IRAQ: The aircraft banked sharply and the city below came into view, a sprawl of grey concrete sliced by two rivers. A muggy haze shrouded the landscape. It was January 2005 and this was now home, Baghdad.
The drive from the airport was a bleak introduction to blast-proof walls, razor wire, checkpoints and military convoys, with the occasional flash of normality, children playing, stalls of oranges and grapefruits, street sweepers.
Iraq was one week away from an election and the start of a tumultuous year, which I was to cover for the Guardian. The fate of the US-led occupation and the attempt to build a democratic state on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime hung in the balance.
The challenge for foreign correspondents was to gather information without getting themselves or their Iraqi staff kidnapped, maimed or killed. After settling into the Hamra hotel, a fortified compound in the middle class district of Karrada, I had an additional goal: not to go mad.
As a potential target for insurgents and criminal gangs daily life was heavily circumscribed, verging on claustrophobic. No leaving the hotel without my two interpreters and two drivers, no interviews in the street beyond 20 minutes, no visits to Arab Sunni districts where most of the fighting took place, no going out after dark.
For exercise I would go on to the roof at sunset and skip with a jump rope, ignoring helicopters overhead and mortars in the distance. One of the world's most important stories was unfolding within earshot and I could not chronicle it properly.
We would hear of government forces sweeping through Sunni neighbourhoods, arresting boys and men who subsequently turned up in a ditch bound and shot, or of rival insurgent groups clashing, foreign Islamists versus home-grown rebels, and too often we could not follow up and verify details. There was a numbing complexity to the interplay within and between the coalition forces and the Kurds, Shias and Sunnis, with all sides churning out rumour, propaganda and misinformation.
Was the insurgency fragmenting or growing stronger? What proportion of Iraqis wanted the Americans to leave, and when? Were things getting worse or better? Facts were elusive and I could only wonder at the pundits, both pro- and anti-invasion, who from thousands of miles away knew all the answers.
A good day was when a piece of the jigsaw fell into place, such as the stream of Shia voters in Najaf who, in January, rejected the secular coalition of the American favourite, Ayad Allawi, and elected an Iranian-linked religious coalition endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Or that scorching April morning when the 7th US Cavalry rode into the town of Salman Pak, declared the area cleared of insurgents and, amid much back-slapping, drank a farmer's tea. But the old man's hands shook as he served it; he knew that with nightfall the Americans would leave and the insurgents would return.
A really good day was when someone knowledgeable gave it to you straight, such as Basra's police chief, Gen Hassan al-Sade, who admitted what was long suspected: half his force had been infiltrated by Shia militias and moonlighted as political assassins.
These were no more than fragments of the story but better than nothing.
Every few months I would "embed" with the US or British military, skimming out of the capital on a helicopter to a base where a major would brief us on the schools rebuilt, the arms caches discovered, the "bad guys" caught or killed, a list of numbers which showed the coalition winning.
On patrol in Mosul and Falluja, you could half-believe it: insurgents were no longer openly in control and the Iraqi army was slowly taking over from the Americans. But then insurgents would seize towns near the Syrian border and the big picture would again blur.
Death was everywhere and it had no dignity. Mosque walls studded with the flesh of suicide bombers, morgue slabs occupied by waxy corpses, plastic bags filled with jumbled remains.
On October 19th I was kidnapped but soon released and bundled out of the country. The timing was good. Not long after, the Hamra was bombed and my room badly damaged.
For the sake of trying to understand events, however constrained the reporting, I am glad colleagues remain in Iraq. Good luck to them. I have no plans to return.