The young man with the AK-47 at a checkpoint in the Triangle of Death ordered us out of the car the moment he realized I was a foreigner. He led us into the desert, over scrub brush and cigarette butts, toward a grizzled man in a wooden hut.

Borzou Daragahi covered Iraq and Iran for the Post-Gazette and other publications as a freelance journalist before joining the Los Angeles Times. He currently is based in Cairo and soon will move to a new assignment in Beirut (daragahi@latimes.com).

"And who is he?" the older man asked my Iraqi colleague and interpreter, Raheem.

I had repeatedly promised my bosses, my colleagues, my family and my wife, Delphine, that I wouldn't take big risks. But here I was in the early summer of 2006 in the middle of a lawless desert between Baghdad and Najaf that had swallowed up hundreds of Iraqis and not a small number of foreigners.

We were in a mostly Shiite Muslim part of the country, so I stuck to my cover story: I was an Iranian headed to Najaf, one of the thousands of Shiite pilgrims who make their way there each month to pay their respects at the shrine of Imam Ali.

The man demanded to see my passport. To my surprise and terror, he thumbed through it. Then he looked up and asked, "Where's your entry stamp?"

I had no answer. I had entered Iraq with my U.S. passport, which I wouldn't dare bring with me on the road. I froze.

Since arriving in Iraq 4¹/₂ years ago, first as a freelance reporter for the Post-Gazette and other news outlets and then as the Los Angeles Times bureau chief, I had kept up the pretense that I was playing it safe.

Now that I am out of Iraq, I can begin to be honest. For years, I had swaddled myself in half-truths: I was an Iranian heading to the shrine cities. I was an average Joe from the U.S. Midwest who liked to go canoeing in the summer. I was an Iranian journalist visiting the brave fighters of Sadr City.

Sometimes I went beyond the truth to survive. I was a Sunni Arab with a speech impediment. I was a sympathetic journalist visiting the brave Sunni patriots of west Baghdad. I was among a group of pharmacists heading down to visit a hospital caring for truck-bomb victims. Anything to get the story and get out alive.

In fact, I am an Iranian-American reporter from Chicago, a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school, where I was taught that the greatest journalists were impartial and balanced. But in Iraq, I measured success by my ability to make it past checkpoints and gunfire, to melt into the background as mysterious masked gunmen flashed by, to ease back into the office compound, story in hand.

At the checkpoint on the road to Najaf, I struggled to decide whether to admit that I was an American journalist traveling in disguise. If I did, the gunmen could kill me and everyone with me. I couldn't bear to think what Delphine would do if she didn't hear from me that night.

My time in Iraq had started so promisingly.

"Welcome!" said the peshmerga warrior. "Welcome to free Kurdistan!"

It was September 2002, months before the U.S.-led invasion. Delphine and I had just made it across the Iran-Iraq border into what was then the autonomous Kurdish enclave. We were freelance journalists then, in the springtime of our romance. We vowed to go on adventures together in Iraq, in Iran, to the gulf, to Afghanistan.

The peshmerga were irregular soldiers of an undeclared country. We were drawn to the Kurds' festive spirit, colorful weddings and boisterous candor. Their stated vision for a democratic federal Iraq was seductive in this authoritarian region of the world.

"If the Kurds, the most unadvanced part of Iraq, can have democracy, why can't all Iraq have democracy?" said Jalal Talabani, then a Kurdish leader and now the president of Iraq.

But he also issued an ominous warning.

"Liberating Iraq is easy," he said. "Ruling Iraq is difficult. Ruling Iraq requires the full cooperation of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi opposition."

As the United States invaded Iraq, Delphine and I joined convoys of peshmerga and U.S. special forces storming Khanaqin and Kirkuk and basked in the adulation of the liberated Kurds. They showered us with candy, flowers and hugs. Saddam Hussein's rule was wiped away.

But the country's unraveling began quickly. By day, looters swarmed Iraqi military bases, hauling off rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and mortar rounds. At night, explosions boomed and fires raged into the sky.

Outside the friendly, pro-American Kurdish areas, political troubles started early. We entered Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, a few hours before the Marines did. We were greeted with smiles. But a friendly man warned us to get out quickly. Among the welcoming faces, he said, were Hussein loyalists who would harm us. We sped away, returning the next day to see Marines arresting middle-aged Sunni Arab men, putting them in plastic handcuffs and seating them on the pavement.

The detainees smiled at the troops.

In retrospect, anyone could have seen what was coming next, but much like U.S. officials, we were oblivious. We listened to the complaints and warnings from ordinary Iraqis: no electricity, no security, unfair detentions. "Where is the freedom?" they asked. "Where is the democracy? Soon we will take up arms."

Life was hard living in Baghdad during the first year or two after the invasion: The generators roared all night and the heat was unbearable. The stench of raw sewage rose from the Tigris River. But we were intrigued by the new Iraq.

Sufi musicians in Fallujah crafted songs about jihad and artists turned from painting portraits of Hussein to those of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. New television stations broadcast funny soap operas chronicling the lives of Iraqis.

