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General Fares Hatem Abdel Hamid in the rec room of the General Counter Explosive Directorate with his son and Jamal Hamit Farkan behind him. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Three days after Iraqis voted amid a barrage of bombs and Hollywood awarded Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker six Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), I’m at Baghdad’s General Counter Explosive Directorate, the center of Iraq’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal programs. It is here that Iraq’s government, with the help of American advisors, trains the EOD specialists who eventually will replace the kinds of teams featured in Bigelow’s film. In one of the classrooms, decorated with bombs of various shapes and sizes, lined up like snakes in jars of formaldehyde, thirty-six students are quietly sitting behind their desks, listening to the instructor. “You must apply yourself. You will not cut corners. If you don’t pass, you’ll not stay in the class. Study hard, you must do well. I will say this one time and one time only: Think Safety. Welcome aboard one of the hardest courses in the world: EOD.” There’s no pep rally response. The Iraqis sit in respectful silence. The only sound is the faint ticking of wristwatches.

General Fares Hatem Abdel Hamid, the commander of the Federal Police EOD program, takes me on a tour around the complex. He proudly shows me the new bomb-disposal suit propped up like a museum piece in the hallway, more a status symbol than anything the Iraqis would ever use. The suit is so large and bulky that it looks as if two of his men could fit inside. Next, we pass by the “wheelbarrows,” the remote-controlled robots on tracks, the latest in bomb-disabling technology. The EOD team seems especially fond of these. “When we gave them the robots,” a major from the US Army tells me, “the Iraqis sacrificed a lamb on the occasion and consecrated them with the blood. I can show you the gory pictures.” Robots smeared with sacrificial blood—this must be the modern parable of Iraq.

At the end of the tour I visit the recreation room, where the Iraqi soldiers relax after a day of cheating death. There is a pool table, a ping-pong table, a foosball table, some dartboards, a mini-bar. Posters of soccer clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona give the room extra color. The general’s son, a boy of about twelve, is playing a soccer videogame in the corner. He is a miniature replica of his father, dressed in child-sized army fatigues, complete with an EOD patch and a general’s three-star epaulets. “He is very good with guns,” his proud father tells me and takes out his cell phone to show me a clip of the young lad shooting a rifle. He is good with guns. Somewhere in the background another TV set is playing a music video by the popular Iraqi singer Hasan Al Rasam. “Don’t leave bombs in the streets, leave roses,” he blares over documentary scenes of carnage and bomb explosions.

“We are people of peace,” the general tells me, “but the situation has forced us to do this job.” Then he launches into a harangue about the terrible things Saddam did. To illustrate his point he takes out his cell phone again and makes me watch the graphic beheading of two men by Saddam’s police. “You see? That’s why we hate the man. He killed so many Shi’a. The US should have invaded in 1991, but instead they let Saddam go scot-free.”

“My idol is Henry Kissinger,” one of the officers, Jamal Hamit Farkan, jumps in. In his fifties, a small but spirited man, Farkan used to be a truck driver before he joined the Federal Police’s EOD team. Now his dream is to visit the US. He wants to have a car, he tells me, and drink scotch. He takes my hand in his and begins to recite the names of American cities, using my fingers as an improvised abacus: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Dallas. “I thought we’d be the fifty-first state,” he says, “and look what happened. We became the zero state.”

Then the general: “I want the Americans to stay. I want them to stay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the Iraqis cannot control their own land, but if there’s a riot, there’d be nobody to say ‘Don’t shoot at the people.’ Also, when the Americans leave, I fear that the militias will take over the Iraqi Security Forces. You see those guys with the black turbans on TV. They are the problem. I really hope the US will not leave us high and dry.”

“Aren’t we the fifty-first state?” Farkan keeps asking, again and again, still holding my hand. “Why do we need visas to the US? Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio. I’d give one of my kidneys for a visa.”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the National Magazine Awards finalists today, and we’re happy to see that we’ve been nominated in the Fiction and Photojournalism categories.

In the Fiction category, two stories are jointly nominated: “The Vanishing American,” by Leslie Parry, and “Fauntleroy’s Ghost,” by Vinnie Wilhelm. We’re up against The Antioch Review, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker. And in the Photojournalism category, the nomination is for “The Young Mothers of Port-au-Prince,” by Ruxandra Guidi, featuring photographs by Bear Guerra. Also finalists in that category are Foreign Policy, National Geographic, and New York.

