For the past four years, CNN’s Mic hael Holmes has been reportin g the tragedy of Iraq. It’s a horrifying story, but one he feels compelled to tell in all its gruesome detail. Artwork by Karl Hilzinger.

Arriving in Baghdad in many ways feels like returning to a second home.
I’m not sure that’s a healthy sentiment – Baghdad has for the past four years been a place few want to call home, and most want to leave.
On this occasion, my bosses wanted us to film “behind the scenes” footage to show people how we work, and give more time to showing the realities on the ground in Iraq. I cringed a little when told the documentary would be called Month of Mayhem.
It proved to be a more than apt title.

This was my eighth visit, my first being as the war wound down in 2003.
I was driving from Kuwait and into Baghdad with the Marines of the 1st MEF.
During the seven earlier “tours” I had witnessed a steady deterioration in the level of security and services; despite my hopes, it has always been worse.
And I knew this trip would be no different.

It really becomes a matter of how bad it’s going to be. Before leaving the airport – before leaving home, for that matter – I know there will be bodies and bombs. It’s only a question of who and how many. And, yes, there are prayers that you don’t make the daily list of victims. But still I return, as do many colleagues. Well, not so many these days.

Four years into this war, there is a hard core of Western journalists willing to come back, willing to risk their safety, willing to live like we do, in order to continue telling the story of Iraq. When I first arrived in Baghdad in 2003 there were hundreds, possibly thousands of Western reporters. Today, they number a few dozen.
As it turned out, my eighth visit coincided with one of the bloodiest periods since the war began.

The road from the airport to CNN’s bureau is a familiar one, but I’m a little ashamed to admit I can’t tell you its real name. To me, and most other Westerners, it’s either called Route Irish (the military’s name for the road) or the BIAP road (Baghdad International Airport).
This time our security staff said we’d probably encounter worse than normal traffic (traffic in Baghdad is always “bad”) because of a firefight. It was more than “just” a firefight. Within 10 minutes of reaching the bureau, I was live on-air reporting on the Battle for Haifa Street, as US and Iraqi forces battled Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda elements just half a kilometre from our office.

All day, the air was rent by the sounds of small-arms fire, heavy-calibre machine-gun fire and missiles fired from the Apache helicopters that swooped low over our heads. CNN’s Arwa Damon was much closer. Embedded with a Stryker unit, she found herself in the middle of a nine-hour battle, having already been awake for 24 hours. As always, she reported with great skill and calm. So much calm that one of our cameramen later reported she took naps between calling in to report live.

Having Damon in town was a boon for me because it allowed me to escape many of the routine live shots from the bureau and embed with the military for much longer than usual on a five-week assignment.

Embedding with the military has become the safest way of reporting, not just on the war, but on Iraqi civilians. It’s about the only way we can safely meet with ordinary residents, talk to them on and off camera, and get first-hand accounts of the awful tribulations they endure.
This was a month of massive bombs at universities and market places, of more bodies dumped in the streets, hands bound and shot after being tortured in almost inconceivable ways, including with electric drills. It was a month when the so-called US “troop surge” began, when the Baghdad Security Plan got underway, when the first joint security stations were being set up.

The severity of the security situation was illustrated by an embed in Adhamiya, an area about 6km from our bureau, but considered too dangerous to drive to. Roadside bombs and ambushes had been common in the weeks before.
Instead, to reach the unit we drove a mile into the Green Zone, waited several hours to hitch a ride on a US Blackhawk helicopter to Taji, about 40km north, and waited several more hours before joining an armoured military convoy that was heading to Adhamiya. A journey that could have taken 20 minutes took about seven hours.

This area had large elements of the Mehdi militia, the armed wing of renegade cleric Muqtada al Sadr’s organisation. The commander of the US unit with which I was embedded had done what few of his comrades had done during this mismanaged campaign: built a relationship of trust with the local tribal leaders in a land where tribal loyalties rank far above those of nationalism.

One benefit of Saddam’s overthrow is that Shiites can now practise their faith.
Under Saddam Hussein, the Shiite ritual of Ashura – one of the most important commemorations on their calendar – was banned. It had been years since Western television crews had been able to record the event.

We went with a local sheik on the streets of this Shia district as Ashura was in full swing: men hitting their heads with swords, blood streaming down their faces as they honoured the Imam Hussein and shared his pain and sacrifice.
Without the sheik’s “protection”, I doubt we would have lasted five minutes without some sort of incident, ranging from being told to leave to being kidnapped or worse.

