October 20th - Camp Stryker, Near Baghad Airport

We are in limbo, a place where one spends a lot of time when travelling with the military. After a week with the British in southern Iraq, we're now with the Americans, en route to Al Asad airbase in the west, and then up to the border with Syria. This requires us to move mainly at night - sometimes by armoured vehicle, sometimes by helicopter - to sleep in various tents and offices at odd hours, and to spend inordinate amounts of time lugging our very heavy gear across sand and gravel walkways in military camps.

"We" is myself and Tim Lambon, who is producer / cameraman / editor / bodyguard and, he might say, donkey. It's hell for him travelling with a puny correspondent like me, because he ends up carrying most of the gear while I struggle with just a couple of bags. TV equipment is much lighter and more mobile than it used to be, but it's still always more than you want to lift.

He has a new camera, which is smaller, from which he can feed the pictures directly into the computer on which he edits our stories. That same computer is linked up to two satellite phones to transmit the pieces. It takes about 20 minutes or half an hour to transmit one minute of pictures and voice-over, so we will always have to be ready at least an hour and a half in advance of Channel 4 News. All this waiting, and in the end I know that editing the stories will be a mad rush.


Cameraman Tim Lambon.

The advantage of this peripatetic existence is that I get to write during the vast swathes of time, more monotonous than the desert, which characterise our days. It takes only a short while to believe one's life was ever thus, a futile shuttle between points on a map, barely noted because of exhaustion.

There are no decisions to be made, no options, no alternatives, so it's strangely relaxing. When they tell you to get on the chopper, or the bus, you get on. Flak jacket and helmet ON. Going up. Going along. Going down. Slowing down. Getting out. Flak jacket and helmet OFF. Sit for eight hours in an air-conditioned room with a war movie blaring, until called. Wait in the sun. Stand by this concrete blast wall. Wait until midnight. Onto the next transport.

We flew by Hercules from Basra to Baghdad, spent a day waiting at the airport (the helicopter airbridge to the Green Zone was down), jumped on a British convoy into town with a couple of helpful RAF officers, and landed up in the Convention Centre in the Green Zone to find that we were in more or less the right place for Saddam Hussein's trial the following day.


Lindsey Hilsum live on air

We didn't have a place in the courtroom, but since those that did were behind sound-proof glass and couldn't hear a thing, I don't think this was a great disadvantage. We watched it on Iraqi TV, did live broadcasts from the satellite trucks parked outside, and then, at midnight, headed to the concrete barricaded car park to catch the 'rhino bus' armed convoy to Camp Stryker back at the airport, from where I write this. And now, more waiting,until we can get a chopper to Al Asad Airbase, hopefully tonight.

October 21st

No, not last night. Nor tonight. Tomorrow night. Bad analogy suddenly opportunities proliferate - 'We are pebbles on the gravel walkways of life, crushed under the Humvee of destiny'. I feel that I have lived in limbo forever, waiting for the Movement Operations Cell of Fate to note my existence. When we finally managed to get online today, in the Internet and Movie Facility, I thought the line which flashed up as I logged off read not "Are you sure you want to exit?" but "Are you sure you want to exist?"

Another two days of this (which is what we expect) and I might not be sure I do, at least, not in my previous form!

As we noted when at Camp Fallujah last year, this war effort is extraordinary. I don't know what the proportion of bureaucrat-soldiers to fighting-soldiers is, but the former seem to proliferate. They are office workers in uniform with guns. Many never leave the camp.

They had lobster tail as one of lunch options in the Chow Hall (Mess Hall to the British. 'Chow', I think, comes from the Korean War). Lobster tail! Don't they know there's a war on? Baskins and Robbins icecream is available daily.

This is the Military Industrial complex in action, a vast economy of scale dropped into the Mesopotamian desert. Plastic cutlery and plates, hundreds of thousands of them, used and discarded three times a day, waste on an unprecedented scale. The British have gone over to plastic too, so I dread to think what all this is doing to the planet.

October 25th - Al Asad Airbase

We have at least got within shouting distance of the right place. After three nights and four days in Camp Stryker, we finally jumped a chopper to get to Al Asad. It was empty so I don't really believe that it was full on all the previous nights.


Lindsey Hilsum at Al Asad Airbase

Anyway, here we found Patrick Baz whom we last saw in Fallujah - he's a delightful Lebanese/French photographer working for AFP and he'd been waiting three days there. We saw the Colonel this evening. He was an odd mixture of swagger and honesty - completely clear that there's no winning this war, and suitably sceptical of US politicians' claims that it's nearly over, but also gung-ho: "We're not interested in capturing a lot of guys. If you're out there fighting, our job is to kill you. You're the guy standing in the way of this country."

