After a 10-day pitched battle the city was said to be crawling back to its feet and offering a glimmer of hope that a positive future for Iraq may be possible.

I went along to see.

THE SOLDIERS After a mandatory stop over at an obscure transient base in Kuwait, where the sun burns your eyeballs, the wind blows like the exhaust of an 18wheel truck and the choking sandstorms make even the soldiers happy to return to war, I am crammed onto a C-130 plane at midnight with a hundred fighters in full body armour: "In BIAP, " my instructions tell me, "get a ride to the Stryker Stables and manifest yourself for the rhino, " which turns out to be Military for get a lift at the airport to Camp Stryker and get on a list for the armoured convoy to the Green Zone.

At the airport, soldiers stream in single file on and off planes like queues for the meat grinder in the movie The Wall. I find a Filipino baggage truck driver who gives me a lift to Camp Stryker to meet the rhino armoured bus. We join the nightly lumbering truck convoy that stretches for miles into the darkness as goods are brought to Baghdad under the protection of a curfew, a fleet of humvees and helicopters.

Arriving at three am at the press centre gateway, I finally dump my ballistic vest and eat food rations with a couple of Irish-American soldiers who are watching Michael Collins and want to know if de Valera really set him up at Westminster. They are the first of an endless number of soldiers of Irish heritage I meet over the coming days. What, I wonder, would the American military have done had the Irish stayed at home all those years ago?

The next night, flying out of Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter, we see a beautiful city twinkling in the night haze after a blistering hot day. A jazz band plays softly while people swim by starlight in the warm water of Saddam's palace pool. Except for a mortar attack that afternoon, the war has not been in evidence.

But the further away from the Green Zone we fly, the less the city twinkles. Further out into the city, more and more black spots appear in neighbourhoods without the luxury of power for lighting. Or for that matter, air conditioning in the 100degrees heat that forces Iraqis, desperate for a sliver of breeze, to sleep on the roof.

Arriving at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Warhorse outside Baquba, I check into a tent, am given a cot (a two by six foot piece of canvas on a frame) and kept awake all night by artillery shelling, a screeching Air Force jet and helicopter traffic.

That night in Baquba, American soldiers engage in firefights and bomb disposal. Across town, al-Qaeda members execute a family for complying with the Iraqi army, and then blow up their house. The artillery unit at Warhorse fires illumination rounds into the sky but the killers aren't found.

By daylight, Warhorse is like something out of a movie: piles of sandbags surround truck containers that pass for housing; blast walls encircle every building, and the dusty roads are lined with tanks, humvees, and Strykers . . . the formidable vehicles that have that armour of a tank with the speed and mobility of a truck.

Sand gets into everything and within hours, skin, clothes and hair are a uniform shade of beige. Shower trailers, port-a-potties and sleeping tents are strictly segregated with signs like "Absolutely no males allowed in this tent" posted on the women's doors (oddly no equivalent is posted on the men's).

I expected a few thousand Rambos, crass and sexist, gone stir crazy in the desert after 14 months of fighting an invisible enemy, armed to the teeth, and ready to shoot anything that moved with their Bradley tanks and M-4s. They are in fact polite, respectful, often thoughtful and hilariously funny.

BATTLE FOR BAQUBA After sleeping an hour I attend the first ever meeting of local community leaders with the man assigned to help rebuild the city . . . Lieutenant Colonel Fred Johnson, an intense and focused man with boundless energy.

Along the route, buildings are reduced to rubble and rubbish is strewn alongside open sewers.

Craters from IED explosions are gouged into the roads and filled with green stagnant water and sewage. Baquba clearly has taken a hammering both from al-Qaeda and the US offensive that routed them out.

In 2006 Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, proclaimed Baquba their centre of operation and set about recruiting males plagued by 70% unemployment. In this culture, manhood is questioned when there's an inability to provide for the family, so they were happy to plant bombs for money.

But the more deep-rooted al-Qaeda got, the harsher their measures to control the city became. They rounded up non-compliant males who were later found bound and shot. They introduced a strict interpretation of Sharia law to a culture that had been largely secular. Women had to cover up, tomatoes and cucumbers couldn't be mixed together since one was male and the other female, those caught smoking had their fingers broken. Government collapsed and the food aid and fuel on which the city depended since Saddam Hussein's era stopped coming.

By March this year, a group called the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade that had fought with alQaeda against the "American invaders" broke away when they realised they didn't share a common view of Iraq's future. They fought the terrorists for eight days until they ran out of ammunition then turned to the US forces for help. Over the next few months the Americans responded with overwhelming force, culminating in a 10-day offensive that killed, captured or dispersed hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.

"Children were cutting the command wires in IEDs that were buried around their school, " says Captain Ben Richards, the US commander in the southern part of the city. He found ordinary Iraqis showing remarkable courage, even pulling explosives out of the ground themselves to help take back their city.

"Baquba was by far the deadliest place in Iraq, " says Captain Stew Brown, who describes how they were throwing smoke for concealment and running full speed for cover through constant fire.

"We encountered more direct fire in two weeks in Baquba than in 10 months in Mosul, " he says.

The enemy was organised, well trained and engaged them almost from a 360-degree angle.

