The Cheat River, c. 1967. Photograph by John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty

I fell out of time in the summer of 2004. I fell back in about seven years later, on September 11, 2011.

The first fall was slow, more of a slide than a drop. It began as I moved around Baghdad, in the summer of 2003, with a growing sense of unease. On Memorial Day, while reporting for the Washington Post, I went on a 1st Infantry Division patrol in western Baghdad with another Post reporter, Anthony Shadid. I talked to members of the patrol, while Anthony talked to the Iraqis in the neighborhood. “Everybody likes us,” Spec. Stephen Harris, then twenty-one years old, told me. Anthony heard a different story. “We refuse the occupation,” Mohammed Abdullah, a thirty-four-year-old Iraqi, told him. “They’re walking over my heart. I feel like they’re crushing my heart.” (Anthony, who had been shot in Israel, in 2002, and was kidnapped in Libya, in 2011, died while covering the rebellion in Syria in 2012.)

The rest of 2003 brought a series of bombings in Baghdad—of the United Nations office, of foreign embassies, of the Red Cross—that clearly were designed to peel away potential allies from the United States. (The U.S. responded to these attacks with flailing and with moral errors, such as the torture of prisoners—and not just at Abu Ghraib.) In the spring of 2004, there simultaneously was a Shiite uprising on one side of Baghdad and a Sunni one west of the city, in Fallujah. Yet, the Americans seemed to think that all that was needed was a positive attitude.

In the back of my brain, an unconscious thought was growing, whispering, insisting on being heard: something is very wrong here. It hit me hard; it was a personal feeling. This wasn’t a matter of policy, this was a matter of my life: This war is going to be very different from the other conflicts you have covered, I thought, different from Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Something here has grabbed ahold of you. You have lost control of your future.

For reasons that I still don’t understand, my mental elevator-ride down accelerated on a trip home in early August, 2004. It began with a daylong flight on an Air-Force C-130 Hercules cargo plane. We flew from Baghdad, but, instead of going directly south to Kuwait, we first went north to Mosul, then sat on the hot runway for what felt like three or four hours. It was probably about a hundred and twenty degrees inside the plane. We took off dripping in sweat, froze in our wet T-shirts while in the air, and finally landed in Kuwait City late at night.

Kuwait brought an unhappy bureaucratic surprise. Because I had arrived on a U.S Air Force plane, I did not need—or have—an entry visa. But I was flying out commercially, and for that I needed an exit visa. Yet, I was informed at the airport that one could not be given to me because I was not officially in Kuwait—that is, there was no stamp in my passport. I hired a Pakistani taxi driver to help me make the rounds of government offices. The Kuwaiti officials seemed to delight in tormenting me. The cab driver, seeing my face as I emerged from the third Kuwaiti office of the day, said to me, sympathetically, “Sir, I told you these guys was sons of bitches.” He shook his head. I felt awful, panicky, as if the walls were closing in.

Looking back now, I realize that all this bothered me more than it should have. On the British Airways flight from Heathrow to Washington, the stewards, half on strike, were a bit rude, but it felt like they were poking me with sticks. When I got home, my house was in turmoil—a much-needed renovation was underway. It all seemed like a conspiracy to make my life more difficult. When my wife handed me an avocado-and-tomato sandwich for dinner, it tasted like ashes.

I left to go whitewater kayaking on the Youghiogheny and Cheat Rivers in West Virginia, a few hours west of Washington, D.C. I paddled hard for five days. On the sixth day, I was tired. On that final day, I was near the takeout—that is, the end of the river trip—when I came to the last hard rapid in the Cheat Canyon, where a three-foot-long pillar of rock juts out like a thumb from a clenched fist, angled over a small waterfall. At this Class IV rapid, I should have taken a right stroke, to edge the boat a bit to the left. I had been through this rapid a dozen or more times before and had executed that move successfully each time. Instead, this time, inexplicably, I took a left stroke, and the kayak shifted ever so slightly to the right. At the drop, my bow leaned off more toward the right, propelling my torso into the edge of the rock projection. It hit me so hard in my ribs that I felt almost lifted out of the boat, even though I was wearing a tight, heavy, rapid-proof sprayskirt. Just writing about it brings back an ache in my ribs.

I’ve never quite known why that accident happened. But I wonder now if it wasn’t completely unintentional.

I was able to paddle to the takeout but awoke the next morning barely able to get out of bed. I rolled out onto my knees, eventually rose to my feet, and drove home, where I had a deeply irrational argument with my wife. I blamed all that was happening on others. I felt that people were really pissing me off and that they just needed to listen to me more.

That was my low point—the late summer and early fall of 2004. I was in bad mental shape but did not know it. The best thing I could have done, I think, was to get some therapy. I didn’t.

But I did the second-best thing: I withdrew from reporting for a year to write a book about the Iraq war. From the start, I knew I would call it “Fiasco.” I was beginning to sense that I had undergone some serious changes. One day in the course of my research I was reading some news stories I had written in the fall of 2004, and I realized that I had no memory of writing them. This was very unusual for me—usually, I can look back at a story years later and recall conversations with sources and editors. But this sheaf of stories from November and December, 2004, were just blanks to me. That puzzled me then, and it still does now.

Still, I had a lot of energy and needed to let it out. I began writing the book in January, 2005, and finished it that December; it came in at just under five hundred pages. After typing the last words, I walked downstairs to where my wife was working on her own book and told her that I was done. She asked if I was happy with it. I said that I didn’t care if it didn’t sell a single copy. I had written what I had set out to say.

Yet, contrary to what I had hoped, or even expected, seeing “Fiasco” get published—and become a best-seller—brought no sense of resolution. I could not put Iraq away. I was shackled to the subject.