Control

The rain began this morning on the way to the car;
I tucked my silk tie into my shirt.

Last night we ran out of milk;
I can pick some up on the way home.

My blue pants split last week; I had them sewn.
The fit me better now.

My dog pays more attention to me than most people do;
I like him more every day.

People in my church just never stopped complaining;
I can sleep in on Sundays now.

The stream of terrible news trickles daily onto my doorstep;
The newsprint screams silently up the chimney.

The elevator fills up in front of me;
I’ll walk up to your room.

My knees resist each step up to your floor;
I’m getting used to their complaints.

My customers all know what is happening;
They call me occasionally; concerned.

The cards fill up your windowsill;
I make room for more.

The voicemails overflow into nothingness;
I delete most of them.

Your legs have circulation stimulators twenty-four hours a day;
I cover your cold feet with a blanket.

Your fever increases, less influenced by medication;
I ask the staff to increase the dosage.

The monitor over your head tells me what I don’t want to know;
I turn my chair towards the window.

The sun set again this evening, like always.
Smiling helps me no to cry so much.

I am someone else now.

Cool stuff

In any major event, like sports, or college, there are some things at certain times that are, or at least seem to be, indispensable. Here are some of the things that helped us in Iraq, in no particular order:

laptops
nerds to fix the laptops
thumb drives
USB mini hubs
camelbacks
care packages
cigarettes
mail in general
the internet
satellite phones
minute cards for satellite phones
clean underwear
not having to wear any
bottled water
anything by Thermarest
portable DVD players
Jenna Jamison
Conan the Barbarian
Conan the Destroyer
The box set of Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Gatorade powder
sport bras
the PX
Women without burkhas
The Bee Gees (personal favorite)
battery operated fans
batteries
more batteries
ice chests
ice
ceramic inserts for interceptor armor vests
cooler heads prevailing (most of the time)
translators
duct tape (of course)
Bruce Willis shaking everyone’s hand and thanking them personally
Jane Fonda staying home
MP3’s
MP5’s
MP’s
Reservists who came to the party
Reservists who volunteered to extend
Stars and Stripes
LED microlights
solar showers
digital cameras
high school kids to explain them to me
Iraqi children
Most Iraqi people
Jersey barriers
Texas barriers
Alaska barriers
KBR
Kuwaiti rental cars
GPS systems
Motorola Talkabout handheld radios
More batteries
Baby wipes
Marines
Navy corpsmen (and women)
close friends listening to you whine
pre-cast concrete bunkers
the God voice
Patriot missiles
ID card laminating machines
The Red Cross
Satirical unit newsletters (FREE THE BUG!)
Freaky-Freaky movies
Hajji Movies
“Good, Mister! Good!”
Heather Brook


Here are the things that we could have done without.

Red Cross messages
Most chains of command
22 General Officers in theater
Briefings
PowerPoint
Anything over 98 degrees Fahrenheit
Seersucker missiles
Scud missiles
“Lightning, lightning, lightning”
Sand flies
Mosquitoes
Tray packs
listening to your close friends whining
MRE’s
Chlorinated water
Conan the Barbarian
Conan the Destroyer
Michael Jackson
Martha Stewart
Paper coins from the PX
Piss tubes
Diarrhea
Shitting into barrels of kerosene
Burning barrels of shit mixed with kerosene
The smell of burning shit and kerosene
being stiff-armed by CPA for lunch
Al-Qieada (sp?)
Some Iraqis
Most Iranians
OIF2
OIF3
Haiti
North Korea
Colombia
Liberia
Shipping restrictions on water bongs
travel restrictions
force protection rules
General Order #1a: No alcohol
General Order #1b: No sex
Pettiness
prima donnas
The Army of One
IED’s
VBIED’s
dead people
learning what it’s like to be scared shitless
repeating the experience
the MUIC
Fort Bragg altogether
Sand
Dust
Sand
Dust
No AC in Hummers
Dehydration
“Give Me!”
Blocked websites

©Tom Kinton, 2004, Camp Doha, Kuwait

Inbound

We drove south all day tucked into another convoy and hit Doha after dark. The convoy split up and our several vehicles parked outside some office waiting to get clearance to enter the part of camp where our unit was living. After twelve hours, two wrecks and a shooting (not by us) it sucked to wait on a piece of paper, but we were back in the rear now and rear is just another word for asshole. So we got the paper, stuck it under the wiper blade of each of the Humvees and drove in to unload our gear. It was close to 9 PM, which meant that the food court in the PX would close soon, and since we hadn’t had lunch 9 PM really meant something. I left the humvee and the gear and went over to order some pizzas.

