I could go home.

So my busman's holiday has come to an end. Curfew ended and airplanes whisked me back to the Missouri River Valley.

Although I'd been to Iraq briefly four years ago, in the intervening time it had moved from being a place, to an abstraction. I'll admit to becoming numb to the reports of yet another bombing, of yet another shrine destroyed, of so many more families forced from one place to the next.

Like most people, it had little impact on my life. There's been no draft. Gas got pricier, but let's face it, do any of us drive less than before? Taxes haven't even gone up to pay for the darned thing.

But sitting in Humvees wondering if this was the day I'd be in a vehicle that trips a roadside bomb, sweating into my body armor for hours on end, I was reminded of just how tough troops have it.

At night in my Baghdad hotel, I could hear the mortars most days. I could hear the gunfire. Talking with the brave Iraqi journalists working in the bureau about the chaos of their neighborhoods, about the tough prospects of their lives, I came to understood just what a mess Iraq has become.

At home, people inevitably ask "what was it like?" Great. Awful. Tragic. For U.S. troops? For a high school girl whose final exams got delayed, and delayed and delayed because it wasn't safe to go to school? For an Iraqi politician under pressure to do so much with so little?

In the end, they are stuck with the tough reality of a country in collapse.

In the end, I had the choice to leave. They don't.