees, helicopters and planes today.

Even the statistics on the strength of Iraqi security forces is unreliable, according to Stuard Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction for the Defense Department. Iraq says it has 530,000 people in its security forces, including 160,000 in the army. But Bowen said that many of those have been wounded or killed or gone AWOL.

When 1st Sgt. Braet trained Iraqi soldiers, he said, “We lived with them. I personally took them to the range.”

But today, he said, “They are trained by the Iraqi army. They have no NCO [noncommissioned officer] structure. The officers are OK, more or less, but the enlisted men don’t know anything.”

At the patrol in Saidiyah today, the two Iraqis returned from the second floor and declared the house clear of weapons. The thirsty soldier and the soldier who was talking to the woman thanked her and turned to go. And the soldier in the living room kept watching TV until somebody called him and told him it was time to go to the next house.

May 6: In the middle of our interview in an air-conditioned conference room of Alpha Company’s outpost, Capt. Andrew Betson says:

“I’m gonna get it before it gets you.”

Then he stands up, walks over to the wall behind my chair and steps on a cockroach the size of my thumb.

Just another day in the life of COP 821, a combat outpost in Baghdad’s southwestern district of Saidiyah.

COP 821 is one of the 60 or so outposts created by Gen. David Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq. The purpose of these outposts, scattered throughout Baghdad’s neighborhoods, is to help U.S. troops monitor city life more closely than before, when the troops made forays into the streets from their vast U.S. military bases. This one, occupied by Apache Company of the 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, houses about 100 men, a bunch of dusty armored vehicles and a dog named Goodie. Goodie is a mutt the company adopted and named after Cpl. James Gudridge, one of Apache’s soldiers who was killed in January by an explosively formed projectile that cut his body in half.

The company lost four other men in March: Staff Sgt. Christopher Hake, Spc. Jose Rubio, Pfc. Andrew Habsieger and Pvt. George Delgado. They were burned alive when an explosively formed projectile pierced their Bradley fighting vehicle, incinerating everything inside.

Apache Company eventually detained the perpetrators.

“Small victories,” Betson says, taking a swig from a bottle of cold water. “I’m glad we got these fuckers.”

The soldiers don’t know for sure what was in much of the compound before Apache Company moved in. Some say the giant hangar, which now hosts windowless sleeping quarters and a gym, was a warehouse; others say al-Qaida used it to store materials its members used to make explosive devices. The large mess hall, which has power sockets that stick up precariously from the floor, was said to have been an Internet cafe, but when the troops arrived here it was filled with rubble.

In the paved courtyard there are some pull-up bars and a basketball hoop. The gym has an infrequently used ping-pong table, weights and two treadmills. The treadmills were bought in Iraq and no one uses them, maybe because in order to plug them in the soldiers would have to unplug the water cooler.

Water coolers are everywhere, and a leaflet in the company tactical operations center reminds the soldiers to rehydrate all the time. Summer temperatures in Baghdad can reach 130 degrees, but this week the weather is mild: 100 degrees, partly cloudy.

Also, unlike bigger military bases in Iraq, which open their mess halls to the troops only at certain hours, COP 821 allows its soldiers to rummage through the mess hall any time they want. Granted, there isn’t much to eat: a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs (from a packaged powder), pancakes and sausage, and a hot dinner. Today was meatloaf and rice pilaf. For lunch most soldiers subsist on potato chips and power bars, although sometimes they go to a new Iraqi restaurant that opened a couple of blocks away, Sun City Foods. The hamburgers there are legendary.

Behind the mess hall is a gravel-strewn yard with showers and latrines: plywood cabins with wooden seats over metal barrels. “We call them burn shitters,” explains 1st Sgt. Jim Braet. When the morning comes I understand what he means. A half-dozen barrels stand in the middle of the yard, their contents aflame, and tall clouds of black smoke billow above the compound.

Sgt. Brian Carman was stuck, too. He had a black bruise under his right eye from a sniper bullet that entered his face during a fight with the Shiite Mahdi army in Sadr City two weeks ago. His left cheek, where the bullet came out, was swollen. The front of his flak jacket was splattered with brown blotches of his own dried blood. He had been waiting for two days for a helicopter to take him to Baghdad International Airport, where he would catch a plane to Kuwait, and from there, another plane home to Missouri. He was going on home leave for 14 days. Then he was going to return to Sadr City to fight the Mahdi army again.

“Good thing they didn’t ship me out when they were supposed to” (immediately after his injury), Carman said, slurring his speech. His cheek has not healed yet, and he was taking a lot of painkillers. “My face was huge.”

Sgt. Carman was there with two other soldiers from his unit. They chain-smoked cigarettes and talked about what they were going to do when they got home. A medic, who said he had patched up 130 casualties between March 25, when the fighting broke out, and April 30, when he left Sadr City, was going to buy a big bottle of Jameson’s whiskey and drink it by himself. Another soldier was going to drink German beer and golf. Sgt. Carman said he was going fishing.

They talked about the fighting in Sadr City in terse, clipped sentences.

“It was real quiet, not a shot, and then it just erupted in one day,” Carman said.

“They’re fighting, but we’re pushing them back,” said the medic.

