Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing on September 11, 2001. Whether we started in the car, a meeting or were still in our beds, at some point we all found ourselves in front of a television set - the images burning themselves into our synapses. But like all effective nightmares there are emotions that carry along with the images. They are independent entities in their own rights, burned along with the images of smoke and dust and falling bodies into our memories forever- the disbelief, the awe, the anger, the rage and the frustration.

Most of all the frustration. The physical human instinct to help other humans in need, protect them...and to revenge...the intellectual human need to understand, both what was happening, who or what had caused it and why.

Some would fulfill these needs by joining the military, but for most of us these frustrations would remain an unfulfilled emptiness - at best we'd end up trying to fill them up by flogging out our tensions on internet web logs and the like.

Author Steven Vincent could add another sense memory to his 9/11 collection - smell. He was only a few miles away - able to view the second airliner complete its final journey live from the roof of his own apartment building. Those moments, those images, those smells and emotions would, as for so many of us, have a profound effect on the author. But unlike for many of us, they would lead him not into a blogger's set of pajamas, but instead into an outfit consisting of a black dishdasha and keffiyeh and a journey of thousands of miles - into Iraq. Into the Red Zone.

What could drive a man to, as Vincent says, give up his job as an art reporter and critic - cast off his comforts and travel into the belly of a country barely clawing its way out of the pit of warfare (and, as we've seen to date, still in it)? Again, among the reasons was something common to many of us who watched the towers fall that day - the recognition that yes, there was evil in the world - and it had found us:

Fear is a wonderful motivator. In Vincent's case, it was one of the factors that stirred the silt in the bottom of his gut. It got him moving. Where it got him moving to was another matter, decided later with the invasion of Iraq. Again, like many of us, he understood that the hijackers were not themselves Iraqi, but in another sense, in a larger sense, Saddam's Iraq was tied to 9/11, and the invasion provided great opportunities for the future:

He was inspired by a President and, again just as with many of us, it surprised him:

But find a way to participate he did - never underestimate a writer motivated - and In the Red Zone is the fruit of his labor. The fruit of four months worth of traipsing the country - alone, with local guides, making contacts as he went - interviewing the locals, the NGO's, and the Western soldiers.

This is a view from the inside, from the ground up, as gathered by a man who shares a world-view with many of us - supporters of the War, admirers of the President (wherever we started from) - people who understand the importance of the War in Iraq and success there as part of the overall effort in the Greater Struggle who hope and pray in our own ways for the success of this effort. Although many of us have turned to alternative sources of news - supplementing mainstream media outlets with the firsthand accounts of bloggers (like Iraq the Model, Healing Iraq and many others), questions always remain as to how representative they are.

Viewed in this way, Vincent operates as our agent, dispatched from home base to go sniff-out the truth and report back to us: How do "average" Iraqis view the US and our troops? How is the reconstruction going? Do we find more optimism or pessimism and why? Are Iraqis ready for democracy? Are Muslims?

This is not a day-by-day travelogue. We do not read about the details of the author's travels - how he gets from place to place and what he sees unless, of course, the description relates directly to a point being made. This is not a chronological description of events where the author effectively packs us with him and we share the ride. Instead, what we get are the lessons Vincent has learned, with enough detail provided to make the point.

If I have one criticism of the book I would say that was it. I found myself wanting more - more detail, more descriptions and more blanks filled in. A plea from the reader to author Vincent to "take me with you!" goes unheeded. Instead, he goes out and brings us back the conclusions. He includes supporting data, yes, but I want more - a few more "tell me what it was like" descriptions, a little more of what may to an editor have seemed to have been extraneous may also have helped satisfy just a bit. Sometimes the reader can discover his own conclusions that the author never expected or intended.

But that, in the end, emerges as a nit to pick compared to the power and import of this work. Vincent goes to Iraq as an agent with ideological "street cred." He's not there to write an anti-War polemic - in fact, some of his most entertaining anecdotes are when he meets the folks referred to derisively by Iraqis as "People of the Slogans" - but it's also clear upon reading that, while he may be "our man in Baghdad," Vincent is not there to white-wash a thing. This is not a book that war supporters can turn to to read a chapter to help sooth a battered spirit at the end of a long day. Clearly that's not what Vincent views his job to be.

And the positives and negatives do begin to blend, right from the start, on that first trip into Iraq. While internationalist groups predicted all sorts of humanitarian disaster and hardship with the Afghan invasion - including Noam Chomsky's infamous prediction of millions intentionally starved to death by US forces - in the end, Afghans voted with their feet and the only humanitarian crisis was created by two million Afghans returning to their country from sanctuary abroad. So too was it with Iraq.

In an incident that finds its echoes throughout the book, Vincent finds himself sharing a car ride from near the Jordanian border and on into Baghdad. His companions are a seemingly Westernized, erudite professional couple and their two sons. A computer specialist and an artist, they're returning to Iraq from their home in Vienna to show their two young sons "the land they came from." This is exactly the type of family many of us are counting on to help serve as the basis of a reconstructed Iraq.

Along the way, there's also a lesson in what the invasion achieved - the evil it overthrew.

Ah...righteousness. Look what an evil dictator we overthrew. We feel good now, right? Hmmm...not so fast.

Vincent notices that it's Mohammed that does the talking. His wife? Quiet. That's OK, though. Her English probably isn't that good.

Maybe not.

And those selections are representative of the roller-coaster of feelings we're handed on the journey - a little taste of triumph to nourish our need to feel that America "done good," but quickly tempered by a cold, complicated reality, oblivious to our need for self-justification.

At this point I'm going to acknowledge that this is a blog post review, not the New York Times Review of Books and cut it short. I could go on and on providing meaty morsels culled from this all-too-short, but oh-so-important bit of non-fiction. My copy is filled with yellow highlighted bits. I almost can't bear not to include a description of his encounter with Canadian Folk-singer and "Person of the Slogans" extraordinaire, Bruce Cockburn (a couple of who's vinyls still adorn my shelf), but I'll leave that for you to read for yourself or find in other reviews.

In a way, while looking for the answer to the question of, "Can democracy take root in the Middle East (outside Israel), and if so, what will it 'look' like?" we might view author Steven Vincent as our tester and In the Red Zone as his soils report.

Before the War, we were told that of all the Arab states, Iraq was perhaps the ripest for change and a move toward Western democratic secularism with its tribal ways of life muted by a strong urban middle class, yet he finds much to worry us. Ancient tribal customs still hold strong sway, as do horrible corruption, almost no sense of civic responsibility, misogyny - terrible, overbearing misogyny - religiosity to a degree that nearly banishes critical thought, external interference, deadly conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism...it's more than enough to sap the will of any farmer brave enough to try to till this land. If this is the best there is, the outlook elsewhere must be grim indeed.

But try we must, for one could argue that our subsistence here and beyond relies upon this one crop.

Vincent, for all the difficulties he saw there, has not himself given up hope. We shouldn't either. But we do need to be realistic about what we're facing there, and reading In the Red Zone is an essential step in coming to grips with that reality.

Author Steven Vincent blogs at In the Red Zone.

You can purchase his book direct from the publisher here, or from Amazon here.

Don't miss Arthur Chrenkoff's review of In the Red Zone here, and his interview with the author here.

Also, check out FrontPage Magazine's interview here.