"We were fighting for our lives for 15 days straight, " says Lieutenant Colin Layne about the endlessly long days and nights they spend in the field, fighting what LTC Johnson calls "an incredibly adaptive enemy". They were dealing with suicide bombers, mortar attacks and small arms fire round the clock.

"Two soldiers cracked and were sent home, " he adds. "It was a ghost town but if something was moving, it was probably going to shoot you."

THE BAT CAVE In the small hours of the morning, helicopters shoot dead five individuals digging a hole in the road. They had been trying to plant a lethal IED. Not too far away members of the 1-23 Infantry detonate a booby-trapped house where four pipe bombs were daisy chained together with a pressure plate trigger.

Bravo Company is heading off to the remote Joint Combat Operation Post (JCOP) it shares with the Iraqi Army to give them closer access to the surrounding neighbourhoods than their own base allow. Sergeants Terry Dokey and Timothy Going brief me for the trip: have cold water for heat stroke, bug spray for the mosquitoes and a hat for the bats.

"They're not vampire bats, " Going says. "They won't bite you."

"They won't flock either, " says Dokey. "But tie your hair up."

They are chuckling together as I leave.

The bat cave turns out to be an abandoned warehouse in the commercial centre of the city, which means near the market. Rubbish and goats own the streets on which Strykers roar and soldiers patrol.

A little generator powers the radio that incessantly chatters with reports of gunfire, weapon caches and booby-trapped houses. It also gives life to the six fans upstairs which make it almost possible to sleep in over 100degrees nights. The men sleep on cots, shave by puddle reflection and live on vacuum-packed rations and bottled water.

Having failed to clean my face with six babywipes, I give up and join the great, uniformed unwashed.

Captain Brown, a tall, blond all-American with impeccable manners and a sharp sense of humour is issuing instructions via radio in Military like, "JCC Sigact IED CP409 5th IA EOD ETA 15 Miles. UAV NMC due to WX."

I am asked my blood type and sent out on a night patrol with Lieutenant Layne around the pitch-dark streets of rubble and rubbish. They are still rigged with deep-buried IEDs. Elsewhere there are booby-trapped houses and snipers. The soldiers have night vision. I can't see a thing except the guy in front of me so I step exactly where he did.

They want permission to clear some trees from the owner of a large palm grove that alQaeda had been using to ambush the locals and attack an Iraqi checkpoint. They recently found a donkey cart of explosives here and detonated it. The donkey was found alive and well a few trees away.

The locals greet the soldiers with waves and smiles. The children shout "Mista" and hold up their hands for high-fives and pose for photographs in front of every camera. Some offer cold water, grapes and cigarettes.

"Welcome to our country, " says a robust woman with a jolly face in an upscale house. She now ventures to the market occasionally. Before the offensive, she was afraid to go out, afraid to look at the dead bodies al-Qaeda had strewn in the street. Another woman cries for help; al Qaeda had killed her two sons and her husband was sick in hospital. She needs help they can't give.

"I'm very happy you came to Old Baquba and killed bad guys, " says a lawyer. "If you go back to the US, Iraq will be very bad."

There are also some who are afraid to be seen talking to the Americans. Two women have been found dead for giving tips to the Iraqi Army. The interpreter comes across as one person who can't understand why the soldiers need the locals to tell them where the terrorists are hiding at all. "They watch the movies, " he says, "and think we have satellites that can see through houses to find the bad guys." The fate of the forest is kicked up to a higher pay scale and the platoon heads off to check on the nearest Iraqi Army outpost.

Its jittery captain tells Layne . . . via an interpreter . . . that 200 al-Qaeda are on their way through the groves to attack them. With three Strykers, 40 infantrymen and aerial support at the ready, Layne hopes he is right.

We wait. They never come. Eventually Layne asks the Iraqi captain if his guys want to come on patrol with us.

"They're in bed, " he says.

POP-LOCKING It's too hot to patrol in the afternoons. The American soldiers sleep, play battery-powered video games, chew tobacco, read everything they can find, eat vacuum-packed rubber omelettes and try to find something new to talk about with the same soldiers they've been looking at for 474 days.

Today, sergeants Rob Woodring and Matt Reece decide to interview the soldiers to recap the highs and lows of the tour. Their boss Sergeant Joe LeBrosse is forced to describe how under heavy fire last winter, he'd slipped off a little bridge and fallen into a 10-foot deep open sewer. He held his weapon aloft and just as someone grabbed it, he sank over his head into the cesspool.

"How long were you covered in human faeces before you could shower?" Reece asks as peals of laughter erupt from the guys in the background. "About 18 hours, " answers Lebrosse belligerently. He suffered mild hypothermia from being wet so long.

Private Saunders, who is new to the company, made the mistake of bragging about his dancing ability. His sergeant insists he demonstrate.

"I'd really rather not, Sarge, " he protests, seriously sorry he'd opened his mouth. But the sergeant is adamant and poor Saunders finds himself doing old-school hip-hop moves called pop-locking without music in the middle of the bat cave floor while the rest of the soldiers fall about laughing.

The kid was right, though. He can dance.

Back at Warhorse everyone is subdued.

Reports have just come in that four soldiers from the 1-23 Infantry, the group that had successfully disposed of the four pipe bombs a few days earlier, were killed when they stood on a pressure plate in a booby-trapped house. Their interpreter was also killed.

They were scheduled to return home in 40 days.