There's nothing gentle about the descent into Baghdad airport. To confuse the insurgents who lie in wait with rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft missiles, the pilot of the Hercules transport plane doesn't select a glide path until he's pretty much over the runway. By which time it's more of a plummet path.

Twenty thousand feet below, four Apache gunships patrol the desert, their Hellfire missiles and chain guns ready to atomise anyone who fancies taking a pot shot at us. Meanwhile, at the airport itself, ice-white barrage balloons full of spy-in-the-sky cameras float in the dust-streaked, windless sky, monitoring the perimeter for signs of activity.

Up on the Herc's flight deck, two crew chiefs — big, hard special-forces men — stand behind the pilot scanning the skies for the telltale smoke trails left by incoming ordnance. They are fidgety and nervous. In January, an RAF Hercules was brought down by an anti-tank shell; and now we're two days into Ramadan, a good time for the Muslim fighter to die. Although on our approach the threat came from an even more dangerous quarter. "There," said one of the big guys urgently, and sure enough, bearing down on us, fast, from the west, was an American fighter plane.

To avoid the impending collision, the pilot set the flight controls to "tactical", ducked under the fighter, banked hard and, with a rush of negative G-force that lifted the crew chiefs clean off their feet and into a state of weightlessness, we started our free-fall, engine-screaming, super-fast descent into Baghdad. It's important at times like this to get the soundtrack right. Vietnam had Hendrix and the Doors. I needed something more up to date. So before setting off, I'd made a special playlist on my war-Pod. The Five Best Songs for a Combat Landing into Iraq. And so, with the Hercules hurtling towards Baghdad, in the manner of a wardrobe falling from the top of a tower block, I was listening to U2 belting out Vertigo.

Oh man, what a rush. Especially when the coalition pilot, an Italian, hauled back on the stick, sending a shudder of face-bending G through the airframe. As we weaved through the screen of helicopter gunships on our final approach, I turned to Adrian, smiling the smile of a very happy man, and couldn't believe what I saw. He was fast asleep.

And he stayed that way until we'd floated over a badly repaired pothole in the middle of the runway and, with an almighty bang, landed. The worst two war correspondents in the world had arrived in Baghdad.

Over the years we have become used to journalists being on the scene of the battle within hours of the kickoff. And I bet you've never wondered how on Earth they get there. Only the RAF flies direct from Britain to Iraq and the only planes they can use, the only ones that are fitted with missile counter-measures, are three 35-year-old Tristars. These things predate video recorders.

Nevertheless, Adrian and I were due to board one of them on a Sunday at oh-my-God o'clock. "Why," I wailed, "does it have to be so early? Why don't you forces people ever set off anywhere at tea time?" A silly question, as it turns out. They have to leave in the dark in Britain so disaffected youths from Bradford can't pass the departure time to their mates in Iraq; and they have to land in the dark as well.

It didn't matter, though, because it turned out all the Tristars were broken and the trip was in grave danger of being called off. This was horrible. When I'd first been asked to go to Iraq, my response was: "Ooh yes." Mr Bush had made it plain that the war was over and that the whole country was returning to normality. Mr Blair always makes it sound like Bourton-on-the-Water over there. But do you know what? He's lying. At present, 350 roadside bombs and 20 car bombs go off every week in Iraq. And in Baghdad alone, there are 25 attacks of one sort or another every day. So far, around 2,000 Americans have been killed in action, and that's rising at the rate of one every eight hours. Once every four hours, one of them has a limb blown off.

My insurance company reckoned I had a one-in-a-hundred chance of being killed, and charged a premium exactly twice what I'd been offered to write the story. These figures caused some concern on the home front. Adrian's girlfriend made him write a will. My wife, having discovered the insurance would only pay up if I were killed, not if I died of a heart attack, called Adrian with some very specific instructions.

"If he starts to go a bit blue, shoot him," she said. And me? I was worried about the very real possibility of being beheaded, live on the internet. I didn't think I'd be able to go with much of my dignity intact, frankly.

So as the trip was endlessly postponed, I vacillated between relief and disappointment. I wanted the thrill but I didn't want my head cut off. And then the phone rang. The trip was back on. The RAF had chartered a Monarch Airlines Airbus, which, because it had no anti-missile gubbins, would take us to Qatar.