Part five of my special series examining political progress in Iraq is up at the Long War Journal. Check it out.

Part four of my special series examining political progress in Iraq is up at the Long War Journal. Check it out.

Part three of my special series examining political progress in Iraq is up at the Long War Journal. Check it out.

Part two of my special series examining political progress in Iraq is up at the Long War Journal. Check it out.

Part one of my special series examining political progress in Iraq is up at the Long War Journal. Check it out.

As usual, he captures the atmosphere of US military living conditions outside the wire:

We stopped there to have lunch and I gagged on my way into the kitchen.

"What is that smell?" I said. It was sour, horrendous, and so overwhelming I could taste it.

"Rat piss," Sergeant Foster said.

"Oh, God," I said, and bolted out the door back into the living room. "Seriously?"

"Seriously," he said.

"I killed twelve of them in here myself," said another MP.

The others laughed at me, but at the same time they sympathized. They saw their own selves reflected back at them. All reacted the same way to their rodent-contaminated kitchen when they were first exposed to that nastiness. "You get used to it after a while."

I did not stay for a while, so I did not get used to it. All of us had to retrieve our food from the fridge and use the microwave, but some of the MPs actually ate in that stench cloud.

That reminds me of the Marines who lived with the smell of a broken sewage pipe - previously smashed by a suicide truck bomb - in Fallujah police headquarters.

Embedding with the military in Baghdad and Fallujah has given me a deeper appreciation for the comforts of modern civilization than I would have thought possible when I was younger.

Amen. But the takeaway is this:

"So ... there's a lot more to this mission," he said. "If you go into everything with an open mind, you can take so many lessons out of this mission, not only with community policing and the mission at hand, but with human relationships in general."

Read the whole thing.