My friends and colleagues are shocked when I tell them I only took one pair of socks when I left to “embed” with the 1st Marine Division from Camp Pendleton in the days before the beginning of the war with Iraq.

I have an explanation: I was so worried about the technology needed to file my stories from the field that things like socks never entered my mind.

Embedded with Marine units on the road to Baghdad, reporter Tony Perry valued a clean satellite phone connection over clean socks.

As reporters waited for weeks in Kuwait City to join our designated military units, technology was a constant source of worry and agitation. On the electronic battlefield, we are all combatants.

Reporters talked endlessly about satellite phones, laptop computers, Internet connections and battery chargers. I caught a bad case of technology anxiety.

I decided to use the military strategy called “redundancy.”

I may have only taken one pair of socks but I also took two satellite phones (one Thuraya, one Thrane and Thrane), one cellular phone (Nokia, with 200 minutes purchased from a Kuwaiti vendor), two laptops (one Dell, one IBM) and a travel bag bulging with extension cords, power strips, adapters, converters, jumper cables, splicers, spare batteries, surge protectors and more — all neatly segmented in individual Ziploc baggies.

The Army had done its best to increase our collective insecurity by warning reporters that no help would be provided in recharging our battery-dependent gear or in filing our stories.

In truth, the Marines were exceedingly helpful in both regards. Whenever I wasn’t eating, sleeping or reporting, I was either charging my satellite phones and laptops or seeking a power source to do so. My favorite sources were the large-scale generators used by the Marines and the cigarette-lighter connections on 7-ton trucks.

On the night before we embedded, I was on the windblown roof of the Sheraton Hotel testing my ability to file a story by hooking the Thuraya to the Dell, dialing up an Internet connection and then creating a file to be sent to the Los Angeles Times e-mail system.

In the event the Thuraya-Dell-Internet system failed, I was prepared to use the Thrane and Thrane to send stories directly to The Times editorial system.

The night the Marines stormed into Iraq, I was in the back of a truck using my Thuraya to get a final briefing from a Times technology wizard in Washington, D.C., about the Thrane and Thrane.

The Thuraya is the size of a standard cell phone and fits nicely in my backpocket. The Thrane and Thrane is bulkier and comes in a case that looks like it carries a bowling ball.

My preference was the Thuraya. It allowed me to file and then check e-mails and even surf the Net. But two weeks into the war, the military brass decided that the Thurayas, which use a global-positioning system, were a security threat: that the perfidious French had sold the “codes” to the Iraqis that would allow them to listen to calls and pinpoint U.S. positions.

Three days after seizing my Thuraya, the commanding officer of my unit relented. I was with the 1st Regimental Combat team closing in on Baghdad. The Marines were fighting the Republican Guard and winning. I was fighting spam and losing. At a burned out, bombed out, fly and dung-infested Iraqi village, I tried to use my Thuraya-Dell team to send a story that my editors wanted asap.

As the flies buzzed around me, I made an Internet connection, “dumped” my story into an e-mail, and hit “send.” Up popped a message saying I could not send because my e-mail basket was full with spam.

Spam is exceedingly difficult to erase on a laptop and so I never again attempted to file via e-mail using the Thuraya, although I used it daily, even hourly, to call my editors in Los Angeles to provide updates, often from the back of a moving Humvee.

My Thuraya was so precious to me that I wrapped it up in a plastic bag each night and slept with it cradled in my arms. A Marine noted that I showed as much concern for my Thuraya as the Marines do for their M-16s; I took that as a high compliment.

Outside Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s ancestral home, we were pelted with a surprise rainstorm at midnight. I panicked.

My sleeping bag began to leak. For fear my Thuraya would be soaked — it was already showing wear and tear and dirt-damage — I jumped out of my bag and sprinted 50 muddy yards to the medics’ quarters. They had earlier offered to let me sleep in their tent. Soaked, breathless, wearing only my underwear and clutching my Thuraya to my chest, I burst through the door without knocking.

The medics were friendly. I had let them use the Thuraya to make calls home. As the war progressed, more Marines and sailors realized that reporters had satellite phones.

In my seven weeks in the field with the Marines I tried to make the phone available to all who asked. I was offered money, war souvenirs and distilled spirits for use of my Thuraya, but I declined such payment.

One lance corporal, however, after using the phone on several occasions, brought me a gift too good to turn down: a pair of clean socks.

Tony Perry is the San Diego bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.