“I could have just run in with somebody, but then how would I get out?” he recalls.

Carlson says journalists staying in Kuwait advised him to call off the trip, citing their own near-death experiences as evidence that no driver could be trusted to protect his life in such a setting.

“You can’t go up the river with Kurtz,” he says he was told, alluding to the grim postcolonial boat-ride of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Vietnam nightmare of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

In Embedded and in person, Carlson often cites a back-of-the-envelope statistical calculation that, as a group, journalists were about ten times as likely as coalition soldiers to die during the three-week ground phase of the Iraqi war. The book concludes with a list of 16 journalists (out of 2700) known to have died in Iraq between March 22 and July 6, 2003—13 of them during the earlier three-week period, in contrast with 135 coalition soldiers (out of 250,000) killed in that initial phase.

As for Carlson’s own safety, he ultimately found a driver who managed to ferry him in and out of the country intact—indeed, Carlson says, the man Katovsky awards “an honorary NASCAR membership” in Embedded’s acknowledgements saved his life.

On the long road to Baghdad—“It reminds me of Mad Max,” he says of the ravaged city—Carlson says his driver’s car was passed by a truck with weapon-bearing men inside. When the truck returned a few minutes later with a second truck, no more friendly, Carlson says his driver’s agile stuntwork at the wheel might well be the only thing that prevented an instant death in the desert.

“There are enough characters like that that you should be going 100 miles per hour so that you’re the smallest target,” he says of the Iraqi roadways.

Between the Rebels and the Riot Helmets

Still, Carlson says he had no desire to live out his decades-old flirtation with reporting from the frontlines at last.

“In no way was I trying to be a war correspondent,” he insists. “I wanted to talk to them, but I didn’t want any risk.”

Carlson concedes that going into Iraq at all in April 2003 was “a somewhat calculated risk.” He is more adamant on a theme that runs through Embedded’s chapters: staying fair in an atmosphere as charged as Baghdad was.

Throughout the book, journalist after journalist reveals objectivity to be an extraordinarily slippery concept when dealing with the twinned subjects of Saddam Hussein’s regime and President Bush’s invasion. Times reporter Burns drew prominent media attention this fall when Embedded included his excoriation of those of his colleagues whom he saw as kowtowing to the Ba’athist government before the invasion.

“In this profession, we are not paid to be neutral,” Burns says in the book. “We are paid to be fair, and they are completely different things… As far as I am concerned, when they hire me, they hire somebody who has a conscience and who has a passion about these things.”

For Carlson’s part, he is careful to point out that he gave equal time to embeds from all parts of the political spectrum. Views from Voice of America and Al Jazeera, the words of a peace activist and the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of public affairs, appear side-by-side with what seems like every position in between in Embedded.

“We…made a pact that we had no agenda politically,” he says. “I have a lot of feeling, but I’m not an advocacy journalist.”