For the past few years, I watched from my hotel balcony as the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad sprang up across the Tigris River, deep in the heavily guarded Green Zone.

The building cranes were impossible to miss -- for a long time, they were the only real signs of construction in this battered city.

Back in Iraq for the first time since its official opening in January, I was eager to check out the finished product, the largest embassy in the world.

 I've had several meetings at the new embassy now, both with State Department and military officials. I bought Dr. Pepper and US Weekly from the restricted-access commissary, ate enchiladas in the D-FAC (dining facility), sipped an iced latte at the cute cafe and lounged in the sparkling consular services section while trying to renew my passport. It's far more than an embassy -- it's a self-contained, Vatican-sized hamlet, albeit one with reinforced dormitories to protect its resident employees from late-night rocket attacks.

I don't yet have a "brown badge," a U.S. military-issued credential that's basically a backstage pass to the war, so my every move inside the embassy compound is shadowed by an escort, typically a media liaison from the embassy or a public affairs officer from the military. (Actually, I'm pretty sure you need an escort even with a brown badge for the embassy, though not for other U.S.-run sites.)

That means I enter the Green Zone through an Iraqi-guarded checkpoint, take a cab to the Ugandan-manned checkpoint and then wait at the entrance with the Peruvian security contractors working for Triple Canopy, a private security company that reportedly won more than $90 million in government contracts related to the Iraq war, as of 2005.

Today, I arrived at the embassy with half an hour to spare before my appointment. I couldn't enter until my escort arrived, so I passed the time talking with a Peruvian guard -- in his broken English and what little Spanish I remembered from high school.

"Are you press?" he asked.

When I confirmed that I was a journalist, he lowered his voice and looked around to see if his American supervisor from Triple Canopy was watching the interaction.

"They no respect the contract, this company," he whispered. "The contract says we work one, two, three, four, five, six, seven days, and then we should have a day off. But I work 12 hours a day for 12 days and then one day off. They no respect the contract."

He went on to tell me about his 11-year-old daughter and how it breaks his heart to be so far away from her. Over the Internet, he said, she tells him to quit and come home, that the money isn't worth the job, which from his description sounded to me like a few short steps away from indentured servitude.

"My girl, she tell me, 'Come to Peru, come to Peru, why you work 12 hours a day for 12 days?'" he said. "I told her if I say something to the company, they say, OK, go back to Peru and they bring other guards."

He shrugged and said, "What I do? I work."

My escort arrived and I disappeared into the vast embassy compound, leaving my Peruvian acquaintance outside in the sweltering Baghdad heat, halfway through his 12-hour shift.

"Adios," he said. "See you again."