Dateline: Baghdad: husband-and-wife correspondents for The Times in Iraq fear for each other's safety as roadside bombs explode and young soldiers die.

• Author: Cave, Damien
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

My wife, Diana, saw the explosion from a Humvee parked a few hundred yards away. Dirt rose over the palm trees, a deep thud shook the ground, and Diana told herself I was nowhere near it.

"I'm sure it was just a mortar," a soldier in the front seat said. She hoped he was right; mortars are notoriously inaccurate. But seconds after they climbed out of their vehicle for a 10-mile trek through fields and canals south of Baghdad, the radio crackled, "One K.I.A. [killed in action], three wounded."

I was with the unit that had been hit, 20 yards or so from the blast. When the cloud of dust cleared, we could see that Sgt. Justin Wisniewski, a brash and funny 22-year-old from Michigan, had stepped on a land mine. From behind my dirtied goggles, I could see him lying dead near three bloodied soldiers and a large hole where the bomb had been buried.

A MINEFIELD TREK

A medic and a photographer ran toward them, and I followed, scribbling notes and trying to stay out of the way.

Several soldiers swore and said "I love you" to the wounded. The intensity of it all obscured the risk of another attack. Only after the medevac helicopters began to circle did we realize that the whole field could be mined.

A soldier screamed out a warning. And as we began to walk slowly in each other's footsteps, leaving a safe distance between us, I started to think about Diana. I needed to contact her, to keep her out of the fields. Safely on the road, I grabbed a tall soldier with a radio and asked for a favor.

"There's one of our reporters with another squad, and I need to get her out," I told him.

Sergeant Wisniewski's unit was heading back to the base, and another squad was preparing to take its place. Humvees and soldiers swirled around us.

"Listen," I said. "I'm sorry to bother you with this. It's just that the reporter isn't just a colleague. She's also my wife."

His eyes widened, and he said he'd help. I felt awkward. After all, Diana and I had willingly come to Iraq for The New York Times--I'm a reporter, she's a videographer--and we had agreed to keep our relationship out of our work, especially around soldiers who already had enough to worry about. But I couldn't help it.

Not that it did any good.

"Sorry," the soldier said after checking. "They already started walking."

There are a lot of things Diana and I didn't know when we came to Iraq early last year, including that it's harder to see your spouse at risk than yourself.

Diana and I went to Iraq unsure of...