It was a little after 7 a.m. in Baghdad.

Locked into an anxious dream one minute, I was sitting bolt-upright the next, and, I think, screaming. My bed was showered with glass shards and there were shouts and confusion outside.

I’ve been back in country since New Year’s Eve and, as with every time I resubmerge into Baghdad, there’s been a long adjustment period. I have been in and out since September 2003. Each time I return, the footprint that it’s safe to travel in feels smaller.

Most foreign journalists don’t leave Baghdad now, since insurgent checkpoints mushroom often and unpredictably. A foreigner, or any Iraqi with a foreigner, doesn’t stand much chance of making it through the ring of peril around Baghdad.

But you can get used to anything. I’ve ditched the beard I usually wear here for a mustache that our driver assures makes me “look Iraqi ... well, maybe Turkish.’’ I have also adopted a local wardrobe: dark local pants, a rather hideous plaid shirt, and a checkered headscarf. These measures make me feel like I blend in and I’ve been getting out onto the street and talking to more Iraqis.

But feelings of safety dissipate quickly in the new Iraq.

This morning’s rude awakening was a truck bomb. No surprise, I guess. But at first I thought it had hit our relatively secure compound. I quickly threw on some pants and headed out.

All of the windows in our lobby were gone, and most of the hotels on our narrow street were in similar shape. A group of Indians who have been stranded in my hotel for weeks after a contractor cancelled their work were already sweeping the glass and debris from the floor, helping the Iraqi staff.

Out on the main road I saw that the bomb had in fact hit about 200 yards away, at the half-finished building that serves as the main Australian outpost in Baghdad. All that was left of the truck was two burning tires, one still stuck to half an axle that survived the blast.

The Australian soldiers inside the building were fine. But two bystanders were killed: a homeless man, who used to drift around our compound living on handouts from foreigners and shop owners, and another Iraqi man, who was crossing the street with his wife. Someone on the scene before me said that she didn’t have a scratch on her, but she was wailing.

Two other car bombs, coordinated with this attack, echoed around Baghdad at about the same time. An hour later another went off. All told, about 26 Iraqis were killed. After watching for a few minutes, I drifted back to the hotel – there wasn’t much to do, or sense to make out of the bomb. Such attacks have become an almost daily occurrence.

The US 1st Infantry Division (ID) was in force at the scene, locking it down and keeping onlookers back. Though the US often talks about handing more and more security authority to Iraqis, US forces still bear the brunt of the work when the insurgents strike.

Before I left the scene, a hulking member of the 1st ID came running towards me, his riot shotgun held by the barrel and ready to smash my camera. Feeling that having my windows blown out gave me some right to be there, I said: “Hey man, back off.”

He looked startled, but told me I had to clear out. A few minutes later he came up to me and apologized. “Look, I didn’t know who you were. Pictures are real money makers for the terrorists.” I nodded. One piece of good news at least – maybe the mustache is working.

Before I came to Iraq for the first time last September I had the privilege of speaking at the Eisenhower National Security Conference in Washington, an annual series that is well-attended by members of the State Department, Department of Defense, and the military. I spoke on a panel with other journalists about how the war on terror has changed perceptions of the US in the Muslim world, and how new security challenges are arising in places like Indonesia, a country I lived in for 10 years. I was fortunate enough to make some friends there in the US military whose ongoing contributions to my understanding of US foreign policy have been invaluable.

In the Q&A I mentioned that I'd be heading straight to Iraq, and afterward I was approached by nearly a dozen officers, all concerned that the media in Iraq were overplaying the violence and missing the bigger story of successful reconstruction and improvement. They urged me to be fair about the positive side of the occupation. I've been consistently impressed by not only the idealism, but the erudition of US officers. Their concerns seemed valid. It's no surprise then that my first story from Iraq was a look at the rebirth of Baghdad's night life as security had improved, with a few delightful evenings spent playing backgammon and drinking tea in cafes along the banks of the Tigris.

Normal life was returning, and people felt free to criticize both the deposed Saddam Hussein and the US occupation - a heady new right.

This was in October 2003, and I was surprised by the relative safety and calm I saw on the streets of Baghdad. I think this infused my early coverage. But events since then cannot be overlooked.

Sporadic suicide attacks, carried out by Sunni jihadists, have killed over 400 people at Iraqi hotels and police stations; the insurgency has continued to gather steam and well over 1,000 Iraqis have been killed in April, which also has been the deadliest month of the war for the US; and conditions for foreigners have deteriorated sharply, with targeted assassinations and kidnappings.

Sitting with a group of friends here a few nights ago, I realized how blasé we'd become about the new conditions. None of us had eaten out in the evening for at least a month. We agreed that the two-hour drive south to Najaf had become too dangerous to attempt. The journalists among us agreed that our work increasingly relied on phone calls to Iraqis on the scene, rather than real reportage of what we could see and touch. And everyone nodded knowingly when two NGO workers said they'd be leaving the country because it has become too dangerous to conduct their reconstruction work here.

In essence, I feel we've become boiled frogs. Toss the frog into boiling water, and he jumps right out again, or at least tries. But put him in lukewarm water and slowly turns up the heat and he barely notices until he's cooked. Rather than overestimate the problems (a common journalistic temptation), I've begun to wonder if we're not understating them, notwithstanding the letters from readers who accuse our paper, and many others, of being Chicken Littles.

To be sure, in a wartime environment like Iraq's there is rarely a constant arc of progress, or descent into chaos. Violence ebbs and flows, incidents flare and then almost inexplicably, vanish. This froggy is leaving on a reporting trip outside Baghdad today - the first trip out of the city in more than a week. It feels safer again.

Or it did, until a few hours ago, when news arrived of three coordinated car-bombings in the southern city of Basra that killed more than 60. More worrying, British troops were stoned by local citizens as they moved to secure the scene. Over the past few months, it's become common for average Iraqis to turn on foreigners whenever an attack has occurred - blaming the foreign presence for the lack of security, seemingly more than they do the people carrying out the attacks. Everyone hopes those attacks will be the last, but no one believes it; while coalition spokesmen insist from the podium in Baghdad's Green Zone, an area that most coalition officials rarely leave (and never without heavily armed escorts), that things are better than they seem.

I drove by Al-Beiruti, my favorite Tigris River cafe, a few days ago in the early evening. The stars were twinkling, the air cool and clean. A perfect night for friendly gossip and the clatter of dominoes after a cold, damp, and anxious winter. It was empty. (By Dan Murphy)

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)