American military types always seem to think that real life is trying to imitate war movies rather than the other way round. "It's a cross between Apocalypse Now and Mad Max out here," he said. Everything up to Ramadi is bizarre. Everything beyond Ramadi is surreal.

October 26th - Al Qaim Military Base

This being the desert, it's hot during the day and pretty cold at night.

We got up in the chill of 4am to get on the convoy to Al Qaim, the base up on the Syrian border. About 60 vehicles, mainly seven and half tonne open-sided trucks and truck-trailers carrying armoured vehicles. We didn't get going until 8.30am and then the 70 mile journey took nine hours through endless, pale brown, stony desert with only a few small towns along the route.


"Wagons Roll..."

I slept most of the way, huddled on the floor of the truck with my flak-jacket and helmet on, and a Lawrence-of-Arabia scarf across my nose and mouth to guard against the desert dust. The insurgents had been out there first, of course, this being their territory, so the truck four back from ours hit a roadside bomb, an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). No-one was hurt, but the armoured vehicle had to be unloaded from the trailer and then it drove very slowly, so the whole convoy was delayed. Another IED was detected and blown up a few yards ahead. Then the wheel of the first vehicle, which presumably had been creating a lot of friction despite the run-flats which enable it to keep driving with a damaged tyre, burst into flames and thick black smoke. This was very dramatic, a rare occasion when that song "Wheels on fire, rollin' down the road" becomes reality.

So we limped into Al Qaim as the sun went down, covered in powdery dust, and exhausted from doing nothing. It's a surprisingly large base here, which I'm sure pisses off the Syrians no end, as it's just near their border. Even up here, they have Baskins and Robbins ice-cream and a PX selling DVDs.

October 28th - Al Qaim Military Base

The base is big and getting bigger. Mainly marines, with some army and navy. Very few women. They've established themselves in an old railway station, so it's rather surreal, like a double exposure when a photo is reproduced on top of another without totally obscuring the first.

History moved on but the setting didn't change. Marines wander between old railway carriages, one of which has been adopted as a church and christened The Soul Train. Railway tracks run throughout the base. In the distance, through the dusty sky, we can see the old phosphate factory, a rusty labyrinth which must have at one time provided a lot of Iraq's fertiliser. The daily convoys gather (or 'stage') in what they call The Dust Bowl, which speaks for itself. Everything is protected by sandbags - well, there's no shortage of sand, so I guess that's easy enough.

If the essence lies in the travelling not the arriving, then this is the ultimate. When I close my eyes, I see clouds of sand through a windscreen, as our Humvee rolls across the desert for endless, uncomfortable hours, carefully following the tyre tracks of the vehicle in front to avoid mines.


"A dusty patrol"

This has got to be the sandiest place I've ever worked. Dust gets everywhere, and into everything, which is a nightmare for cameras and computers, not to mention people. The Americans don't control the roads, so they travel in convoy across the desert, taking long detours and varying their routes to avoid roadside bombs. Yesterday, our convoy came across two anti-tank mines buried in the sand at the only place where you can cross the wadi. They do a good job on detecting these things and blowing them up safely, but it shows that the insurgents are out there, and know the weak spots.

Our driver yesterday was Lance Corporal Lin Nguyen, whose parents fled Vietnam. His father was a South Vietnamese National Guardsman, abandoned, in his view, by the Americans, and captured by the Vietcong when they took the south. He got out in 1980. His father hadn't told him that much about it, he said.

Nguyen saw no link or point of comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, except his mother's lament that the family had known nothing but war. As we approached Husaybah, the border town where the marines have established their last outpost, he pointed to a section of the town. "That's where the bad guys are," he said. "I don't think there are any good guys in there at all."


"Taking a breather"

This is no Fallujah; there's no intense fighting up here right now, just daily hit-and-run attacks and both sides saying they've got the upper hand in a war of attrition. As one drives through the endless desert, the American presence seems stranger and stranger.

What are they doing here? Trying to bring democracy, human rights and the American way to the smuggler towns on the Syrian border and the tribal belt along the Euphrates seems like a pretty futile task. Even Saddam didn't really extend full control up here, because it's the kind of territory where imperialists or central governments aren't welcome, because local power structures have it sorted their own way.

That first colonel we met seemed to have got the hang of it. "This is nothing to do with hearts and minds," he said. "Love's got nothing to do with it. It's to do with who ends up on top of the hill. Nothing's permanent here except death. Winning is a western concept, in the US they think it's like a football game, where after 60 minutes you win or you lose. It's not like that here."