When I came back Chris and Miguel had started unloading, and the rest of the non-deployed folks were just watching us work. Our unit, like many this time around, has been fragmented from day one. It started three months before the deployment, when our command replaced most of our senior staff with outsiders from another region of the US. Not a great way to go to war. It got worse from there. Our unit, like others, is broken down into groups called functional teams. The joke is that they really are dysfunctional teams. We have been split up and re-organized so many times in the last fourteen months that any sense of unity or esprit-de-corps has been eclipsed by the Army of One.

So we ate pizza in between hauling loads of gear into our bunks, inside the huge warehouse that had been the home to most of our unit for the last six months. We finished, drove the vehicles back to the motor pool, and walked back to showers and sleep. All we had to do now was get the vehicles washed and ready for shipment; that couldn’t be so bad.

Wrong. The wash racks, over a hundred of them, were basically ramps onto which you drove your vehicle so you could access the undercarriage with the nozzle of the power washers. The standard (in the military everything has a standard) is NO DIRT. Pretty simple, until you understand first-hand just how many nooks and crannies there are in a vehicle like a Humvee. Forget about tanks and personnel carriers, we had our hands full just blasting away the parts of Iraq that hadn’t been blasted away during combat. After one hour behind the spray gun, we were pretty cocky. I went up underneath the vehicle and ran my hand around and on top of the drive shaft. Oops.

Two hours later I ordered more pizza for the twenty or so of us still left on the racks. We finished the pizza and the washing about two hours after that, for a total of over five hours just to do one vehicle. As one team passed inspection, they peeled off to help the people next to them. The army of one turned back into the one that I remembered from the early eighties, a team. No one could leave until all the vehicles were done and we all were soaked with a cocktail of water, grease, Simple Green® cleaner and Iraqi sand. We finished the job by actually cleaning down the wash racks the same way we cleaned the vehicles. After all was done, we drove the Humvees to the sterile lot where they were to wait for the call forward to the port. That day we were all we could have been.
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Copyright, 2004. Tom Kinton
Camp Doha, Kuwait

Leaving Baghdad

I’m still wearing the sib-hah that Rana gave to me. It’s a small one, and I wear it like a bracelet, contrary to Army regulations. Leaving the Iraqis and the project was emotional for me. The sib-hah has spooky little bird-eyes on every bead; Rana told me it was to ward off other people giving me the evil eye. I’m not sure about all of that, but I keep the bracelet on my wrist all the time to keep the memories from getting mixed up with our new and changing realities as we move a few steps closer to our former lives.

Kuwait is a lot different than Iraq. For most people, it means going to the mall, eating fast food, and the familiarity of Army life like barracks, sports, and friends. For me it is a place with no emotions, no futures, and a questionable past. We live here in a warehouse full of steel furniture; bunk beds, wall lockers and chairs. Pallets of water in cardboard boxes have been turned into tables and chairs, and the television is on from morning till night, with the usual fights over the remote control. I come and go from the warehouse to meals, mailing packages, showers and meetings, moving through the time here slowly; too slowly. We all just want to get on with our lives, however fragmented they might have become.

The stories people will tell when they get back home will probably be a lot like stories from Vegas; everybody has a good time and nobody loses any money. Ask most of the soldiers about their time in Iraq and they will tell you about the funny shit that happened one day, the way the mail never got through for two or three months then flowed like rain, or maybe, if you catch them just right, about some ordinary person who did an extraordinary thing that meant a lot, at the time. But, right now, in Camp Doha, ask them about going back to their families or jobs after fourteen months of being away and you will get the Vegas answer: no problem, they will say. My family is great; my boss is understanding, etc….

Until next November, when we get deployed again, for another nine to fourteen months. They don’t realize that, yet.

So I keep the sib-hah on my wrist, and count the beads every chance I get. I’ve kept a lot of things from Iraq, in addition to the sib-hah. I’ve kept the cough and shortness of breath that’s been with me since before Christmas. The red and white checkered yeshmagh which I wear everyday. The craving of a silence not broken by the sound of generators or car bombs. It reminds me of where I was, what I did, and what I have left behind. My future, like the future of many of my friends, hangs on a thread slimmer then the sib-hah on my wrist.

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Copyright, 2004, Tom Kinton
Camp Doha, Kuwait

Transition

Before this night is over, the rotors will wake us up, causing the weak to tremble and the strong to wonder. We are together in this, them and us. They are innocent and guilty, in the same city, under the same sun and sound of laminated wing and hydraulics, of 7.62 millimetre judgment, the victims of the verdict of night vision and heads-up displays. They will stay, stand or fall, like all the nights before.

