ON JANUARY 16, 2004, we boarded a bus in Amman, Jordan, bound for Baghdad. At the Iraq border, we were surprised to learn there wasn't any security—no razor wire, no armed guards. Inside a grim little blockhouse, a pair of bored-looking passport clerks moved through the harshly lit room as if underwater. They stamped our passports without looking up, and away we rolled. After 24 hours of intermittent engine failures and sightseeing opportunities that included burned-out tanks, our voyage ended around 4 p.m. at Baghdad's central bus station.

There, chaos ruled. Hundreds of minibuses were coming and going across a huge swath of pavement. As we grabbed our luggage, a female Iraqi who spoke English offered to share a cab. We told her we wanted to go to the al-Rashid, a hotel inside the Green Zone that was one of the few places we knew by name.

"That's Saddam's house," she said. "Now, Mr. Bush house!" Her head was wrapped in a flowery scarf, face showing. She looked flinty, but she was laughing at her own joke.

Our taxi let us out at one of the GZ's major checkpoints, the al-Rashid Gate. What had once been an ordinary road was now a no-man's-land, protected by a machine-gun tower, nests of looping concertina wire, and mega-sandbags called Hesco barriers. Through an opening in the loops of wire, a youngish blond woman emerged. She saw us and came over.

"Backpackers in Baghdad?" she said with a giggle. "Wow, now I've really seen it all. Where are you guys going with those big packs?"

We explained our mission. "Can we stay at the al-Rashid?" Jeff asked.

"No," the woman said, smiling at our sublime ignorance. "It's been closed since Paul Wolfowitz was rocket-attacked there last fall. C'mon, I'll take you guys to a hotel."

The woman, whose name was Marla Ruzicka, had a driver, a casually dressed Iraqi man, and we all packed into his car. Before long we were stuck in traffic on a bridge that spanned the mud-brown Tigris River, the waterway that meanders through Baghdad's center. Marla told us she'd been in the city since the U.S. invasion and was in Afghanistan before that. She was 27 and had grown up in California. She was the founder of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), whose job was keeping track of civilian casualties in war zones.

"How much money do you want to spend on a hotel?" she asked.

"Cheap," Jeff replied.

Marla led us to an affordable place called the al-Rabei. After settling in, we cracked open a bottle of whiskey. That night, from our room's balcony, Baghdad looked like a sparsely populated desert, thanks to the electrical grid being down. Two Black Hawk helicopters circled in the dark sky, reminding us that this was indeed a war zone.

"Mission accomplished, amigo," I said to Jeff. "From a Brooklyn roof to a Baghdad balcony."

"Cheers," Jeff said. We passed out soon after that.