Kraul never did do a story about a wounded soldier who’d returned to Iraq. The military was like an oversubscribed taxi service when Kraul returned. The next available opening it had for an embed was more than two weeks after he put in the request, and the military couldn’t yet give him a date for his return. Like all visiting correspondents for the L.A. Times, he was spending only three and a half weeks in Baghdad. So this story that was positive and patriotic, this story that was personal and political, this story that Donald Rumsfeld would no doubt have liked to see—Kraul never had the chance to do it. He didn’t have the time or the means.

“I’m ashamed to say it,” he says, “but all the features I reported were from the Green Zone.”

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Jennifer Senior
• Table of Contents: May 22, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!