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Humor sometimes the better part of valor

Editor's note: Mike Taibbi and John Zito recently returned from Iraq, where they reported two more installments in their series, "On the Line." Another installment is set to air this week. If you missed any of their reports or blogs so far, you can find them all here.

It began in the desert with Daisy. Taking up the two back seats of a Humvee, Mike Taibbi and I rambled back to base at Ft. Irwin, Calif. Riding in the front seats and manning the gun turret were three soldiers with the 2-69 Armored Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division. We had just wrapped up a day of shooting as they trained for their upcoming deployment to Iraq. 

If you’ve spent time in a Humvee, or any military vehicle, then you’re familiar with the “net.”  It’s the radio network units use to communicate in the field. The net crackles like a trucker's C.B. with seemingly hundreds of voices, all speaking military jargon, spewing tons of directives, orders and responses -- it's near impossible for virgin civilian ears to comprehend. But listen long enough and the chatter begins to make some sense.

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'On the Line' with the 3rd ID

It’s been repeated many times: even the best battle plans never survive the first shot fired. That maxim has never been more true than in the Iraq war. It applies to the troops fighting there, and to the journalists covering them. The art of reporting this war is always changing for NBC News as we continually adapt to new -– usually violent -- realities in Iraq. Now, as the war moves into its fifth year, we add another approach to our coverage with a series called, "On the Line."

The series began on Feb. 16, when correspondent Mike Taibbi reported from the National Training Center in Ft. Irwin, Calif., where we found the men and women of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division gearing up for a third deployment to Iraq -- a deployment pushed up three months by President Bush’s so-called "surge" plan to bring some stability to the mean streets of Baghdad. Mike introduced you to Capt. Alex "Pancho" Perez-Cruz, a tank company commander from El Paso, Texas, fiercely devoted to his men and the mission in Iraq. Alex seems to shrug off the American public’s flagging support for the war. He told us, "The way I deal with it... is we sacrifice. We're the ones doing the hard work, and from our perspective it's worth it." And he doesn’t buy the "support the troops, not the war" line. For him the two are inseparable. "The war" is what "the troops" do. It’s their job. To indict it is to give a failing grade to what Capt. Perez-Cruz does for a living; he takes it personally.

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A day at the palace

Hopes were not quite high, but confident, this morning that we'd be able to join Brian on his trip to Al Anbar. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who is in command of day-to-day operations in Iraq, invited Brian for a "battlefield tour" west of Baghdad, where Sunni insurgents have taken their strongest stand. Al Anbar province is where you find the Iraqi towns like Ramadi and Fallujah that have become household names in America because of the phenomenal violence committed there in the past five years. Getting there meant piling into precious seats available in the small fleet of helos Gen. Odierno deploys to get him around Iraq. After Brian, NBC cameraman Craig White, and sound tech Bob Lapp hopped on board, there was no room for me and Brian's producer Subrata De. Literally left in the dust of Odierno's Black Hawks, Subrata and I did what any other self-respecting journalists abandoned at Baghdad's Camp Victory would do: take a tour of one of Saddam Hussein's mega-palaces now occupied by U.S. and coalition forces.

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