Kuwait City, Apr 04: You're caked in sand, body and laptop. You sleep in a ratty sleeping bag under the cold desert sky and check for scorpions in your boots before putting them on in the morning. You hang with kids hoisting M-16s, playing heavy metal music and driving trucks baptised "redneck rampage." You hear the terror down the road but can't see past your own brigade, much less to Baghdad. You're a war correspondent, slimed, grimed and above all -- embedded. More than 500 journalists have been "embedded," or integrated, into US combats units in Iraq, eating, sleeping and traveling with the troops on a scale unprecedented in the annals of battlefield coverage. The experiment has produced compelling front-line reports and breathless live images of hi-tech havoc. But if the press is steeped in the consequences of war, how much truth comes with it is an open question.

"You're only seeing a slice of the battlefield," said FP correspondent Lachlan Carmichael, one of the first reporters to move into Baghdad airport today with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division.

"You get access to the commanders pretty easily," said Carmichael, who covered the first Gulf war in 1991. But he added: "you're somewhat dependent on them, what you see, what they'll let you see."

Luke Hunt, an Australian who left the Cambodian jungles for desert duty with AFP in Iraq, found the low-level "grunts" of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force open and honest with him.

Bureau Report