This rather realistic view seemed not to have filtered down to Camp Gannon which overlooks Husaybah. A junior officer there told me how they were gaining the confidence of the locals who certainly preferred the Americans to the insurgents and would surely soon come down to their way of thinking. His idea was that once the insurgents had all been driven out, the marines would engage with the local people and then the locals wouldn't let the insurgents back in again. Hmmm.

Husaybah is a few yards from the Syrian border; the late Syrian President Hafez al Assad can see the American soldiers from the murals on which he's painted. That's if he could watch from a mural and spin in his grave at the same time. Our Lebanese companion Patrick amused himself taking pictures of the mural, and two US marines walking towards a sign saying 'Welcome to Syria'.

For the moment, the marines just shoot at people from the base and the insurgents shoot back, but in the fullness of time they'll probably sweep in with a major assault like they did in Fallujah. Which will undoubtedly clear the place of 'the enemy' for a while. Until they come back. Or go somewhere else to do the same thing.

November 1st - Al Qaim

We're waiting for the helicopter which will take us out of here - an alternative to the nine hour convoy. Al humdallilah! This has been an interesting trip, although nowhere near as intense as Fallujah.


"Tim Lambon filming in Iraq"

Spent one night in a building in a village called Sudah where the marines have established a command headquarters. 'The enemy' is clearly active but not that effectual - small arms fire, the odd rocket etc. but they rarely hit a US target except with IEDs.

As ever, I'm amazed by the contrast, because the marines hit big with huge firepower, mortars, cannon, airstrikes. Interestingly, a local APTN cameraman has been on the other side ie: on the ground with the people, so he has been taking pictures of where the airstrikes land while we've been taking pictures of those calling them in.

On two occasions, his pictures have shown serious civilian casualties. Not as many as local doctors say - the numbers are always inflated, but serious nonetheless. Yesterday, the doctors he was quoting said 40 killed and 20 wounded in an airstrike on two houses.

His pictures showed ten dead. The marines here said they had no idea if civilians had been killed. And that's probably true. How can they know who's in a house if they can't see? They get intelligence from local informers that insurgents are in a house, and then they hit it.

The informers may be telling the truth about Islamist fighters who've come over the border, or they may be holding a grudge against their neighbour who pisses them off. Who knows? Not the Americans I suspect. And they could easily have the correct information, and hit the right house, and kill the right person and still kill quite a few civilians.

Yesterday we went out with the Civil Affairs team, who take medicines, food, footballs and radios to distribute to people in the hope that people will then like them. I got chatting to a woman who was very pro-American, she told me that her cousin had been taken by Salafists (ie: hardline Islamist fighters who've come in via Syria) two days ago. She feared he'd have his throat cut. She accepted that people would be killed in American airstrikes, but said that this was unavoidable and the most important thing was to get the Salafists out.

Then I talked to the women queuing up with their children at the clinic, many almost completely covered, with only their eyes showing. This is a v. tribal area. They all wanted/needed the American sponsored clinic, but were very resentful because most of their husbands had been detained. One woman said her husband had been taken by the Americans 29 months ago, and she had only been able to visit him once. This is partly because the Americans don't encourage visiting, and also because transport is difficult as the place is under siege, and also the honour system means that it's not really acceptable for women to leave the village and go to visit a prison on an American base.

It was great to chat to women, it made me realise what I've been missing in these two years of it being too dangerous to get around as we used to do in Iraq. The first woman invited me into her house, insisted on giving me gifts and showed me the family photos.

My lack of Arabic is a nightmare, because women will always pull you into their world and if there's no-one to translate I miss everything except the feelings. Outside the house, Patrick, the Lebanese photographer, translated. I made a connection with one of the veiled women - you could see just from her eyes (which was all you could see) how spirited and intelligent she was. She laughed uproariously when I suggested that women might be MPs or hold other political positions. Not round here, she said.

Anyway, I'm glad to be getting home, because I'm fed up of going to the loo in the Unisex Comfort Trailer. And I'm bored of sleeping in the Female Berthing Trailer, even though, thankfully, I'm the only female berthing there. Most of all, I'm fed up of sand and dust. You can shower as much as you like, but you get filthy within minutes of emerging from the Female Showering Trailer.

Maybe I'll label my bathroom at home Female Bathing... no. Maybe not.

November 2nd - Back home.

Just got back to Britain. Getting out was amazingly easy - chopper from Al Qaim to Al Asad, plane from Al Asad to Kuwait and then we managed to hop on BA back to Heathrow. And, yes, the first bath at home was fantastic.

RELATED LINKS

>>More4 News: Iraq's Border War - Watch Lindsey Hilsum's report from Iraq's border with Syria.

>>Special report: Iraq - Read more reports on the crisis in Iraq.

>>Analysis features - Read more analysis and opinions from Lindsey Hilsum, Alex Thomson and Liam Halligan.