I returned to Baghdad last Monday night, six weeks after my last rotation here as a Monitor correspondent. To get here, I left Amman, probably later than I should have, with a Jordanian driver at the helm of a white GMC truck – the land-boat of choice for the runs to and from Baghdad. A delayed flight had gotten us started from Amman later than I wanted, but I comforted myself that the heavily traveled western road into Baghdad hadn’t suffered from any attacks in recent months. At least none that I had heard about.

It’s the sort of thinking a lot of us journalists engage in here. You hear someone was killed, and you begin to think of all the ways they’re not like you: They were taking greater chances or they’d made an enemy or there was something special about them that made them a high value target. In a country with so many angry people, and so many guns, it’s probably a fool’s comfort. But it’s a game that most of the people who come here seem to play.

About 10 minutes outside of Baghdad, around midnight, we and the other GMC driving with us (under the logic that there’s safety in numbers) are brought to a screeching halt by a US military roadblock: Two humvees parked in the middle of the desert highway surrounded by wary troops. The lead driver immediately jumps out of his car and begins to shout and flail his arms. I don’t speak Arabic, but I could tell the driver was frustrated. Roads are inexplicably and unpredictably shut here often, and nerves are always frayed. I’m certainly not immune.

Before I left Baghdad in February, I lost my temper when I was stopped at a US roadblock late at night inside the city. Five minutes from home, I was going to have take a 30 minute detour. I asked one of the soldiers if we could go through. He shouted menacingly at me, as he circled his flashlight in my eyes and told me to get the hell out of there. I tried one more time, said I just want to go home. He said, “now you’ve done it,” and pulled us over for a lengthy and thorough search. When I got out of the car I said something very ugly to him and was immediately ashamed. On top of being inappropriate, losing my cool like that can lead to serious consequences in a lot of the countries I work.

But I was also surprised to have myself promptly cuffed with the plastic ties that most soldiers carry tucked into their flak jackets. With suicide attacks on the rise, and troops facing an enemy that doesn’t wear uniforms and pops up without warning, it’s no surprise they’re on edge. Anyone would be. But the incident – involving Americans on both sides, with no language or cultural barriers to deal with – shows how hard it is for an army of occupation. Is the next driver going to be a suicide bomber? Or a group of gunmen? You can never know.

Incidents aren’t uncommon at roadblocks. Some Iraqi families who haven’t understood hand signals to stop their vehicles have gotten too close to soldiers and have been shot. Two journalists from the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV station were killed by soldiers at a US roadblock on Friday night. The incident led to a walk-out by most of the foreign Arab reporters at a press conference US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave during his surprise visit to Iraq on Friday.

At any rate, on Monday night the tensions are quickly diffused after the soldiers train their guns on the agitated driver but calmly ask him to settle down.

Finally, they make their way back to me – the only English speaker in either car – and a sergeant explains that there’s an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) on the road, that a mine-clearing team is being brought in, and that it will be a while. The drivers seem to trust me more, and so I help them by pointing and saying “boom.” They get the picture, and we back away. The bomb was probably radio controlled and designed for use against a passing American military convoy, but we could have been hit if the soldiers hadn’t found it first. I was glad they were there, and frankly, I worry about what conditions will be like once they’re gone.

The US-led coalition keeps emphasizing that it is training more and more Iraqis to take over security here, and is officially hoping to reduce US troop levels by half, to about 50,000, by the middle of next year. But we continue to see foreign troops, usually Americans, doing most of the unpleasant and difficult tasks. It’s hard to believe that in a year’s time local troops, making at most $150 a month, will be spending as many sleepless nights combing Iraq’s roads for trouble.

The tempo of violence, particularly suicide attacks, quickened substantially while I was gone, something that’s immediately clear upon my return. On my second day back a suicide bomb struck the small Lebanon Hotel in the center of Baghdad, and on Thursday a smaller suicide attack hit the southern city of Basra. That was followed, again, by another small hotel bombing on Friday night. And while I was gone, foreign civilians had come under attack like never before.

On Thursday I had dinner with an old pal from Indonesia who’s now working for an nongovernmental organization (NGO) doing democracy outreach work with the Coalition. A friend of his, a young American woman working on human rights and women’s rights in the Shiite town of Hilla, was murdered by a group of off-duty police officers on a road outside town last week. Her driver and translator were killed with her. My friend had the awful duty of breaking the news to the woman’s family. He was quite shaken – as were many – by the murder of a driver for the Voice of America, along with his mother and his young daughter, in Baghdad earlier this month. Three Iraqis working for a US-funded radio station in the town of Baquba were killed in a roadside attack on Thursday.

So far, western journalists have been relatively lucky in occupied Iraq. But the feeling of threat is greater than at any time while I’ve been here, including last fall. And as for the Western road between Baghdad and Amman? On Wednesday, an overpass on the highway was dynamited by insurgents. (By Dan Murphy)