GETTING TO KNOW Baghdad, taking those first tentative steps, the second brigade is about a week and a half ahead of our own first brigade. Mansur is in the Southwestern quadrant of Baghdad. Read the whole thing here.

For the next six months, and probably longer, 1st Lt. Ed Lauer’s platoon will essentially own a 6-square-mile zone in downtown Baghdad.

The unit’s area includes Mansur, a well-to-do district of restaurants, fine homes and bustling businesses; the Grand Mosque, Saddam’s largest and still-unfinished center of Muslim worship; and a complex of bombed out Iraqi Intelligence Service buildings now inhabited by dirt-poor squatters.

“It’s like Tijuana,” said Lauer, a San Diego native who speaks Spanish. “You have the First World right next to the Third World.”

This is the new home of the Baumholder, Germany-based soldiers.