Over the last five years, as I’ve consumed one dispatch after another from journalists embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, I’ve wondered how accurate a picture of events such reports provide. Given the stark dangers journalists face in Iraq, embedding clearly offers a valuable means of getting around the country and seeing the troops in action—but at what cost? Does the presence of journalists affect the way soldiers behave? Do journalists—physically protected by soldiers—in turn protect them in what they choose to write? How willing are soldiers to talk freely about their experiences? And to what extent is it possible to talk with Iraqis while on an embed?

This past May, on a visit to Baghdad, I got a chance to explore such questions myself. On my embed application, I wrote that I wanted to visit a typical Baghdad neighborhood to see the effects of the surge and to get an idea of what more had to be done before the U.S. could begin to reduce its forces in significant numbers. I was assigned to the Second Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Regiment of the Tenth Mountain Division, a light infantry unit stationed in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora.

At 9 o’clock on a blistering morning in mid-May, I was met in the Green Zone by a four-vehicle military convoy. Emerging to introduce themselves were Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Watson, the battalion’s commanding officer, and Captain Brett Walker, the public-affairs officer (pao) assigned to watch over me. On the fifteen-minute ride to Dora, they told me how a year earlier the neighborhood had been one of the most violent in Baghdad, with Sunni fighters attached to Al Qaeda in Iraq setting off car bombs and leaving mutilated bodies along roadsides. But thanks in part to the stationing...

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