Each time I return to Iraq there seems to be a new “worry” among the troops. This time it was the increasing sniper activity and the growing threat of explosively formed projectiles (EFP). These are savage weapons: shaped charges that fire out a ball of molten copper or similar metal. Regular improvised explosive devices (IED) were described to me by one soldier as “like a shotgun blast. EFPs are like an armour-piercing bullet aimed at your head.”

The snipers are another problem, particularly as they’re getting better at what they do. I embedded with a cavalry unit that had lost a sergeant the previous day, shot in the temple as he sat in the back seat of his Humvee with the door open about 30cm. The sniper was 400 metres away. Another new tactic, particularly in crowded back streets, is for teenagers to be paid $50 by insurgents to drop grenades into the gun turrets of passing Humvees or Strykers.

While I was embedded with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment (part of the 2nd Infantry Division), I was told the story of Private First Class Ross McGinnis, a 19-year-old gunner in a Humvee. The rule when a grenade is tossed into a vehicle is to scream “grenade!” and get the hell out.
As the gunner, McGinnis was already halfway out of the vehicle. But after warning his four comrades, and noticing they were having difficulty getting out, he laid his body on top of the grenade instead of jumping clear. He was killed, his four fellow soldiers (none of whom had exited the vehicle) survived with hardly a scratch.

Whether you oppose the war or not, you have to consider what goes through the mind of a 19-year-old kid in the millisecond before he makes that decision.

And many of them are kids. Back on base, they play video games (usually war games), goof off and act their age, but when they go “outside the wire” on patrol, they change into grown men who often see things no-one should ever see. No, they’re not perfect and don’t always make the right decision, but you have to spend time in Iraq to understand what goes on. And I don’t mean “parachuting in” for a few days – I mean spending weeks on end. “Visiting” Baghdad will not provide any perspective on or context to the big picture.

I met another soldier who’d been, as he put it, “blown up” four times by IEDs, and wounded three times. It was his first day back after his latest medical leave, and he was the driver in my Humvee. Dark humour about his “bomb magnet” status flew around the vehicle. Another soldier told me about an EFP that hit a Humvee he was driving. It went through the right rear window of the vehicle, decapitated the soldier sitting there, took the legs off the gunner in the middle, took the head off the soldier in the left rear seat and continued out the window.
And this happened to an “up-armoured” Humvee.

I met Iraqis who had been forced from their normal, comfortable lives by the sectarian bloodletting and were now living in fetid, sewage-flooded “camps for internally displaced people”. It’s a fancy name for a disgusting dump now home to dozens of families.
I met a local arms dealer who said he sold so that people in his sect could “defend themselves”, although his inventory included rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and mortars. Hardly “defensive” weapons.
I drank tea with families as US troops searched their houses and questioned their men. Iraqis, like most Arabs, are hospitable people, even when soldiers are going through their bedrooms looking for contraband. I doubt very much that Americans would be as hospitable if a group of armed men in full body armour and dark sunglasses walked into their living room.

Covering the war has become increasingly difficult. When the US first arrived, I recall wandering through market places without body armour or helmets, mingling with curious locals and talking about the deprivation of the Saddam era. Today those deprivations are worse: less electricity, less clean water, less of everything, especially security.

I saw a photo taken during my time in Iraq showing a bloody body in a blown-up car. In the background, a man was holding his son’s hand as they crossed the street. The boy was about seven, my son’s age, and was holding his school bag. They paid no heed to the body in the car.
A friend showed me a photo of three bodies, hands bound, all shot in the head, dumped by the roadside. I’ve seen bodies like that while driving around the neighbourhoods. It’s all part of the scenery.

There was a car bomb not far from our bureau which blew the doors open.
A gunbattle down the road resulted in a bullet piercing the window of the room I’d been sleeping in. Welcome to Baghdad.

Covering the war became more difficult after January 27, 2004. I had been reporting on a story in a city called Hillah, south of Baghdad.
At that time we could move around without military escort in unmarked cars. Back then we could operate unilaterally, as the military calls it. In other words, without them. We could drive to towns and cities and villages in our own unmarked cars.
Embedding with the military has become the safest way of reporting, not just on the war, but on Iraqi civilians. It’s about the only way we can safely meet with ordinary residents … and get first-hand accounts of the awful tribulations they endure.