Delphine and I priced houses and thought gingerly about moving to Iraq to cover the reconstruction. After all, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority until it was dissolved in June 2004, was talking about a Marshall Plan for Iraq.

I asked Delphine to marry me a few months later. We seated our guests at tables named after cities where we'd worked: Tehran, Kabul, Dubai and so on. We sat at Baghdad.

Iraq's descent quickly intruded on our illusions. The violence edged closer and closer. We befriended Al Arabiya television correspondent Ali Khatib a few months before he was killed. We met with clerics in Najaf a few weeks before its shrine was bombed, killing Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim and launching the spiral of sectarian violence that would become the narrative of the coming years.

We lunched in the cafeteria of the U.N. headquarters a couple of days before it was bombed. We missed by seconds a massive roadside bombing that killed an American soldier on the highway to Fallujah. A bomb went off near my hotel room, shattering the windows and lodging shrapnel in the wall of my kitchenette.

I came to love the action and adrenaline. I got used to the gunfire and explosions. I even got used to the smell of burnt flesh after car bombs exploded. I believed I could distance myself from it, as long as I was not physically harmed.

I became attached to the Iraqis I worked with. The more danger and horrors we survived together, the closer we became. I cherished relationships with ordinary Iraqis, politicians, U.S. Embassy officials and soldiers.

As the situation in Iraq grew more dire, Delphine moved to the relative safety of Tehran. I took a full-time job with the Los Angeles Times, committing myself to an even longer stay in Baghdad. My wife and I began spending more and more time apart. (I joked that my coalition partner was abandoning me, just like Spain and others were ditching President Bush.) What had started out as a romantic adventure became a dangerous full-time job and a bizarre lifestyle.

I came up with more survival tricks. My greatest fear was being followed by gunmen or kidnappers as we left an appointment or the hotel, which everyone in Baghdad knew was teeming with Western journalists and contractors.

Sometimes, I would dress down like an Iraqi laborer and walk off the hotel compound with Nadeem, my interpreter, holding digital cameras, recorders and notebooks in a decrepit plastic bag. Our driver would pull up, with a little "taxi" plate on the roof of his sedan. We'd pretend to haggle with him for a few seconds before getting into the car.

A little facial hair, a Middle Eastern complexion and local clothes helped me blend in, as long as I didn't open my mouth. But there were more close calls than I care to remember.

Mornings I awoke to the dry thud of explosions. The metallic clang of weapons loading signaled preparations for an afternoon trip to the grocery store. After days that stretched to 19 hours, I fell asleep to the sounds of automatic gunfire.

I rarely mentioned the close calls to my wife. My goal was to prevent Iraq's troubles from flooding into my life or those of the increasingly demoralized Iraqis I worked with. But inevitably, Iraq began inundating my waking hours, even when I wasn't in Iraq.

During a drive through Chicago, I imagined the mainly Latino West Side battling the mostly African American South Side. I imagined fighters setting up mortar positions along the Dan Ryan Expressway, snipers taking shots from the top of Soldier Field, its facade crumbling from rocket fire.

In Tehran, a Dutch colleague spoke to me in English as we walked down the street and I turned on him. "Shhhh!" I demanded. Be quiet.

"Dude!" he said. "We can speak English here! We're not in Iraq."

I trembled each time the trucks rumbled past on the road to Najaf. I had seconds to make a decision. With little choice, I told the man at the checkpoint the truth: I was an American journalist traveling in disguise. He asked for my American passport. I told him I didn't bring it. "Would you bring an American passport on this road?" I asked defensively.

His assistant nodded in understanding, but the older man looked at me and shook his head, his frown hardening.

With my fear came a strange calm, a sense of resignation.

Then the man's frown melted and he smirked, shaking his head. He believed my story. If anything, he thought I was a moron for driving down this road just a few months after the bombing of the Samarra shrine. The Sunni-Shiite civil war was raging and every Iraqi who could flee the country was long gone. Here I was playing undercover agent.

I am out of Iraq now, but I keep having to remind myself that there's no countdown anymore before my next trip to Baghdad. Getting ready for the next stint "in country" was always hard. I could rarely sleep the nights before I left.

But it's getting better. I am learning again to appreciate quiet breakfasts with my wife and boisterous games of soccer with friends. But readjusting to ordinary life is not easy. I miss the action.

I still daydream about my last helicopter ride traveling north of Baghdad. I stuffed in earplugs and strapped on a flak jacket. I thrilled as the Black Hawk lifted up, swinging over the Green Zone across the homes of the brawny, good-humored British, South African and American security contractors.

We skirted the mosque of the wily Shiite cleric who venomously ripped into his enemies during Friday prayers, but politely offered visitors tea and sweets. We passed over a marketplace, where teens in plastic slippers pushed around wooden gurneys while shopkeepers worked their prayer beads. Young women stood in the courtyard of a school, perhaps recounting the woes that had befallen loved ones. Farmers worked ancient fields of barley and wheat.

Boys and girls dressed in colorful robes of pink and purple walking on a dirt road waved up to us. I imagined reaching my hand out and drawing them into my heart.

All of them.