Before this night is over, birds will fly over all of us, silent and spiralling through the darkness of the doubt of our existence, whirling overhead through the airs of our conceit and arrogance, gliding down to the reality of a dawn that will break over this place without our help.

Before this night is over, men will speak into transmitters and give direction to those under their command, breathing logic into the space between us and them, giving shape to policy and form to the informal unseen hand of change. Changing tomorrow with words, shaping some lives and taking others, forming opinions and solidifying options.

Before this night is over, trajectories and careers will arc and apogee and at some point in the distance of space and time deliver reality with an impact usually only seen in theatres. Theatrics will ensue with a hardness of steel and a flash of fire and finality ending in a close and far-off rumble, different only from your point of view.

Before this night is over, trust and confidence will give way to the uncertainty of doubt and a lost innocence of lives changed and time served and letters written, vows given, futures altered and paradigms shifted. Words will be spoken, prayers mouthed silently, languages and utterances vocalized with an earnest desire to only last until after.

After we have left this place elections will be held, schools will fill with hope and the hopeful will look to the West for a direction not given, motives not known, guidance feebly offered. The uncertainty will remain, like water in the pump primed for action, waiting only for the switch of democracy to move from ‘off’ to ‘on’.

After the sound of the rotors dissipates and the booming guns are silent those who remain will speak, or remain silent, or take action in the same way as always. The focus will be shifted, the main effort re-aligned, the centre of gravity pulled away by the moon of public opinion towards the next big thing.

After, when they have survived this changing change, a few of us will look over our shoulder and say that before we came here we should have thought about after.

After the analysis, discourse, audits and elections they will remain. We who shared this time with them, we few, will think silently about the before and say a prayer for those who remain, after.

©Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq 2004

Standing Still

Omar and I are watching the Tyson-Williams fight on television, and the euro-beer is doing nicely as a stand-in for white wine with my homemade fettuccine. Tyson is down for ten, walking out of the arena with his girlfriend and the boom makes both of us look at each other in that way the two professionals look at each other when you both hear the sound of shit hitting the fan.

We have two choices, Omar and I. Before we choose, we pocket the weapons lying around the table and walk outside into the street with the rest of a growing crowd of our neighbors. Straight down the avenue, past Technology street and perhaps one street over, smoke starts to flow upwards through the date palms and gets blacker and thicker as we talk in Arabic and English about what it might be.

Growing up in a small town, I remember watching with complete attention as airplanes flew overhead; I tracked satellites in the night sky as if each one were a UFO; my red English-style bicycle carried me each day on my paper route and sometimes, if I were lucky, it carried me to the pot of gold at the end of the fire-truck’s rainbow to see flames billowing up through the night sky. Who lives in that farm, I would wonder. Are there any animals in the barn?

I carried that sense of curiosity into my twenties, stopping for every accident and hitchhiker that crossed my path. One fateful night I wrestled with God and lost; sometimes there is nothing to be done.

Today is like that. Actually, every day is like that here. We came back inside the house, and I took another swig of the beer. My curiosity is gone. I didn’t even think about grabbing the fully-stocked aid bag and running down the street to the scene of the bomb or accident or whatever it was. There is no point here. Someone would see me and mark me as the next kidnap victim, even as I would be applying a saline drip to a burn victim.

So I watch Tyson give up and see his ugly girlfriend throw some stupid looking stuffed animal back at the crowd. It’s better like this; just pretending that it is all on television and changing the channel.

The Last Day in the Office

6 A.M.: The alarm goes off and I am already awake. I have been dreading this moment and the ones to follow for two months now. My big mistake has been to be too much in control; seen as the authority for all the decisions by both the Iraqis and Coalition staff here. I have tried for several weeks to wean them away from my by coming in late, leaving for a few hours here and there but they just ended up waiting for me to return before they sought the answers to the thousands of little questions.

I roll out of bed quickly and look around my trailer. Most of my bags are already in the car and the only thing left here are my clothes for the trip to Kuwait today: DCU’s, rifle, pistol and a small black backpack with my red and white Iraqi scarf. I look at the nightstand and see my watch, ring, some money, and my wedding band. A quick run through the shower, shave, and then the things on my nightstand take their place in my pockets and on my body. I suit up. Uniform, boots, thigh holster, 9mm in place, small black ruck, rifle. The nightstand is clean now and looks sterile. None of the little things that made it look normal are there anymore. The dried flower, the green bottle, the picture. They are all packed away and waiting, like me, for the next thing.