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at Lincoln Center on April 22.

American soldiers in the headlights of their armored vehicles. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Under the quarter moon, in the high beams of their armored vehicles, US soldiers are gearing up for the most important day of the Iraq War. Seven years ago, this month, the United States and its “Coalition of the Willing” invaded in a bid to oust Saddam Hussein and seize his cache of weapons of mass destruction. When WMDs turned out to be a mirage, bringing democracy to Iraq became the war’s new raison d’être. Seven years after the beginning of the war, on March 7, 2010, the reality of Iraqi democracy is put to the test.

Light streaks the eastern horizon. The ghosts of date palms and eucalyptus trees come out of hiding. Somebody adjusts the straps of his Kevlar. Humvees and MRAPs are growling, impatient like hungry dogs. Then the troops gather in a circle for their mission brief and prayer. “Guys, today is the most important day you’re gonna have,” says Captain Barr, a man with the countenance of a child. Faces are serious, lost in thought. So this is it. The Big Day. If everything goes well today, we will all finally get to go home. When the convoy rolls out, the only thing missing is a marching band and a cheerleader twirling a baton.

11:00 AM

Hurry up and wait. The Army’s unofficial motto. We are waiting for the Special Representative of the United Nation’s Secretary-General for Iraq, Adrianus Petrus Wilhelmus Ad Melkert, to arrive at the Baghdad Airport on the Victory Base Complex, so we can escort him to polling stations around the city and then to a press conference at the Al Rasheed hotel in the International Zone. Engines are idling. We have all sloughed off our body armor, Kevlars carelessly scattered on the gravel lot like empty seashells. Though the March sun is still merciful, everyone is cowering in the iron shade of their vehicles. Soldiers are taking a nap, or reading, or playing around with their iPods.

The whole morning we’ve been hearing explosions out in the distance, toward central Baghdad. Boom. Then again, much closer. BOOM. Boom. BOOM. We are counting. Two, four, seven, ten, twelve. By noon I’ve counted fifteen explosions. They could be anything: mortars, rockets, IEDs, VBIEDs (Vehicle Borne IEDs), PBIEDs (Person Borne IEDs), RPGs, EFPs (Explosively Formed Penetrators). Acronyms concealing deadly shrapnel. Rumors are starting to trickle in but nobody knows much yet. Eighteen attacks. No, thirty. No, sixty. Soon, the numbers pile up and cease to matter. The blasts are like hiccups—annoying but easy to ignore. Boom. You turn the next page. BOOM. You turn up the volume of the iPod. Boredom seems a greater enemy than bombs.

I decide to walk around a bit and talk to some of the soldiers. What do you think about the elections? Boom. Do you think the Iraqi security forces will be able to take over? Boom. What do you think about the future of Iraq? BOOM.

Specialist Moser: “It’s a great day. It’s a beautiful day.”

Captain Richards: “Every day is dangerous in Iraq, but this one in particular—we’ve got lots of tension today. But it’s their country and they have to figure things out on their own. We are here just to assist them now. We are soldiers, and we go where we are told to go. It’s a job.”

Sergeant Gassler: “It’s a job.”

Private Zimerman: “It’s definitely time for us to withdraw. It’s time for us to head home and call the mission complete. I’ve been a lot around this country, and it’s much safer now.”

Sergeant Gassler: “The mission is a success so far. For me it’s a success just getting ourselves and our equipment safely back home.”

Sergeant Keen: “I don’t think the Iraqis are ready to take over. Their intelligence is not up to the task.”

Sergeant Thomas: “There’s been a lot of improvement. And that’s no talking point. I think we wasted a lot of money, no question. But the Iraqi security forces are doing much better now. It will be tough without the American forces here, but they need to be given a chance. They are doing that right now with the elections. At the same time, what are we getting out of this? A smile from the Iraqis? A smile for trillions of dollars. I’d smile for that amount of money any day.”

3:00 PM

We are still waiting and I’m getting antsy. By now, half of the world knows more about what is happening in Baghdad than I do. Ad Melkert, the UN representative, has arrived, but his personal security detail and the US commanders are trying to agree on the safest route into downtown Baghdad. There have been no explosions in the last hour or so, but our large convoy would certainly draw a lot of attention. “If he doesn’t go into Baghdad, what does that say to the Iraqis,” one soldier muses. “And if he gets killed on the way, what does that say,” another counters.

