We drove back from Al Ristamiyah today. What a trip! The traffic through the country side was manageable, but downtown Baghdad was heavy gridlock. That didn't seem to matter much to our convoy drivers. Following the first rule of convoys in Iraq (don't stop) they proceeded to honk, yell, and generally intimidate every vehicle on the road into getting out of the way and off onto the shoulder until we passed by. When they didn't get out of the way . . . well, things happened.

At one point we came up on gridlock moving through a narrow portion of road in central Baghdad. What did we do? Why, we just hopped the concrete meridian and drove on the opposite side of the road against oncoming traffic. Four lanes of oncoming traffic *gulp*. I suppose when you see an up-armored Humvee with a six inch diameter steel brush guard on the front and a .50 caliber machine gun on top, you get out of the way. Which most people did.

However, there were a couple of incidents. I personally only saw one collision. A small, red, two door sedan tried to cross traffic in front of the lead Humvee and didn't quite make it. They t-boned him square in the passenger side door and spun him clean around onto the opposite shoulder. Evidently one of the other guys was wearing a headset hooked up into the intercom and would periodically hear someone deadpan, "Uh, hit another one."