6:45 A.M.: I leave the key on the nightstand, say goodbye to my roommate Bob, and walk out the door for the last time. Three metal steps down to the pre-cast cement tiles that separate me from the sand of Iraq. Navigating through the maze of trailers to the parking lot takes one cigarette; I light another one as I start the car and suppress the urge to run back and unpack all my things. Every action now takes me away from all of this effort and struggle and leads me towards an uncertain future to which I can no longer relate.

7:30 A.M.: The parking lot is almost full but I find a space in between some British vehicles. I carry all my bags to the Humvee that will carry me down to Camp Doha. Walking now through the gauntlet of tactical and non-tactical vehicles from every country, through the guards who know me by name, and down to the office for the last hour of my tour in Baghdad. My desk looks bare without the prayer rug or coffee cup. I open my emails for the last time and discard most. Then the last letter of recommendation for my faithful secretary who promised to come early today and see me before I left. I print the letter, and put it on her desk, where my prayer rug waits for her as a little surprise.

8:30 A.M.: Tim comes over to me and tells me something smart but nice, and uncharacteristically gives me a hug. I can’t start now; it won’t stop if I start now. I walk down the hall and see Ali’a, Rana’s sister, waiting there. She opens her arms and hugs me, too. Not normal at all. She points down the back hallway and Rana is there, small and quiet. I make Ali’a promise to take care of Rana and then walk down the hall. Rana has been crying; we have been so close through all of these days and weeks of stress and laughter and death and fear that being apart now is something that neither one of us can take.

8:45 A.M.: We move into the little room made to receive the end of a tall circular staircase that will take me up and out of the building and away from the work and people that have been my life for the last five months. She starts to cry, then stops, looks up at me and makes me promise to come back. I go to my knees in front of her and hold her hands. I look up into her tears and tell her that if God wants me to come back I will, and if he doesn’t I will be angry with him for not understanding what no one else can understand. I stand and hold her close to me and we both cry a little but I have to go; the convoy won’t understand, either. I tell her to wait for me, and then I turn and clank up the metal circular staircase to the daylight and away from her and them.

9 A.M.: The convoy leaves Iraq.

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Disclaimer

Portions of this blog were condensed and published in the April, 2004 issue of Esquire magazine. As I have attempted three times to seek permission for their publication here with no response, I will assume approval until otherwise directed.

Gordon

On any given day I interact with a wide mix of folks in our office; Iraqi government workers, paid Iraqi staff, State Department people, and coalition forces. So today was just the same; sort of like working the floor of a trade show only you never get to go up to the corporate hospitality suite for drinks after the customers leave and this trade show never ends. The people that stream into our office are a mix of all of the above. We get Russian mafia/business types, Middle-Eastern middlemen, local Iraqi opportunists and nobody from France. Too bad, because we have a really great security guard on the front door. Lately we have seen a surge in job-hunters. Hadeel was one of them.

She always wears a pink scarf. Not being too original, and not wanting to teach everyone how to pronounce Hadeel, I named her the pink lady. I guess the Iraqis haven’t seen Grease. Anyway, Hadeel asked me to take her to her employer, a contractor that provides translators to the coalition. We got in the Suburban and drove over to their office. Like everything else here it’s inside the green zone. On the way over you pass by the crossed swords that everyone has seen on TV. They are next to the tomb of the unknown soldier, put up by Saddam after the Iran-Iraq war. It looks like the hatch of a tank, only it’s as big as a UFO.

We turn the corner left and park on the street in front of Titan, the contracting company. All I have to do is walk in and tell the site manager that Hadeel has found a new home with us and leave. So we go through the crowd of wannabee translators looking for work, past the guy on the right with a card table full of cigarettes and candy, and into the cinder block building. It’s full of people and right away Hadeel introduces me to the manager. I tell him who I am and mention that one of my best friends from this deployment was a Titan site manager in Al-Hillah. The guy looks me right in the eye and says you know Gordon was taken from us last month. I say no, I didn’t know that. My face is locked in that famous thousand-yard stare and the guy says yeah, I served with Gordon for a long time in the Army (SF) and he was like my brother. I say yeah again. I asked him what happened, like it’s going to make a difference, and he says Gordon was in a car going up to Kirkuk and the driver tried to pass someone as they were going up a hill. Of course, as they crested that hill they met a fuel truck.

So I tell this guy that Gordon was like a father to me for five months and I was really sorry about all that and we shook hands and I left with Hadeel for the office. We went out of the Titan building and stepped off the concrete and into the dirt and weeds of Iraq and back I went to Hillah and Gordon is telling me how he has to drive down to Kuwait and get the payroll, in cash, in a plastic shopping bag, and drive all over hell to pay his people. He smokes, I smoke, and we sit in his air conditioned tent talking about all the problems we both have with translators and the Marines and the army and just shooting the shit like two guys do in the field when they have all this common background.

