The Green Zone is possibly the most bizarrely peaceful place anywhere, like the eye of a storm. It's peace is a long way from being safe. There are on average 25 serious incidents in Baghdad a day. This is when someone gets killed or their future radically reorganised — involving ramps, handrails and incontinence pads. It's an area the size of a small market town drawn around Saddam's nouveau Babylon of palaces and monuments. It has a heads-down hush, on the banks of the Tigris, amid date palms and a maze of concrete blast walls that hide government buildings, embassies, command centres, commissariat canteens, car parks and all that the gorgon's head of civil service and ordinance needed to maintain itself. The gauze of normality gives it a hallucinatory atmosphere of science fiction cut with the surreal banality of the suburbs. It's Desperate Housewives with guns.
There are a lot of very neatly clipped hedges. Who's tending the privet? The strangest job in the current-affairs world must be apocalypse topiary. We turn into the British military headquarters. A garden cropped like a formation of green guardsmen, with a goat. An Abyssinian goat with droopy ears and a malevolent mien that's called either Dog or Jar Jar Binks. Where would the army be without a Sunday-roast mascot? It can only be a matter of weeks before the Mirror and the Mail are vying to save it. Maud House is named after a defunct general who passed this way in the previous century. It's instant camping English. There's tea and informality and old copies of Country Life.
An air of prefect's common room. Nobody salutes or stands to attention. It's all first names, but the hierarchy is as keen as a pack of hounds. The lieutenant general who is second-in-command of this whole damn shooting match seems to spend a lot of his time half-naked, or perhaps that's half-dressed. He sports no rank badge but then he doesn't need one. Only a lieutenant general would be walking around headquarters bare to the waist. Apart from the naturism, Bims has more charm than I'd have thought possible to get into a single human being. I imagine the army has a special course for everyone over the rank of colonel that makes them devastatingly good in a room. The polite version of cone-shaped chargers. There is no defence against a blast of molten English niceness.
Maud House is all shiny megalomaniac's marble, mostly bedrooms and bathrooms. It was one of Saddam's private brothels. The army, bless it, always resolutely unaware of its own symbolism, turns a politely blind eye to the fact that the Americans live in Saddam's palaces and the Brits in his knocking shop. So who's the daddy and who's the Yankie bitch?
Saddam's nuclear bunker is the heart of the Green Zone. The first thud of shock and awe, dropped from 15,000ft, were bunker busters that crashed through the palace's domed roof and burrowed underground and exploded with maximum prejudice. They barely chipped the corner off the 2-billion-dollar safe box. It was built by the Germans and Swiss, who know a thing or two about vaults. One hundred and fifty people could live down here in reinforced concrete catacombs that are sprung on shock absorbers like a Posturepedic mattress. The air scrubbers and generators, the fixtures and fittings, are all looted and smashed. It smells of damp carpet and panic. There are bullet holes in the airlock doors and bloody hand prints picked out on the walls by our leaping flashlights. They look like cave paintings. For something so postmodern, this place is ultimately primitive. A cave, a shaman's secret hole in the ground. Of all the grandiose monuments that Saddam built for himself, this bunker is the most telling, with its flock wallpaper in the dining room, the gold-tapped bidets and the grim 1970s hotel lighting.
It is the most complete skin-crawling, silently screaming evocation of hell; the reinforced concrete transubstantiation of sleepless megalomania and hysterical fear. Upstairs, sunlight streams through the two holes in the dome imitating Hadrian's Pantheon.
Saddam had a Tourette's need to graffiti his initials over everything. He was a dreadful size queen. Everything's huge and pantomime-clumsy. It's always the telltale taste of the monomaniac to evoke size without any understanding of scale.
The bunker is guarded by Georgians from the Caucasus. The international nature of the force is crucial to the Americans, who shriek and swoon like the bride's mother who's trying to do a placement when some distant guest sends excuses, mucking up their arrangement of flags and the walls showing the clocks of coalition time.
The vast majority of the soldiers spend the vast majority of their time guarding each other. The truth about the army here in the Green Zone is that their biggest job is protecting themselves. The American soldiers spend a year opening and closing barriers. It's an excoriating cocktail of weeping boredom and gnawing fear. Checkpoints are magnets for suicide bombers, but the work is so repetitively stultifying that the Americans move like zombies, pressing their faces to the car windows with the uncomprehending glazed stare of guppies in an aquarium. We go to Three Head car park, named after the trio of oversized Saddam busts parked next to the tanks. Sweetly, the Americans give Jeremy and I an Abrams battle tank each. We race them between the monumental crossed scimitars at each end of the avenue commemorating the Iran-Iraq war next to the tomb of the unknown soldier, or "the who-gives-a-shit towel-head" as one of the grunts mutters. I ask my commander what he likes best about his tank. "Ooh," he sighs. "I suppose it's the ability to reach out and touch people."
Whatever Jeremy says, in the tank I beat him by a barrel. I always beat him. In the bright dusty sunshine we can hear the rockets and mortars land, reaching out and touching people, making someone's day. We chopper back to the airport in the mended helicopter, chugging low over the city. Baghdad is pestilent with rubbish, open streams of sewage and corruption. It's vital and virulent. From the ground someone fires at us. The old helicopter, feeling the heat, launches magnesium flares that splutter and shine like dying suns and fall to Earth in trails of white smoke.
At the camp in Basra, the night air glows an ethereal orange from the gas-burning of desert rigs. Until recently the British have had a quietly smug time compared to the Yanks in Baghdad. They've had only half an incident a day, but after we got there things went a bit Rorke's Drift.
Most of my hawkeyed reporting was reduced to watching Jeremy have his photograph taken with groups of gurning, up-thumbing crack-fighting units. It's like a military Disney World. He stands in huddles of camouflage like a big blue extra from Wallace & Gromit with a Plasticine beam and a teacup on his head.
