Reporting Under The Gun in an Ambush Zone

The taxi had passed us. I watched as it sped down the highway to see if the brake lights came on. Our car was still functioning and Falah said if they came back, he would crash into them head-on. "I will kill them," he said.

"Yeah," I said. The shooting had lasted about two minutes.

The taxi became a dot, then disappeared. Highway traffic that had held back while the shooting spectacle played out started to pass. Falah tried to wave someone, anyone, down. Many gawked, but no one stopped. We began our two-wheeled journey to safety at Abu Ghraib prison, where American soldiers let us take refuge. It was 15 miles down the highway. No orange and white taxi came into view.

Hamdulillah.

Falah and I tried to figure out how our car was spotted. Did the police in Fallujah we talked to tip someone off? Was it the Fallujah Brigade, a corps of former Saddam Hussein soldiers supposed to be keeping order in the city? Or was it the two men in the white Chevrolet Caprice who kept appearing beside our car and never seemed to pass?

I recounted our story to Marine hosts at Abu Ghraib. Two were playing chess, shirtless. Geometric tattoos made them look like members of a pale-faced Polynesian tribe. They had no theories. "A lot of that goes on out there," one said. "Check."

Falah and I slept in a cellblock that usually hosts Red Cross inspectors. Saturday morning I awoke with the thought: Why am I still alive? All told, the circumstances favored death over survival. If they had shot out the front wheels, if they had come to finish us off, if the SUV had flipped, we would have been killed.

To soothe myself, I wondered how the newspaper would have handled my obituary. The usual quotes came to mind. "Beloved colleague," "veteran correspondent," "will be missed." And in my case: "Couldn't spell very well."

That night back in Baghdad, my article about conditions in Fallujah was elbowed out of The Post by news of Ronald Reagan's death. So goes the newspaper business. Maybe they could have combined the story with mine, I fantasized, and headlined it, "Reagan Dead, but Williams Still Alive."

When he saw me writing this article, Falah said only, "Be sure and get my name right."