We're Not on the Pacific Coast Highway Anymore, Toto

The bodyguards form a phalanx around the new arrivals, to avoid -- in the argot of the profession -- leaving the "package" out in the open.

The second group steps blinking and squinting into the scalding sunlight of central Iraq to be met by, well, nobody.

These are Iraqis, foreign aid workers, journalists and other low-value targets -- which isn't to say they aren't worth attacking. It's just that they aren't worth guarding.

At this moment visitors become aware of, become a part of, Baghdad's caste system of the protected and the unprotected, the powerful and the powerless.

For them -- and me -- the trip into Baghdad begins on a dusty, bullet-riddled bus with a smashed windshield being propped up with a large wooden board.

Veteran passengers, I note, put their luggage against the windows to shield themselves from snipers. As I wedge my Andiamo against the glass I wonder, just how ballistic is "Ballistic Cordura" fabric?

This is the moment when all of Baghdad's unescorted, naked-in-the-wind visitors ask themselves, "What am I doing here?" I am not a war correspondent. I am The Times' automotive writer, whose previous exposure to risk amounted to driving fast in a Ferrari.

I have come to Baghdad, believe it or not, to write about the automotive war -- the Humvees and armored personnel carriers, the convoys and suicide car bombs.

It seemed like such a clever idea for a story, back in Los Angeles. The bus -- to which some refer, in all seriousness, as the "courtesy" bus -- takes me to Checkpoint One at the airport perimeter, along a two-mile route of blast walls, revetments and concrete guard towers that mark the fence line of Camp Victory, the U.S. military base on the airport property. Along the way, the bus wends through chicanes of Jersey barriers and through fields of pavement ruptured by mortar fire.