IRAQ: Not all US patrols in Baghdad get shot at. And some are made up of kindly soldiers trying to bring help, as Michael Jansen discovered.
My patrol begins in a muddle. At the gate of the army camp where I am to meet my conducting officer, the guard tells me to go to the old Iraqi war college, now another US camp, 15 kilometers down the road.
At the barricade there I get a taste of just how the occupation works on the military front.
"There's a lady out here who wants the Fourth to send an escort," bellows the sergeant at the gate into his purple phone. He taps the phone against the butt of his rifle and repeats the message. "She speaks real good English and says she's a journalist waiting to go on patrol."
He puts the phone in his pocket. "You have to wait here, ma'am, till they send someone to pick you up."
A group of Iraqi painters and plasterers and a lorry load of air-conditioners are waved into the security staging area. I wait in the baking heat along with a translator, also called Michael, who has been here for two hours, and a lorry load of rapidly melting ice blocks, streaming water across the road. "Fourth" take their time.
"They don't like to leave their air-conditioners," says the sergeant, who is from Toledo in Ohio. He becomes a pal after I tell him I was born and brought up in Michigan. If I hadn't made the Midwestern connection, I might still be standing at the barricade.
After more than an hour my driver, Abu Ammar, and I are given the go-ahead to enter. He shrinks in embarrassment when a slim, blond female soldier runs her hands over his body to see if he is carrying concealed weapons. Iraqi men, like Iraqi women, object to being patted down by strange members of the opposite sex.
One of the soldiers who has come from Fourth to meet me says: "We're helicopters. We don't do patrols." His partner gets on the phone and finds out that I should be at the base where I began. During the ride back to where we started, I realise how the mix-up happened.
Capt Monica Walden, who is in charge of "embeds" at the press department, made the arrangement over an uncertain mobile-phone connection. She all too clearly heard "fourth" when she should have heard "first" and wrote "fourth" (4 Squadron of the Second Armoured Cavalry Regiment) on the instruction she gave me.
Neither the civilian nor military mobile phones of the occupation authority work efficiently. I am over an hour and a half late for my appointment.
Capt Ryan Ocampo is waiting with helmet, flak jacket and bottles of chilled water. The helmet sits heavily on my head, the snugly-fitting kevlar jacket weighs down my shoulders, the water tastes refreshing.
We get into the humvee, a wide-bodied jeep where we sit at the four corners with a flat section in the middle where a medium-calibre machinegun rests on a tripod. A second humvee moves out with us. The US military always travels in well-armed pairs or multiples.
We plunge into thick traffic on the broad road along the canal. Riding in an open humvee - even with armed soldiers in front and on the side - is an unnerving experience.
Though belted in, I have the feeling I might fall out if we go over a big bump. The vehicle offers no protection against shooters, rocket-propelled grenades or bombs dropped from overpasses.
I am in the hot seat now, with the troops. It's an uncomfortable feeling. The ordinary humvee is simply a stripped-down shell, with clashing gears, no suspension and a diesel cough. The metal frame is too hot to touch, the air is like the breath of a foundry oven.
We drive to a third base, War Eagle, located in a former Iraqi research facility which has been searched from top to bottom for missing weapons of mass destruction.
Capt Ed Williams and Sgt Joe Harris take me to Comanche troop where I am to go on the routine afternoon water patrol to the smaller of two squatter towns north of the notorious slum formerly known as Saddam City, housing two million people, mainly Shia.
Capt Williams shows me the area on a detailed aerial reconnaissance map displayed at the entrance to Comanche quarters. He points to one location where there are two distinct configurations of buildings.
"You will be accompanying tankers going to a place we call Triangle Town, with a population of 7,000, I guess. It's next to Square Town with maybe 12,000. We have trouble remembering the names so we just call them that. The people have no water and no jobs, sporadic electricity and a low level of education, but they are very supportive," he remarks.
Joe adds: "Ninety per cent of the Shias love us. We take four tankers in the morning and four in the afternoon to the two towns."
