I'm a Republican political hack of long standing. I've been the press secretary for Dan Quayle and for Newt Gingrich, and I ran the communications office of the political shop when he was Speaker. I give a lot of speeches, and I'm on TV a lot. And one night, I was giving a speech in Washington, D.C., when Karl Rove's assistant called and said that Mr. Rove needed to talk to me. So I called the White House and Rove said, "I need you to go to Baghdad." I said, "Fine." He said, "I don't mean like for a weekend. I mean for a couple of months." I said, "Fine. What do you want me to do?" My job was to find positive stores about what we were doing there and get those stories back to the States.

The way I realized I needed to be armed was, I was up in Ramadi with the Eight-second Airborne, and I hitched a ride back with a Military Intelligence convoy. And the convoy commander said, "Do you have a weapon?" I said, "No." He said, "What the f*** are you doing out here without a gun?"

So I went to the civilian chief of staff and said, "I think I need to be armed."

And he said, "Well, Rich, we're trying to get away form this Wild West business, so I think we're going to have to turn you down."

And I said to him, "I'll tell you what. Why don't we do this: Why don't you get into a convoy with me and we'll take a ride up to Tikrit, and when your nuts come back [down] out of your chest, you tell me whether you think this Jewish cowboy needs to have a gun."

I came close to firing it once. In was in a single SUV, which was very rare. Normally, we went out with at least two vehicles. You always had your pistol in your lap, locked and loaded. We were on a four-lane boulevard, and there was a street demonstration up ahead. Our driver [turned left to] cut across the median to go back the other way. And just as that happened, a sedan came up from my right and turned perpendicular in front of us, effectively blocking us. We all understood what this meant. This was a blocking maneuver, and there was likely a car behind us that was going to shoot us with AK-47s. The security guy in the front seat couldn't get at the driver of the car. But I could. If I just leaned out the window I could shoot him.

So, I simply said, "I got him. I got him." We're not there to kill people, but as long as we're likely to be killed, we might as well take some people with us. The security guy in the passenger seat turned around and was going to shoot out the back window, just lay down some fire while the driver was trying to get us out of there. And I leaned out, and I had the guy. He wasn't more than fifteen feet away. I took the safety off and was just about the kill him when he realized he had cut us off and there was a gun facing him. He put his hands up, so I didn't kill him. But he was within a half a second. He was a dead man. That's as close as I came to killing somebody. It wasn't an ambush, but I would have done it.

So, I put the safety back on, put the gun back in my lap, and off we went. In Iraq, if you thought somebody was going to kill you, your best bet was to kill him first. When I did stop to think about it I wondered what paperwork would have been involved if I had killed him. That's what I thought about.

It sounds unbelievably harsh, but readers who have been in a war zone for any length of time will understand.

© 2004 Conte-Nast Publishing