After some more deliberation, our convoy is finally on the move. I’m riding in a non-tactical vehicle (NTV), an up-armored Chevy Suburban, with five soldiers. Of course, IEDs could easily destroy a Humvee or even an MRAP, but our civilian car is more like a bark in the middle of the ocean. The smallest wave and we would be heading straight for the bottom. There are attempts at gallows humor (“If you get shot in the head,” a soldier tells me laughing, “I’ll apply a tourniquet.”), but the mood is still bleak. On the car radio, faint but audible, I can hear the Cranberries. What’s in your head, in your heeeeead, Zombie, Zombie, Zombie . . .

4:00 PM

The abandoned streets of Baghdad. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Baghdad is a ghost town. In this city of monstrous traffic jams, where driving is a form of war, the empty boulevards look alien, as if some genie has made all vehicles disappear with a snap of his fingers. It is not, however, the absence of moving cars (required by the election curfew) that makes everything nightmarishly calm. It is the complete absence of people. And, most of all, the election posters lining every street, every sidewalk. Faces everywhere—hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of faces—not one of them living and real.

We drive on, passing through the neighborhood of Al Mansur and Al Mutanabbi. Here, too, except for the Iraqi Federal Police idly sitting and smoking cigarettes by their blue-and-white armored personnel carriers, there are few signs of life. Two men digging a ditch, a boy drinking water out of a hose, construction workers mixing cement. But where has everyone else gone?

Our convoy arrives at the polling station. The Humvees and MRAPs cordon off the area, and we all step out. Move, move, move. While we are waiting for Ad Melkert to make his appearance, I spot a father and his little daughter walking hand in hand down the street. Then another family of five. Four young men with their index fingers newly purpled by ink—the sign of having cast a ballot. I approach one of the Iraqi policemen standing guard and ask him about the voting atmosphere. “A lot of people showed up to vote in the morning, but after the multiple bombings around noon, almost everyone disappeared. Some have returned to the streets, but most people are scared.” I take a few more shots with my camera. Here, in this ancient land of suffering, even the sufferers has become invisible.

The two men in the middle have inkstained index fingers, indicating that they have voted. (Dimiter Kenarov)

5:00 PM

End of the elections. Reports are coming from all over the country. People were initially scared off by the intensity of the attacks but remained defiant in the face of danger and voted in great numbers. At the press conference at Al Rasheed, Ad Melkert, says: “Overall, the organization was quite strong and definitely the best Iraq has seen in the series of elections.”

Outside of the hotel, I stop to talk to Shuan Abdul Hassan, a man in his twenties. Dressed in well-pressed pants and dinner jacket, he wears a huge smile. His index finger is inked, the color of a bruise. He tells me that his father and uncle were killed by Saddam’s regime, and he’s happy that Iraqis are finally free to choose their own leaders. What would happen to Iraq after the Americans leave, I ask him. His mood darkens. “If the American leave, this country would probably collapse. People will once again start fighting each other and terrorists might come back. They’ll say ours is a puppet government set up by the Americans. This country will go boom.”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

Friday. A day for prayer. Two days before the national elections. Still warm and sunny.

A lieutenant from the US Army offers to escort me inside the compound of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC). It is, supposedly, the most heavily-guarded building in Iraq right now, the high fortress of democracy, the central control room of the Iraqi parliamentary elections. I haven’t registered with the IHEC, so I doubt they will let me in but decide to try my luck anyway.

A man at the reception searches fruitlessly for my name in the list of accredited journalists. “Sorry,” he says. “You can’t go in.”

In the meantime, the lieutenant has gone inside to see if he can find anyone who can help me out. He comes back with a middle-aged woman in a black hijab. She introduces herself, shakes my hand, and immediately gets down to business. I don’t know what she is telling the receptionist, but her animated voice—first allegro then andante then adagio, full of coloraturas and arpeggios—seems to be working miracles on him. The stern features of his face soften, his eyebrows relax, the corners of his mouth begin to quiver, and soon he is laughing out loud. “Give me your ID,” he says, and I oblige. Before long, I’m walking towards the checkered white-and-blue entrance of the IHEC with a visitor’s badge in my hand. A cursory pat down and I am inside the citadel.

Hundreds of computers buzz everywhere. There are probably more computers and scanners here than in the rest of the country combined. Several flat-screen TVs, mounted high up on a wall, display blue Windows XP password screens. If the Iraqi elections crash, I hope Bill Gates is ready to take responsibility for the future of this country.

I walk around the building undisturbed. I go up the stairs, to the second floor, where rows upon rows of brand new filing cabinets will soon house all the paper ballots. I try one of the cabinets and it slides open. If I had a few ballots on me, I could have easily slipped them inside and nobody would have noticed. But don’t worry: if the results of the Iraqi elections are disputed, you can’t blame me.

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

Iraqi soldiers scuffle amongst themselves on the street in Baghdad. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Pickup trucks, SUVs, military trucks, Humvees, fire trucks, ambulances. Honking. Singing. It all looks like a big tailgate party. “If we were in America, there’d be shitloads of beer,” observes Dave Lee, a US Airman and now a cop with the International Zone Police in Baghdad, as we slowly drive past the commotion. It is the 4th of March, sunny, high 60s. Today all Iraqi Security Forces—army, police, and emergency personnel—are scheduled to cast ballots, a few days ahead of the official elections, when their job will be securing other people’s right to vote.

There is only one polling site in the International Zone, located in the so-called 215 Apartments, but access to that area is highly restricted, even for the IZ Police. “Normally, it shouldn’t be a problem to get in, it’s all part of the International Zone, but the IA [Iraqi Army] wouldn’t allow us that. They like to show who’s in charge now,” Matt Farr, another IZ cop, tells me.

Ever since the Security Agreement transferred official responsibilities to the Iraqi government, the IZ Police don’t have much authority. Staffed by US Army Military Police and Air Force Security Forces, they try to keep a low profile, as all other US agencies in Iraq tend to do nowadays. Their motor pool is now reduced to a few black armored SUVs and eighteen people. The occasional traffic accident is the most exciting part of most days.

Today is no different. First, two Peruvians, working as security guards for Triple Canopy, are detained by the Iraqi Army for taking pictures of the street gathering, and the IZ Police have to negotiate their release. Next, someone finds an old rusty EFP (Explosively Formed Penetrator) by the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, and the IZ Police arrive on scene to secure the area. Later, a traffic accident involving an Iraqi Army lieutenant and a KBR worker escalates into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Then a voice comes crackling over the radio. “Small-arms fire near LZ Washington! Small-arms fire near LZ Washington!” And we’re off. Today will not be like any other day. Lee and Farr are ecstatic. Lee cranks up the stereo: “The Meaning of Life” by heavy metal band Disturbed. Farr steps on the gas pedal, indifferent to the speed bumps on the road. My head knocks hard against the ceiling. In a few minutes we are at the scene, body armor and Kevlars on, their M4s on red. We are the first responders, and we have no backup. We stay in the car for a few minutes to assess the situation. Next to the hideous, half-ruined Blackhawk palace, in front of the compound for Blackwater (now Xe), a crowd of IA troops brandishes rifles and turret gunners on top of their Humvees nervously scan the area with their .50 caliber machine guns. All of a sudden, two Iraqi soldiers break out of the crowd, running and shouting, one of them reaching out to grab the other’s AK. It takes us some time to realize what is happening. Iraqi Army units are fighting each other. The tailgate party has ended in a brawl.

Our backup arrives and we cautiously step out of the car. “Keep your safety on,” Lee tells Farr. The firefight is obviously over, but tensions are still running high. One of the interpreters, codenamed Snake, goes out to the Iraqis to find out what is going on, while we advance by the T-wall. A minute later he comes back with the scoop: a car accident involving two vehicles; heated words; an exchange of fire. The counterterrorism unit vs. another army unit. This is the new Iraqi Army.

Later in the afternoon, while we are resting by the Hands of Victory, the famous crossed-sabers monument in Baghdad, another IZ cop named Sergeant Mariani says, “There was no reason for us to get out of the cars.” He is still seething, pissed that American troops could have been caught in the middle of a dispute between Iraqi soldiers. “Let them kill each other,” he says. “Why should we get involved?”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

The skyline of Baghdad from the bombed-out dome of Al Salam palace. (Dimiter Kenarov)

The sky over Baghdad is deep blue. Last night’s rain has washed the air spick-and-span. The day billows with promise—all green palms and golden mosques. Even the Aerostats, the ominous zeppelin-shaped surveillance balloons floating on the outer perimeter of the city, look somehow festive, like balloons at a party, and the bombed-out dome of Saddam’s Al Salam Palace perches atop downtown Baghdad like a birthday hat. Iraq’s big bash, the parliamentary elections, is still days away, but preparations have long been in the works. Some are pasting election posters over the blast walls; others are putting up colorful election slogans on the barbed wire fences. IHEC (Independent High Electoral Commission) is trying to make sure there will be enough paper ballots for everyone involved. And those tough guys with the guns out there—they are the election’s bouncers.

The International Zone, the seat of Iraq’s government, has six major ECPs (Entry Control Points), all of them guarded by armed-to-the-teeth men and women from half the world’s nations and races. The International Zone is like the sanctuary of the Holy Grail, and to gain unauthorized access is virtually impossible. There is the Iraqi Army, with its new Humvees and tanks and armored personnel vehicles, showing off their brass at every possible occasion. There are the courteous Kurdish Peshmergas, proud but highly disciplined soldiers, unwilling to associate with the rabble of the Iraqi Army. There are the Ugandan contractors, the most fearsome of the lot, dedicated to their job to the point of blind fanaticism: if you don’t have your papers in order, there is no way on earth you are passing by the Ugandans. And finally, somewhere deep in the shadows, there lurks the US Army, its ranks silently dwindling, troops tiptoeing backward toward home. “Shock and awe” has been downgraded to “assist and advise.”

Today I am stationed at a pedestrian checkpoint, ECP 3, near the Iraqi parliament and Al Rasheed hotel. A long stretch of sidewalk flanked by blast walls and fences, interspersed with several search booths, ECP 3 is the tunnel of truth. To enter the International Zone, the Promised Land of Iraqi bureaucracy, each pedestrian needs to pass the three great challenges: the Iraqi Army, the Peshmergas, the Ugandans. Patdowns, scanners, metal detectors. Men to the right, women to the left. It’s all about separating the sheep from the goats. To assure quality control, a few US soldiers are always present, but their power is largely symbolic. “We are not here to order them around,” says Sergeant Richard Burlingame, from the 16th Military Police Brigade, 551st Company. “We are here only to advise them on how they could do their job better.” It’s today’s most popular mantra. We are not in charge anymore so don’t ask us to solve somebody else’s problems. The Iraqi elections, in the eyes of the US military, are not so much a proof of democracy taking root in the country as a way to cut at the roots of the problem. To put it bluntly, the upcoming Iraqi elections are a way to get rid of Iraq, once and for all.

The best part of the day at ECP 3 is uneventful, tedious, an endless line of pedestrians passing. Then, suddenly, a commotion. Not a suicide bomber, but something much more mundane and at the same time more terrifying. One of the local Iraqi interpreters, code-named Mimi, comes in crying, and it takes her some time before she can tell her story to the Americans. An Iraqi soldier has threatened to kill her. “It’s not the first time,” Mimi says. “When nobody’s looking, he would turn to me and say, ‘You, American whore. I’m going to cut your throat one of these days.’ He hates me because I don’t cover my hair, because I tell my Ugandan friends the terrible stuff he says about them.” Her tears are streaming down her cheeks, down on the ground. “Please,” Mimi addresses the US troops, “Please, help me. Let them transfer me to another checkpoint.” Sergeant Gault, a no-nonsense man, tall and dignified, with a dash of white in his eyebrows, swings into action. He calls in the Iraqi soldier, then calls in his supervisor, and demands that the incident be reported immediately to the higher Iraqi command. He wants an investigation opened. The problem individual should be transferred to another unit or disciplined. His words are politely ignored. It is just that the US troops can’t demand anything anymore, even if their cause is just. Mimi stands by Gault’s side, small and vulnerable, visibly worried as the Iraqi soldiers stare her down. She knows what is in store for her after the Americans leave. One of the other interpreters, a woman in her forties, whispers in my ear: “I’m getting out of this country. I’m applying for my US visa and getting out. I’m not going to vote in the elections. This country is finished. There’s nothing left for me here.”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

In the coming days, Dimiter Kenarov will be blogging for us from Baghdad, sharing his thoughts and observations in the final run-up to the national elections and in their immediate wake. Kenarov traveled to Iraq on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project at pulitzercenter.org. —Ed.

The view from an American MRAP. (Dimiter Kenarov)

“Lock the back door.” The voice of our turret gunner is loud but calm, almost weary, like the voice of a steward on a commercial flight from New York to Paris. “Passenger weapon status is amber. Insert magazine, but do not load a round in the chamber. I repeat, do not load a round.”

It is early morning in Baghdad, cold and dark, the sun still hours and millions of miles away. I have booked a ride on the Rhino, the armored convoy that runs nightly from the Victory Base Complex (the headquarters of the United States Force–Iraq) in the western outskirts of the city to the International Zone (formerly known as the Green Zone) downtown, where I need to get my press credentials. Inside the MRAP, an ugly mine-resistant monster the size of a small bus, the civilian passengers are nervously eying each other. Hiding under expensive body armor and Kevlar helmets, we look like unborn turtles in the belly of a giant turtle.

The convoy jerks forward and soon we are moving down the notorious Baghdad Airport Road. There is a sense of safety here now, but that sense seems the result of tunnel vision: all that I can see behind my five-inch-thick ballistic glass are 12-foot-high concrete blast walls flanking the entire stretch of road. The US might as well have dug gopher networks, a new underground Baghdad.

The gunner swivels back and forth, his turret ratcheting. He is a key winding up a grandfather clock. If he goes on a bit more like this, the springs and cogs in my brain will probably snap. The man across from me has closed his eyes, his fingers tightly holding the straps of his backpack. The convoy is moving at full speed. “A moving target is harder to hit,” all the children know. Then, suddenly, we come to a stop. A minute later the voice of the gunner, his cool lost: “Back up, back up!” The whole convoy starts frantically moving backward. I can see a few cars on the left of us and two men in dishdashas and keffiyehs standing by, watching our desperate maneuvers with a sort of amused disdain. There are no shots fired, no explosions. False alarm. Slowly, with a tentative, embarrassed step, we press ahead.

This is my first time in Iraq, so I have no previous experience of the place. Perhaps there was a time, when the situation was much worse. I believe that. I know, however, that the little I am allowed to see does not look promising. The International Zone is still a mythical labyrinth of blast walls, check points, and armed guards from Uganda, Colombia, and El Salvador, hired by private contractors like Triple Canopy. The streets are strewn with trash. There are few pedestrians—mostly enthusiastic joggers from the State Department—and the mood is tense. With the national elections now just days away and US troops on the brink of withdrawal, nobody can afford another fiasco. Let the house of cards that is Iraq stand for just a few more months. We will be gone by then.

I arrive at the CPIC (Combined Press Information Center) to receive my credentials. The staff is courteous, chatty. A light at the end of the tunnel. There are a few glitches with the high-tech biometric software—for some reason it continually refuses to recognize my fingerprints—but the rest of the process—head shots from five different angles and iris scans—goes smooth. The government has me tagged, in case I turn terrorist.

Just as I am planning to go back to the Victory Complex with the Rhino, around noon, I get unexpected good news: I’ll fly back to the base with a helicopter. As an unknown freelancer, I am not sure how I have come to deserve this honor, but I don’t really care. Nothing beats the safety of air travel in Iraq. When the Black Hawk takes off with a roar, I can see the whole of the city spread out below me, the Tigris River quiet and shimmering. I am Daedalus rising over the labyrinth. Or I am Icarus. The sun over Baghdad is so beautiful.

Last fall, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced an expansion of the National Magazine Awards (known as the “Ellies”) to encompass the burgeoning world of online journalism. The nominations for the Digital Ellies were announced today and we’re excited to say we nabbed one!

Jason Motlagh’s series on the Mumbai terror attacks, “Sixty Hours of Terror,” published exclusively on this blog, was named a finalist in the “News Reporting” category, along with work from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Mother Jones, Slate, and Time.

Jason’s report was an experiment for us—to see if the long-form narrative reporting we’re fond of could work online. It turned out to be one of the most-read articles we’ve ever published and this nomination for an Ellie, the magazine world’s highest honor, is extemely gratifying. Congrats go out to Jason and all our staff for their hard work.

The full list of the categories and finalists are at ASME’s website [2]. An announcement of the finalists for the print Ellies is expected in a couple of weeks.

Sunday night’s episode of 60 Minutes featured a segment on the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s ongoing denial of the Ottoman Empire’s systematic campaign to exterminate the Armenian people. There was little new information in the 60 Minutes report, but this is an issue that deserves the widest possible airing, and I was glad to see 60 Minutes offer its attention to the subject.