The troop's Iraqi translator, Nasser, who joins us, says: "The names of the towns are Imam al-Mahdi (which means Messiah) and Hay Tareq (Tareq's quarter)."
The humvee carries five: the driver, Sgt Harris, a scout with a gun to my left, myself and a man who stands in the centre, his torso projecting through a hole in the roof, ready to use the machinegun mounted on top.
Outside the gate a lone water tanker awaits, its driver wearing the grubbiest thobe, an ankle-length shirt, I have ever seen. "Where is the second tanker?" Joe demands. The driver shrugs.
Sweat trickles down the back of my neck. Luckily, I am lightly dressed in an Indian cotton shirt, loose leggings and sandals. The soldiers are wearing heavy camouflage uniforms under their flak jackets and high top boots. Their collars are encrusted with salt from dried sweat.
Joe turns round: "Doesn't look like the other guy is going to turn up. We'll take this one and, if another comes, we'll take him out later.
"Each driver gets $12 a day for two truck loads of water. If the water he brings looks bad, we make him drink it before we deliver. Some try to sell us canal water full of sewage."
We lead the way, with the humvee's beeping horn clearing a path through traffic, past huge lorries with wheels which come up to my shoulder, boys perched precariously on bicycles, pick-ups carrying watermelons, delivery vans, buses, and battered taxis.
Two men on a cart whip their grey horse to race us for 200 metres until we pull ahead.
The rugged route to Triangle Town is through the builders' bazaar. On both sides of the track are mounds of sand and gravel, piles of lemon-yellow bricks, bags of cement and rusting girders torn from pillaged buildings.
A cloud of fine dust heralds our arrival at Triangle Town. Barefoot children rush out of the low, mud-brick houses, shouting: "Mafish cahraba, mafish mai (No electricity, no water)." Boys in T-shirts and torn shorts, girls in long dresses and skirts. Men standing in front of a shuttered shop wave us over. "We've had no electricity for five days," one complains.
Another asks for a newspaper and is sent to the second humvee which has a pile to distribute. The stench of sewage drying in open channels hangs over the settlement. There are no streets, just wide open spaces with squat, flat-topped, semi-detached rows of houses surrounded by litter and reeking garbage.
"You should have seen this place a few weeks ago. We got them to clean it up a lot," says Joe.
We halt, and the tanker is immediately swamped by women and girls carrying empty tins, plastic buckets and aluminium basins. Most of the mature women are enveloped in black abayyas or cloaks which cover their heads and bodies. The younger women and girls wear caftans and scarves.
No one covers their faces. They push to the front of the crowd and skirmish round the tanker's fat hose spurting murky water. The soldiers impose some order. The water spills from tins as the women lift them to their heads, soaking their hair and clothing. Plastic sandals are covered with mud.
"When we first came, they used to fight over the water. Now they understand they will all get some," says Joe.
A boy with a round face and brown eyes like saucers asks in Arabic: "What is your name?"
"Umm Marya [Mother of Marya, the name of my daughter]," I reply.
He is puzzled that I have adopted the Arab way of referring to myself. "What's his name?" he demands pointing to the sergeant. "Joe," I say. He disappears for a moment and comes back with a red-headed boy, "He's my best friend, Ali. We're in the third form together."
Boys go to the small school for three hours in the morning, girls in the afternoon. A tiny girl with a huge smoke-stained teapot stands and stares at us until an elderly woman delivers a sharp slap and tells her to fill the pot with water. The child does as she is told and wobbles home spilling water with each step, crying.
Nasser, the translator, tells me: "These people were farmers from the south who settled here in the 1960s," after the revolution which overthrew the British-backed King Faisal II. He went on: "They came looking for land and found poverty."
Triangle and Square are the most desperate neighbourhoods of Baghdad.
As the tanker-driver signals the water is about to finish, a woman with a heavy bucket asks the soldiers to come closer to her house next time.
We drive back through Square Town, along the new road levelled by the US Corps of Engineers.
"We're going to put down gravel," Joe tells me. "If we can give them just a little help, these people will take care of themselves, start businesses. They're clever, have lots of initiative."