BAGHDAD, Iraq

Some people have their favorite "desert-island discs." Reporters in Baghdad have music to listen to bombs by.

Music is a major diversion for the 300-odd foreign reporters covering the war in Iraq from the capital city. We play it on mini-speakers, disc-players and 20 gigabyte Apple iPods bought during layovers at duty free in Heathrow or in Dubai's glistening shopping malls. We play it while we write and file pictures. We also play it at deadline, as we decide whether to throw ourselves or our insubordinate laptops and satellite phones off our hotel balconies.

But most of all, we play it as shock waves from nearby explosions shake our 17-story hotel to its foundations and we are face-to-face with the question of whether those "smart" bombs and missiles are going to suffer a momentary lapse of intelligence?

Before I regale you with a list of what music Baghdad's reporters are listening to, a few caveats are in order. (You, reader, are welcome to skip this part. It's really for my publisher and editors, who might suspect that their employees in Baghdad lobbied Pentagon war-planners so that we could live on expense accounts longer.)

We're not listening to music over lavish meals of haute cuisine. Most of us eat out of cans or cook envelopes of flavored sodium, i.e. soup, on hot plates in our rooms - that is, when there's electricity.

We're not listening to music in lavishly decorated hotel suites. The Palestine Hotel is - to put it generously - a no-star hotel. Its decor, service and maintenance represent the cultural fruition of Soviet-Iraqi ties in the 1980s.

Television? Before U.S. warplanes knocked it off the air for good, the Iraqi state-run broadcast gave us endless choruses of "I love you, Saddam" on the only station available.

Some turn to verse. Sitting on the bedstand of Tim Lambon, a producer for London's Channel Four, is a well-thumbed copy of a collection of short poems by W.H. Auden, the great British poet and our choice for bard of the war on terror.

Why do many reporters listen to music so obsessively? One answer is that reporters, photographers and television cameramen - "hacks," "snappers" and "shooters," respectively - are obsessive about everything. They must be, or deadlines are missed, equipment breaks down and the magical quote or picture slips into the ether, never to be recorded.

For some, music is a talisman, and the more the bullets and bombs fly, the more we cling to our songs as though they possess magic powers that will somehow pull us through. With anarchy always threatening, no reporter begrudges another their good-luck charm. As one put it: "Forget the rabbit's foot; you can walk around with the whole damn rabbit as far as I'm concerned. Whatever gets you through."

For others, music is what helps them deal with fear. ("Playing Metallica, Guns n' Roses or any rock music very loud when you're driving into a bad situation helps calm your nerves and helps you concentrate," one said. "You can't work when you're scared.") Music also softens the edge of the emptiness and exhaustion that invariably follows the suffering, destruction and bloodshed first-hand. ("The blues, along with the Chieftains and any traditional Irish music, helps me come off the high slowly. It's emotionally painful to careen from one extreme to another.")

Following, then, are results of my random survey:

Monica Garcia, correspondent, El Mundo newspaper, Madrid, Spain: Mozart's Requiem and Handel's Dixit Dominus ("Perfect music for every war," she said. "It's like therapy.")

Giovanna Botteri, correspondent, RAI 2 and 3, Rome, Italy: Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. ("I love this CD," she said. "It's the story of 9/11, the story of Afghanistan and now the story of Iraq. It's about the America I love: democracy, opposition, who can speak, who can think.")

Sean Smith, photographer, The Guardian, London: "Walk on By" by Dionne Warwick, "Say a Little Prayer," by Burt Bachrach and Hal David, and Johnny Cash's Live at Folsom Prison. ("I have this completely absurd idea that everyone would stand together here, a bit like the Blues Brothers, and sing these songs plus 'What the World Needs Now (Is Love, Sweet Love),'" he said. "I think there's too much testosterone here.")

Bob Graham, correspondent, Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, London: Mozart's clarinet quartets, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and anything by violinist Nigel Kennedy. ("Gentle, anything gentle.")

Scott Peterson, correspondent and photographer, Christian Science Monitor, Boston: Springsteen's "Empty Sky," "Worlds Apart" and "Further On (Up the Road)" from The Rising. ("When I have a major piece, or have done so much preparatory work that the actual writing simply requires going through the motions and ensuring enough beat-driven white noise to titillate my brain, then I just line up all the Oasis albums in a row, switching from time to time to every and any Green Day album," he said.)

Robert Collier, correspondent, San Francisco Chronicle: Iraqi singer Kazem el-Saher and the late Umm-Khultan, "the goddess of Arab music." ("This music is completely foreign," he said. "In a situation like this, you can't try to hold on to your old world. It's too distracting. It makes me daydream. I don't want anything that reminds me of home, friends, family and past experiences. I have to dive into where I am.")

Richard Downes, correspondent, RTE (Irish Television & Radio), Dublin, Ireland: Wakafrika by Cameroon's Manu Dibango. ("I lived in South Africa for four years and worked the whole continent for the BBC. Dibango takes me away from all the nonsense. One night, I listened to it because I didn't want to listen to the anti-aircraft fire.")

My choice? Miles Davis' Kind of Blue will soothe the soul anytime and anywhere. But in Baghdad, my vote goes to two songs by Bob Dylan. "Oh God," you say, rolling your eyes. OK, sure, he sometimes sings like he has marbles in his mouth. Then there was that Christian phase, an odd spiritual detour for a Jewish kid from northern Minnesota's Iron Range.

But with the hotel shaking under your feet from the concussions of bombs falling nearby, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and "Shelter from the Storm" played back-to-back - and over and over again - amplifies your deepest fears and yearnings.

Imagine warplanes rocketing overhead in darkness, and the world around you burning in an Armageddon of thunder, glare and destruction. Then listen to Dylan plead: "Momma put my guns in the ground/I can't shoot them anymore/That long black cloud is comin' down/I feel I'm Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Then dream about an end to the bedlam and being changed irrevocably by all you've seen. And think about the one who loves you. In short, "try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm" and click to Dylan again:

"Well I've heard new-born babies/Cryin' like a morning dove/And old men with broken teeth/Stranded without love/Do I understand your question, man?/'Is it hopeless and forlorn?'/ 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give ya' Shelter from the Storm.'"