The CH-47D Chinook is a heavy cargo helicopter built like a black school bus sprouting giant rotors, and looks ponderous and clumsy.  Riding inside one, it is swift and smooth, and overwhelmingly loud.  Every frequency is maxed out - from the shreik of nails on a chalkboard to the thunder of Zeus, it’s all there at mind-bending volume.

Over the dark farmland south of Baghdad, I can just make out the silver ribbon of the Tigris from the reflected starlight.  A tiny sliver of burning red moon is sinking to the horizon past the tip of the deck gunner’s machinegun.  I am sitting near the helicopter’s open back, third on the ground when we hit.

We are on our way to an al Qaeda safehouse, in a place where ground troops of any kind haven’t been for more than a year.  The past few days I’ve been watching the jumpy, grainy footage from radio-controlled planes of 20, maybe 30 men sleeping on the roofs, in the courtyard, with roving guards at all hours.  I watched a truck bomb being assembled in the driveway, with children playing nearby.  I watched skinny cows graze in the orchard on a 50-inch plasma screen.

There is commotion among the soldiers with headsets, and suddenly the horizon is at a sickly 45-degree angle to the Chinook’s deck.  The huge bay fills with dust and whipping wind, and one wheel bounces against the ground, sending the great bird back into the air.  The helicopter spins a 180 nearly sideways and lands decisively, just meters from the front porch of Albert P. Qaeda.

Through the flat green glow of my night vision goggles, the two in front of me vanished into the dust.  I followed, making my way through the soup of burning diesel exhaust, airborne gravel and hoarse shouting in two aurally incompatible languages, photographing as best I could with an unfamiliar camera.  Gunfire crackled, I couldn’t tell from where.  The high-tech hiss of an American missile rose from the din and crashed into the truck bomb, shattering windows and revealing a dozen wide-eyed children in the white flash.

We ran.  Into the houses, the garages, through the orchards past the skinny cows to the outlying buildings lit by the burning truck.  Soldiers slapped handcuffs on the men, everyone else was led into the courtyard.  The quiet was deafening in contrast to the scene just minutes before.  Every few minutes a barnyard dog would whine, and in the distance an artillery round would fall with a muffled crunch.

The practice is known as terrain denial fires, which is more for psychological effect than destruction of actual targets.   They simply fire artillery into open fields or spots where they suspect weapons could be buried.  An earnest major explained, “TDF lets the enemy know we’re here, and that we mean business.”  As if five helicopters full of pissed-off infantrymen couldn’t accomplish that task.

Everything is clear on the ground now.  No one has been shot or exploded or burned.  Five of the men field-test positive for TNT and nitro residue on their hands, but no one can find the explosives, not even Rocky, our affable German shepherd who is trained for that sort of thing.

Rocky alerts on a little shack with some industrial machining equipment inside, often used to fabricate bomb components.  The ground commander radios for an Apache attack helicopter to swing around his way, and he marks the building with his green laser pointer.  The pilot sends his own laser back, and we hurry off.  The main house shudders as the Apache levels the shack with a rain of 30mm shells.

We’re taking the five back with us, and we head back to the field where we came in.  The Chinooks thunder in right over our heads, knocking the uninitiated to the ground.  The wind launches everything smaller than an apple into a frenzied hail.  Everyone throws their arms over their faces and braces for the night’s last great charge.  But this is the ride home, and no one is uncertain in the face of the Chinook’s maelstrom now.  Run into the wind and heat and howl, and you’ll be home before you know it.