He reaches into his duffle bag and pulls out two decks of Saddam playing cards, the good ones, issued by the American Embassy in Kuwait. They are like gold here, and he looks at me and says don’t mention it and I take the cards from his old hands and wonder how he got them. But Gordon is connected so I don’t ask.

I still have the cards he gave me. One deck for me, another for a friend. I wonder if I will remember all of this stuff years from now if I run across the cards in some attic box and I wonder if I should tell my friend about Gordon and the talks we had in his hootch and the favors he did for my unit when we didn’t have shit and if I should tell the guy about the fuel truck and how the driver of Gordon’s car should be on the deck as the fifty-third most-wanted. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I feel connected to Gordon still and don’t want to put him in that place in my head where the dead people are so for now I’ll stay in Gordon’s tent and listen to his stories about the time he was in Iran when the shit went down with the hostages or the other stuff he could never talk about.

Hadeel never knew Gordon. All she knows is I got her transferred from a dangerous outdoor job to our office. That’s good enough for her, and I guess Gordon would like it that way, too.

Later, Gordon. You were my friend.

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©Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq

December 14th, 2003

We let them all go home. After lunch we heard from some of the guards that Saddam had been captured in Tikrit; nobody could believe it so we asked everyone we saw if they knew anything. Ibtesam and Rana Two were with me and they asked in Arabic. We walked through the swinging glass doors of the convention center and turned right, walking fast over the short pile orange carpet, down the ramp to the basement and met LTC Smith (pseudonym) who asked us if we had heard; he said that BBC confirmed Saddam was captured somewhere near Tikrit earlier in the day.

It affected me much more (at least outwardly) than the girls. For so long (not really, but seems that way) I have been the officer, manager, leader of our office that I have grown used to being a little hard and mechanical. When Smith told me, it all hit me at once: being gone so long, losing acquaintances, losing thirty pounds, all the missions and heat and yelling and nervous road trips. Closure is the word that my therapist would use, if I had one. I don’t know about that. We are all still here. I do have the sense that the things we have done so far and the losses suffered are much more bearable now.

I guess overcome by emotion is another term that could apply. When we came back from lunch and confirmed the information, I suggested that we send the Iraqi staff home for the day, both as a safety measure in case the streets turned ugly, and also of course to give them time to celebrate. So now they are all gone. Rana One (my secretary) was the last to leave. She took me to the steps where people couldn’t see us and she turned to me. I was trying hard to control my emotions; she was stronger than me and told me that a) she would come to work tomorrow even if the streets were blocked and b) that she had left me a present on my desk.

It’s a Bounty candy bar. Coconut; she knows it’s my favorite. So here I am trying to put these feelings on paper for you and eating the coconut candy bar and I just went outside and listened to the gunshots and the mosque playing prayers at the wrong (or right) time and sirens going off everywhere. Just went out again. The guards here at the hotel asked me to come back under the overhang because there were bullets landing all over the place from celebratory fire. They said that across the street at the hotel someone took a bullet in the head, so I came back inside. Now the pictures are on the internet. The guy looks like the unibomber; bearded, scraggly, tired. I can’t help thinking how tired he must be and wonder if he is actually looking forward to captivity as opposed to being on the run.

Anyway, the show is over now. Bremer and Sanchez have left the building. Saddam has been caught and now we just have to get through the next few days, months and years and get this place up and running. It’s 4:15 PM and I think I’ll go back to my trailer early tonight and dream about drinking heavily. Tomorrow we will all come to work and see how many Iraqis make it in. Tomorrow, from my perspective, will be a good day.

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Copyright, 2003. Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq.

Thanksgiving

Cyrus and I just finished Thanksgiving dinner at KBR. They run the food service across the street at the Al-Rashid Hotel. The Pakistanis put on a good show, complete with a very phallic ice sculpture that I overlooked in favor of canned eggnog. We had carved turkey, dressing, and some kind of weird strawberry juice. On the way out I lit a cigarette; I’m what we refer to as a ‘deployment smoker’. The cigarette helps with the strawberry after lunch. I go back to the office with Cyrus and we work till 3 PM. I leave in my humvee and drive past the Army Reserve soldiers getting ready for a mission; I don’t know which or where. I ask them if they had Thanksgiving dinner. They had chicken, somewhere else, and the stupid part is that these guys are doing our dirty work for us and somebody in their chain of command didn’t get them into the Al-Rashid, which they were guarding that day. It sucks to be them.

I go back to CPA and into the chapel where I share an intimate nighttime existence with about four hundred of my closest friends; men, women, cell phones, snoring, farting, and nothing but bunk beds in the huge room that we were told used to be Saddam’s bedroom. We call it the chapel because that’s where the coalition had services until they moved us all into it after the rocket attacks.

My nap lasts about an hour. I wake up and get dressed (no clean clothes) and the phone in my pocket rings. It’s my seven year old son, Tommy. Vanessa showed him how to dial the number. He sounds different. I forgot that it was Thanksgiving and he was calling because he is sad that I’m not around. I always do the whole thing; it’s my favorite holiday. We invite everyone and basically eat all day. Tommy tells me about Tae-Kwon-Do and school. I can hear the brave little boy struggling to not cry; I have to choose between hard and soft; I choose hard. Be strong, Tommy, help your Mom get the car ready for the trip to Aunt Laurie’s house for dinner. I am crying but don’t let him know. He is braver than I. My Mom and Dad never left until my Dad left for good four years ago. It killed me when he died and I wonder if Tommy feels like that since I’m gone.

The leadership training kicks in on top of the emotion. I have gotten really mechanical since I’ve been here. Tommy misses me so I redirect his sadness onto something else and away from me being gone. He doesn’t know the risks we run just driving to work; he doesn’t have any idea that the rocket landed in our parking lot fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be at the point of impact (it took out about twenty vehicles). He doesn’t have to worry about any of that but in his world his daddy is gone and I wonder if he remembers what I look like. He talks about me at show and tell (“My daddy carries a big gun!”) and wears the desert boonie hat I sent him with his name on it. He asks me if I will come home for his birthday in March. I redirect him again, feeling like a complete shithead for doing it. This whole thing has forced me to manipulate him and I hate it. I tell him I love him and he says the magic words, “I love you, too, Daddy”. I can’t take these phone calls anymore.

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Copyright, 2003. Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq.

This morning

This morning on the way to work someone asked me if I knew about the Spanish guys and I said sure, they work here and in another town. They said no, didn’t you hear about the ambush? Seven or eight Spanish guys got whacked going south out of Baghdad. I turned around and half-ran up to where the Spanish guys work. No one was there, so I asked the secretary for a piece of paper, and sat down at my friend’s desk and wrote a sympathy note in Spanish. As I wrote I invented all sorts of ways for them to drive backwards from the ambush site and not die. I kept writing anyway. I left the note on my friend’s desk and went out of the building, through the Gurkhas, the Marines and triple-strand concertina wire, and made my way out to the parking lot where my humvee was parked.

It hasn’t hit me; I won’t let it hit me. I can’t let it happen. I drove to work past the green zone café and went down to the office. Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom, Mr. Tom. Fifteen Iraqi’s asking me questions about little details of the work we do. I sit down here at my desk after meeting a blurred series of important men and go over my list of things to do that I worked on till midnight yesterday.

My translator comes over to the desk with two more Iraqi’s; one of them is a truck driver whose rig was stolen last week. “Can you help him?” I listen to the story and take him with me back to the humvee, through the green zone, and back to the palace. Past the green zone café again, past the street vendor guys with their surplus Iraqi army jackets, Ishtar cigarettes and pirated DVD’s. We park and walk past the place where the rocket hit two weeks ago and took out a bunch of vehicles. Through the triple-strand, and past the Marines (“Eindek howiah?”) and Gurkhas, into the building and to the right office. We met a very understanding CI (intelligence) officer who used me as a translator. Spanish just isn’t Arabic but we all try. We figured out enough for the CI guy to make a future appointment. On the way out of the palace the Iraqi driver stopped me and said “God-you-thank you-one thousand”. I tell him Al-afu, it’s nothing, it’s my job. We walk back out through the Marines, the Gurkhas, through the barriers between us and them, back to the office. It’s only eleven in the morning and I haven’t done anything about my to-do list.

The Spanish guys are still dead; I’m back in the office, the Iraqi’s ask me a million little questions. I think in English (or whatever) about the Spanish guys while the Iraqi’s talk to me with and without an interpreter; the Iraqi faces morph right in front of me to whiter and deader and I can’t stop it and I just went out in the hall for my tenth cigarette of the morning and wonder if St. Augustine was right; can I change myself, or set the example for them so they take all of this over and we can all go home. It doesn’t seem possible.

Lina and Quaise invite me to lunch across the street at the Al-Rasheed. We walk out together into the sunlight and coolness of November and away from chaos into the familiarity of a cheeseburger. Not bad for noon. We’ll get better; we have to.

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Copyright, 2003. Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq.

Boys

I feel them right now. I can hear their breathing, soft in the bed sheets and blankets in a world of comforters that smell like fabric softener and safety. They are not ready to wake up yet; it’s eight hours between us and although I am half-way through my day they sleep now until Saturday morning comes and cartoons and friends and the mall and whatever adventures they have planned for the weekend.

They sleep, and we are awake here, far away from them, and increasingly farther away from everything, including, depressingly, their thoughts. I know this. I feel the distance has become magnified or has burned deeper into my heart and theirs. I cannot bridge it with letters or emails or even phone calls. They know they have a daddy and that he is not around and maybe they talk sometimes with their friends about it but I wonder if they put my absence into the same category where their friends put their divorced and absent fathers. I am so sad I want to cry but there isn’t time for that. It’s like the emotion is totally gone.

She feels it, too. This thing has killed our hope for reconciliation or future. There is nothing now but contention, argument and negotiation.

They all sleep. It’s 4:30 in the morning for them and in a few hours I should be making pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs. She likes omelets; I’ll make one for her and me and we will share it because the boys don’t like onions (no boys like onions). We’ll have good coffee, clean up and head out for some little adventure.

This won’t happen today. Today they will wake up without their father. Their mother will have to do all of this, and all that she normally does. She is tired, and growing tired of being alone, and of not hearing from me and more importantly not hearing the right things from me at the right times. She is ready for a change; any change. For someone to care for her, because I can’t. For a future that is solid; not filled with the doubt of deployments or the fear of threat levels or telegrams or late night worried calls that cut off in the middle of hurried explanations.

They all sleep. Just ten minutes have passed and I see them all in separate beds moving slightly with the rhythms of the last hour before waking. I walk into our bedroom and see this beautiful woman who loved me once and now has lost hope and lost me and lost perspective. I move to her, lean down and kiss her on the forehead; I have to leave now, because I’m not really there and this can’t last so I move to one boy’s room; he is a teenager now. I missed that one. I missed Jr. High for him and ball games and band concerts and probably somebody else told him about girls and boys and dating. He is a reader, his room full of books: Tolkein, fishing, fast cars. He likes these things. I see him turn away from me in his sleep and his hair, always messy, never looked so beautiful since the day he was born. He makes a noise and I cross myself for him, kiss him while he sleeps and move into Tommy’s room.

Seven now and he is going to be a black belt in Tae Kwon Do next year and his world is so simple. His room is messy, like a seven-year olds’ should be. Books everywhere, race cars on the window sill, and toys from Christmas under his bed, in his closet, and probably in the clothes hamper, too. When he is awake, he is totally awake; he runs everywhere, jumps into life every day with the excitement of the promise of new adventures and friends and trust and the total absence of pain and regret. He has no concept of these things; his innocence will be broken soon enough by someone close to him, and he will learn like all of us not to trust, not to seek the middle way, not to bridge, but to wall-up and surround himself with the protection of isolation and wariness.

But not now. For him it’s still almost time for cartoons, for a surprise telephone call from someone, maybe his daddy. This shit is killing me. I can’t go here anymore. I can’t stay in this place so far away from them and I can’t leave these people here to fail slowly, receding back into the old ways of corruption and dependence.

I leave his room in my head, and walk down the wood-floor hallway, past her room, turning left into the dining room, past the table where they pray for me everyday even though they can’t remember what I look like anymore. I go through the kitchen door and out into the present wilderness of my existence here and they’ll never even know I was there, because it is all a dream. I just want to wake up and start over.

I don’t know how anymore.

-30-

Copyright, 2003. Tom Kinton

Baghdad, Iraq

Being there.

Lost in the Now of here and losing the Why of today the If of tomorrow slips away before my head even hits the pillow. Time here passes like a criminal through my window, stealing the moments from my nightstand and the hours from my pocket; taking the sharpness of my thought and dulling it into the stupor of recollection and regret. Time steals from us here; value is twisted into bullet points and outside the gate the water doesn’t flow into her house and the refrigerator is broken.

The Now of Here is a Now of fear. The Why of today is crowded out of our minds by trivial densities of events, showering around us like wedding rice; important now, to be sure, swept into the street of tomorrow.

Now is the weapons check each day, the ceramic plates (front and back) weighing us down like the rules of engagement. Now is the water bottle heated to over one hundred degrees and seeming cool; now is the crooked white line of salt in our uniforms and the staggering swelter of the short walk from the trucks back to our tents.