About 20km south of Baghdad our cars were attacked by gunmen, also in cars, firing armour-piercing bullets from AK47s. I’m sure they didn’t know we were media. As opposed to places like Gaza or the West Bank, we don’t identify ourselves as “TV”. We were, as our guard said later, “a bunch of white guys in SUVs”. I saw my attacker’s face that day; he was perhaps 40 metres away. A gun battle at 100km/h ensued as windows exploded and my British cameraman sitting next to me was shot in the head; a bloody wound, but fortunately superficial. He was lucky. My translator and one of our two drivers were killed.

After that, the media community hunkered down somewhat and armoured cars became the norm. We stopped driving around like… well, like we could just drive around. Journalists having “armed guards” was no longer a highbrow ethical debate among purists who’d never been shot at.
Going “out” became increasingly rare. It was something to be planned down to the last detail – details I can’t reveal because they qualify as what the military calls “Op Sec”, or operational security. If the insurgents knew how we protect ourselves, that protection would be clearly diminished.

There are many misconceptions, particularly in the US, about how the media does its job in Iraq: that we’re cloistered in the Green Zone, that we get all our information from the military or US officials, that we don’t go “out”.Most of the media in Baghdad do not live in the Green Zone. And not for reasons of bravery – the Green Zone is a mortar and rocket magnet. Not to mention the restrictions on filming in there, or the targeting of checkpoints by car bombers, or the odious security procedures required to enter and exit.

No, we live outside in the “red zone”. We have protection, for sure, but we’re not in the hotel bar drinking martinis or mingling at the officers’ club.
We do get “out”, but it’s difficult and involves extensive planning. We rely on our local staff: producers, cameramen and drivers. They are important sources of reliable information and put their lives at risk by working for us.
We do embed a lot – more than most of us would like – but we have little choice. To drive into a place such as Adhamiya without military protection would be suicide. But during the embeds we are able to speak to the locals and get a sense of how they view their chaotic lives.
It’s not perfect, but it’s often the only way to get to places and be on the streets.

Inside our bureau, it’s a sometimes bizarre life.
Our bedrooms are within 20 metres of the office, which in CNN’s case is the family room of one of our houses. If we’re not embedded or “escaping” to shoot a story on our own, it’s like being under house arrest. We hear the daily bombs (there are often so many that the vast majority go unreported by the media) and gunfire, and occasionally an errant mortar or rocket will land in our compound.But we do laugh, and occasionally have parties with colleagues from organisations such as Fox, the ABC, NBC or The Washington Post. The parties are in the daytime because the night is not a good time to be out.

Yes, we can get a beer and, no, the food is not good. (All media have their own cooks in-house… the days of a visit to a restaurant are long gone, not that many are open at night anyway). Yes, we do have airconditioning (summer temperatures can hit 55°C) but, no, it’s not comfortable.

During that month of my last visit we laughed in our bureau – you have to laugh – we had a party or two with our competitors inside our compound, we flew in helicopters, drove in Strykers and Humvees and Bradleys. And we saw incredible suffering and loss.The most frustrating thing for me, as an Australian journalist living in the US, is making people in the West understand just how bad daily life is for the Iraqis; that not all of them are insurgents and most want what we want: a home, a safe environment, the ability to go to work, send the kids to school, have electricity and clean water, and not risk being shot or blown up every time you leave the house.

Does that sound dramatic? It’s a dramatic and tragic place.

I also try to get across how many Iraqis die every month. For Americans, the fact that 3000 people died on 9/11 struck deep in their souls. A death toll of 2000 Iraqi civilians in one month is not unusual. And these aren’t anonymous Arabs – they’re people, just like you and me.
Often journalism is guilty of sanitising war. Sometimes necessarily – a lot of people don’t want to see the brutality of war at dinner time. But sometimes people need to know the truth.

When you hear of bodies found dumped in the streets, tortured and then shot, the details are rarely provided. But it’s important to know that these people – almost always men – are usually not insurgents. They’re regular people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong religious affiliation or surname.

And the torture is horrific. Eyes gouged out, broken limbs, burns from hot irons or electrical currents. A favoured method involves using electric drills to bore holes into living people.
No, it’s not pleasant, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know.

I left Iraq feeling that some positive things were happening, but most were about two or three years too late.
I’ll go back later this year because I need to, because I feel honoured to have the opportunity to cover this story up close. Because, like most of the journalists who go there, I really care.

Michael Holmes worked for the Nine Network for more than 12 years before joining CNN International in Atlanta 11 years ago as an anchor and correspondent, travelling many times to conflict zones such as Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Karl Hilzinger is a Walkley-winning artist for The Australian Financial Review.