Embedded With the 101st Airborne

**SWJED** · 12-13-2005

Associated Press writer Ryan Lenz is embedded with the 3rd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division in Iraq and will be filing periodic reports on life in that unit.

Thursday, 8 December.

It took an overwhelming five days after leaving New York to arrive here. Two nights in a Kuwait City hotel room, waiting for transportation that never came. Two nights on a stained nylon cot at the Convention Center in downtown Baghdad, waiting again.

Traveling through Iraq has proven to be a troublesome nightmare. Heliports jam with lines that form at dawn with soldiers eager for any available space on a Blackhawk. Flights get scrapped because of mission priority...

Monday, 12 December.

Going outside the wire. It's a slang expression for leaving the security of a military base in Iraq to travel on highways pocked with holes from roadside explosions.

Silence runs deep during that moment soldiers cross the barrier lined with concertina wire and guard posts. At first their silence struck me as boredom, which sometimes it surely is if nothing happens...

**SWJED** · 12-15-2005

14 Dec. - 101st Airborne Fights a Faceless Enemy.

Soldiers in the division's 3rd Brigade, the "Rakkasans," face the same enemy every day in Beiji, about 150 miles north of Baghdad. It's an enemy they don't know, that has no face, that follows no battle lines and kills indiscriminately.

The war in Iraq has changed because of the bombings, according to soldiers who have had previous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan...