"The Freedom" provides a fearless and unsanitized look at how the war in Iraq is unfolding. Readers enter Baghdad as most journalists do--in a convoy of GMC Suburbans racing 95 miles an hour in tight, side-by-side formation.

Last year, the most superbly equipped fighting force on the planet was led into the only type of war for which its experts deemed it unprepared: a highly politicized urban counterinsurgency. As the casualties mount, American troops discover there is no plan B, only an ad hoc set of tactics cobbled together and called a strategy. The Freedom provides a fearless and unsanitized look at how the war is unfolding. We enter Baghdad as most journalists do--in a convoy of GMC Suburbans racing 95 miles an hour in tight, side-by-side formation. Once in the city, we encounter a relative of Saddam's who's scraping by while his father feeds money to the resistance; a former Fedayeen fighter who loves Limp Bizkit and Michael Bolton; the underage prostitutes who service U.S. soldiers and are hunted by religious vigilantes; the freshly minted MBAs who run the Coalition Provisional Authority's projects on privatization; the somnambulant American press corps and its fierce counterparts from al Jazeera and al Arabia. Finally, we are embedded with U.S. troops, the unworldly, working-class kids left holding the bag, forced to die for a war many of them don't support.