“We’ve definitely got the upper hand,” Carman agreed.

Then the soldiers talked about what they would do when their deployment ends in August. The medic said he might become a military recruiter. The other soldier said he was getting out of the Army as soon as his contract was up. Sgt. Carman said he will stay in.

“After this, it’s tough not to come back. Civilian life just doesn’t work out,” he said. This is his fourth deployment to Iraq since the war began.

Finally, the soldiers’ ride arrived. They hoisted their dusty backpacks, fastened the straps of their Kevlar helmets, and walked, stooping slightly under the weight of their packs, along a gravel strip to the landing pad.

They never got on the helicopter. A colonel needed to go to the airport, and they were ordered to give up their seats for the officer.

“Outranked,” Carman spat out, as he got to the terminal.

It was past noon, and the haze was gone. The scorching sun was almost directly above the soldiers’ heads.

“Fuck it,” Carman said, to no one in particular. He turned his back on the landing pad and went into Camp Taji, away from the terminal. “I’m going to sleep.”

“Like a punch in the gut,” the medic said. “The guy just got shot in the face in Sadr City, and he gets bumped off the flight. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. But there are some people that just don’t get it.”

A half-hour later, the medic got on a flight to the airport, at last. There was room for Carman, too, but he was asleep in his tent.

I examine the people around me. They are U.S. State Department officials, defense contractors and Iraqis who work for the Defense Department and for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. A gray-haired man is wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the words, in English and Arabic: “Danger. Stay back.” Another man has brought along his Martin acoustic guitar — solid rosewood sides and back. There is an Iraqi woman, probably a contractor, with three kids, and for a moment I think: “Now here’s something to remember — flying on an American C-17 as a child.” Then I realize that they, like all of us, are flying into a war that has ravaged their homeland. They will have childhood memories, and most of them are not going to be nice.

When we land, I get a text message on my cellphone. It is from my Jordanian network provider, Zain, which also operates in Iraq. “Zain JO wishes you a pleasant stay in Iraq,” it reads. “Enjoy One Network Services with Zain IQ and feel at home.”

This is my 10th reporting trip to Iraq since the war began, and my fifth trip as an embedded reporter. My last trip was in 2006. When I land in Baghdad, I think I am familiar with the travel routine: I will catch a Black Hawk ride from Baghdad International Airport, where I arrived, to the Green Zone, where I will get my accreditation and continue to the 4th Infantry Division, the unit with which I will be embedded for the next 18 days. As I wait on the landing strip for my ride, I notice that since I was here last most helicopter crews have given their Black Hawks names and written them in large black letters on the helicopters’ hulls. There’s the Dark Angel, all covered in dust. There’s the Hillbilly Deluxe. I get to ride on the Nomad, with two Iraqi employees of the U.S. Embassy.

The crew leaves the doors of the helicopter open, and the stench of decomposing garbage pours into the cabin as we fly low over Baghdad. I see kids playing soccer on a grassless field, swimming pools empty of water and entire courtyards and rooftops of abandoned houses covered in trash. Behind the green curve of the Tigris I see the landing strip where I’m supposed to disembark, LZ Washington.

The helicopter lands, but the rotors are still going and it’s too loud to talk. I show the helicopter gunner three fingers, like a “W,” for “LZ Washington,” to ask if this is my stop. He nods. The two Iraqis get out first. I am about to get off, too, but all of a sudden the gunner is yelling at the Iraqis to run and waves violently at me, throws my bags back into the cabin and jumps in, and we take off again, rising sharply and turning. I see a plume of black smoke rising in the air several blocks away. Mortar.

“Lately we’ve been hit at least once a day, at different times,” explains one American soldier when my Black Hawk finally lands and I’m allowed to step out. A siren goes off soon after I arrive, and a male voice, pumped through invisible speakers, announces: “All clear. All clear.” The soldier smiles. “Sometimes you hear a siren and then you hear: Boom! It’s not a siren, it’s a rocket.”

American troops blame Shiite militias for lobbing mortars and rockets into the Green Zone, a heavily protected enclave that houses the Iraqi Parliament, much of the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy. The shelling has intensified in recent weeks, and in the past month the attacks have killed more than a dozen people, including at least three Americans.

The military press office in the Green Zone is essentially a cluster of air-conditioned metal trailers inside a bunker. Here, I will spend a night under a ceiling of solid concrete. I drop my bags in a large room with Internet access and a few bunk beds and step outside to chat with the Peruvian guards who stand watch here. It is dusk, and the orange glow of the setting sun makes the 15-foot Jersey barriers and dusty camouflage netting overhead look oddly pretty.

“Listen,” one guard tells me. I listen. Swallows are shrieking overhead, hunting for flies. I hear generators hum.

“Yes, pretty,” I say.

“Escucha,” the guard insists, shaking his head, and then continues, in a mix of Spanish and English. “Simply escucha. Every day they” — and he imitates the trajectory of a rocket with his hand — “Pow!”

An hour later, as I’m checking my e-mail inside the press office, the siren goes off again. “Duck and cover. Duck and cover. Incoming,” the voice intones. My stay in Baghdad has begun.