One of the principle subjects of the story was Peter Balakian, who has contributed poems to VQR, and whose nonfiction work I examined closely in my essay in the Fall 2009 issue, “I Have Decided Not to Die.” Balakian led the show’s correspondent, Bob Simon, to Der Zor, a site in the Syrian desert that served as the worst killing ground of the Genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died there. Using their hands, Balakian and Simon dug into a mound of dirt, bringing up bones. The scene is almost identical to one in Balakian’s memoir Black Dog of Fate. Simon also interviews Armenian religious officials and the Turkish ambassador, who, quite predictably, denied Turkey’s role in the genocide, while prevaricating on details.

In my reading for my essay, one of the most dispiriting things I learned, at least about events in recent years, is how some US congressional representative periodically introduces a measure to acknowledge the genocide, only to have it later withdrawn after Turkish pressure. Turkey is an important US ally, particularly given its influence in the Middle East. As Simon said, a majority of our supplies to the Afghanistan and Iraq war efforts pass through Turkey, and its army is the second largest in NATO. Yet other Western countries, including many Turkish allies, have passed resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, confirming what thousands of historians and mounds of historical evidence and documentation already show. These acts of recognition have done little long-term harm to relations with Turkey.

There’s much more to say on this subject, but for now, I’ll direct you to the 60 Minutes piece, called “Battle Over History.” I also recommend highly Armenian Golgotha, the survival memoir of Peter Balakian’s great uncle, Grigoris Balakian, which was co-translated by Peter. It’s an extraordinary historical document and a harrowing act of witness-bearing, but I worry that it didn’t get the attention it deserved when it was finally published last year, despite some laudatory reviews. Read a couple of them [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and then spend some time with this essential book.

As my exceedingly generous co-blogger, Jacob Silverman, posted last week, I recently had the very good fortune to land a book deal with the Harper imprint of HarperCollins. I could write a number of blog posts about how thrilled I am to have gotten a book contract with an amazing editor at such a great house. And I could go on for weeks about how lucky I am to have such a wonderful agent. But I can’t imagine any of that would interest anyone, except maybe my grandmother. Instead, I would like to dedicate my post today to the good folks at Poets & Writers magazine.

As I discovered last week, anxiously scouring the web for information on the submission process, the internet is filled—overflowing, really—with information about the publishing industry. Unfortunately, nearly all of this information can be slotted into one or more of the following categories: unfounded and unhelpful gossip, cheap hucksterism, self-helpy schlock, bitter back-biting, false evangelism, blatant copyright infringement, and valueless aggregation. For the most part, these peddlers of inside information are hoping to capitalize on misguided sacks like myself who think that a better understanding of the publishing industry will translate into success.

As a public service, I would like to state for the record that, aside from a few valiant and selfless bloggers, the internet contains only three useful sources of information about the American publishing industry: 1) Publishers Marketplace; 2) Publishers Weekly; and 3) the good folks at Poets & Writers. Although Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Weekly pitch themselves as indispensible tools for anyone who comes in contact with the publishing industry, writers included, they are both trade journals at heart, useful for keeping tabs on the competition and keeping informed about the latest advances. As someone smarter than myself might have been able to surmise from their names, Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Weekly are best left to the editors, agents, and publishers whose jobs depend on whether Ron Burkle is allowed to buy more shares of Barnes & Noble. Which brings me to Poets & Writers.

Founded forty years ago in the offices of the New York State Council for the Arts, Poets & Writers has gone through a number of different names and iterations, but through the years it has stayed true to its mission of supporting and informing writers at all stages of their careers: from aspiring to emerging to established. Of particular use to myself these past few weeks has been their series of conversations with agents and editors (e.g., 1, 2, 3). In these wonderful and extensive interviews, Grove/Atlantic editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler asks the top names in publishing those questions a writer would want to ask, as well as many questions a writer might not even think of. In the most anxious days of waiting to hear back from editors, pacing back and forth from my kitchen to my bedroom, refreshing my e-mail constantly, and so on, these interviews were my cooling salve. I limited myself to just one a day, but for those twenty or so minutes with Jofie, I was comforted by my expanding understanding of the publishing industry. Not that any of this helped me get a book deal, but it sure did make me feel better. And to me that is worth the world. For that piece of mind, for the Grants and Awards calendar, the Speakeasy, and all the articles I don’t have access to from their website, I’m going to subscribe to Poets & Writers right now.