“I write for Inside Triathlon magazine, you know,” Carlson says with a laugh when these names come up. “That’s the fact.”

But Carlson says he feels no jealousy toward the contemporaries who seemed to find postgraduate success so quickly—nor, he says, is he bitter anymore about the gastrointestinal ailment that prevented him from going to Cyprus as a professional war reporter all those years ago.

“Then it seemed like a disaster,” Carlson says. “It probably was a blessing…I would have been way too affected, I would have been haunted by covering this kind of thing…[I had] covered a lot of demonstrations, but war is a completely different level of meaning and experience and toll.”

From Iron Man to Iraq

What’s more, Carlson might never have ended up reporting on embedded reporters in Iraq had he become a war correspondent all those years ago. It was at the 1993 Iron Man competition in Hawaii, which he was covering, that Carlson met Triathlete magazine founder Katovsky—a participant in as well as a reporter on the trials of strength and endurance.

The two were fast friends as well as colleagues. It took 10 years, though, before Katovsky’s news-junkie habits led him and Carlson to the idea that would become Embedded.

As soon as they heard about the U.S. embedding program, in which journalists accompanied military units as they descended on Iraq, Carlson says he and Katovsky were fascinated by what they saw as “a sea change in war coverage.” In the first months of 2003, just before the U.S. invaded, he says the embedding process became something like an obsession for the two men who had spent years on the fringes of swashbuckling journalism.

“We talked about it almost 15 hours a day,” Carlson recalls. “We were sort of crazed about it.”

A few months and a meager $6000 advance from The Lyons Press later, Carlson, armed with “a tiny 20-dollar Radio Shack mini-tape-recorder,” was alone on an April 16, 2003 flight to Qatar.

“That was a place I could get into with no visa,” he says.

He was unaffiliated with the official embedding program; the money given him and Katovsky by their publisher would cover the plane tickets and a driver into Iraq, but Carlson still had little idea of how exactly he would secure passage into the war-torn country to do his interviews. And if things didn’t pan out?

“We had to pay it back if we didn’t get a book,” he says of the $6000.

‘Up the River with Kurtz'

Carlson certainly got a book, but not before dodging a series of obstacles, some bureaucratic, some altogether more menacing.

After getting in touch with a public affairs officer from the American army, Carlson got from Qatar to Kuwait, where he says he spent a week “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.” He also had to settle the matter of getting someone to transport him over the uneasy Iraqi border.