I felt the first bomb explode - and I knew the war had started
Memory plays tricks and the details get hazy, but that morning five years ago when I watched war break out always burns brightly in my mind. I only saw it happen because I could not sleep.
Back then, in the days leading up to Day 1, foreboding kept you awake, day after day. Things were getting tense in Baghdad, where I had been for almost a month. A dreadful expectation grew as diplomats came and went, asking Saddam Hussein to step down and take his sons with him. Washington's deadlines had expired, but there was still hope war would not happen.
In the preceding weeks, George W. Bush, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld had been insisting on the right to invade, under the authority of the UN Security Council's Resolution 1441. Mr Rumsfeld threatened 'shock and awe', not to intimidate Saddam into submission and surrender, as we now know, but to sell the war to the world's media. The Pentagon was going to put on a show and, Mr Rumsfeld told us, make sure you had a vantage point.
Mine was room 1305 in the Palestine Hotel. It was built by a French company about 15 years previously but two of its upper storeys had still to be completed. The hotel filled rapidly with journalists a week or so before the invasion, but on that morning it was deserted - few people seemed to be awake. After going down to the lobby in search of dawn coffee, the only people I saw were the Sudanese doorman, some concierges and a group of Algerian volunteers waiting for a bus to take them to join the Iraqi army. It was quiet and I caught the slow lift back upstairs just as it was getting light outside.
Shortly before 5.30am, with the sun still to rise or break through the clouds, the air-raid sirens began their mournful wailing as I got back to my room. Was this just an exercise? Then there was anti-aircraft fire, from the gun emplacements along the banks of the Tigris. From my small balcony, it looked and sounded like a fireworks display, the shells bursting in silvery flames and grey puffs high above the hotel, nowhere near high enough to threaten any aircraft.