Why has been replaced by Now. Why spun through our minds long ago in a world of shot records, Wal-Marts and briefings. Why has come and gone and Now has taken hold and will let go only if replaced by When.

When depends.

When is the illusory ephemeral “x”. When is after Now and Now is everywhere. When will come after Now.

After the Now, during the When, the Why will catch up with some of us and when we think of the Why we will take shelter in what was the Now, and remember the heat, the air blasting against our skin like fire without color, the children smiling, the Pepsi’s. We will be comforted by the hypodermic needle of reliving our experiences instead of dwelling on reason and cause; only effect.

After the Now, during the When, the Why will be debated and recorded by those who didn’t see; who weren’t there; who don’t know.

The If of tomorrow grows in our minds slowly as the Why of yesterday fades into print. We few will remember the Now of Then, the Why of Then, and the struggle of There.

-30-

Copyright, Tom Kinton, June, 2003. Al-Hillah, Iraq.

Tom Kinton was deployed with an Army unit in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Road trip with Darwin

I came up from Camp Doha, Kuwait to get away from the fog of peace, and try to make the best of the next six months in theater, since a week before we got the word that we would be staying for a straight 365 in-country. My civilian job (which I left two years ago) was export sales management, and I had the idea that if I could get involved with the Ministry of Trade I might be able to do some good and grab up some good business contacts as well. So we waited around Doha sleeping, eating, working out and sleeping again while the Army figured out they couldn’t fly us up to Baghdad. Darwin (rank and name withheld) emailed his contact at CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) and hooked us up with a place to stay, and then we got a convoy together and left a couple days later on the road north.

We prepped and loaded the vehicles that night and then met at 7 AM in front of the brigade TOC (tactical operation center) and did our commo checks. Small problems can stop you pretty quick and we discovered our Thuraya sat phone didn’t have any minutes left on it and no one had a pre-paid card to load the phone, so I dug mine out of my didi bag and kept it out for emergencies. When you go up the road you stay on a 911 radio frequency which the MP’s monitor 24/7. We use the phones to call back to the unit in case we have a glitch (humvees break down, ambush, etc…). The phones work pretty well.

We have to stop on the way out of Doha for JP8 (diesel fuel) and then we take off. I’m driving the 2-pac with Darwin on my right. We both have M16’s, 9mm pistols, and a bunch of other stuff. I carry a red star cluster and hope never to have to use it; if we call in a dustoff at night we pop the flare and the bird sees us on the ground. Darwin has a couple of frags in his vest that we never want to have to use, either. He spent a lot of time in Korea and Colombia and both of us have been ‘situationally-aware’ for way too long. We chain smoke all the way up to Al-Hillah, the place where we stay overnight before doing the last two hours into Baghdad.

There are trucks and cars everywhere on the road. We learned early on that speed equals security, so we spend the whole day weaving in and out of convoys, civilian traffic, and farm animals, all the while dodging the occasional 735il series beemers that seem to be everywhere. We get to CPA South-Central just before dark, pass through the Gurkhas at the gate and pull into the parking lot. It’s still pretty hot and we are worn out from the trip. COL (x) meets us at the front gate and shows us where to hang out for the night, then takes us out back to the KBR dining tent.

The food is good, and after dinner we find the showers, clean up and move upstairs to the third floor of the hotel building housing CPA South-Central and play pool for a while. We haven’t had alcohol since early March so the bar is pretty tempting. I meet up with a friend of mine from our unit and catch up with the latest gossip about when we all might go home (same shit; nobody really knows). Later we go down, lie down, and sleep.

In the morning we are up early and leaving to Baghdad at 0700. Darwin and I smoke some more and I drive us up the road through Iraqi-style rush hour traffic and into town. We do about 70 miles per hour for most of the way and drive towards BIAP (the airport) and end up at our higher-unit headquarters. They occupy a palace, like most of the headquarters in Iraq. We report in and after a while move over to CPA, at the Republican Guard palace. It’s hard to miss; the dead giveaway is the four huge busts of Saddam on top. They remind me of Monty Python; I imagine at any moment they will rise up, sprout flowers from their ears and drop down inside the palace, burping little Saddam’s from their mouths. The rumor is that they will come down at some point, but for now they sit perched on top of CPA reminding us all that the guy is still out there somewhere.

We find cots in the North wing of the palace and bring in all our shit from the trucks; the Iraq’s see us dragging ass and help with carrying duffle bags, ice chests and rucksacks. I gave them a dollar tip and “shukran jazeelan’ and they took off. Boring is good in country; boring means nothing bad happened, and we enjoyed being bored all the way up from Doha. We sleep and wonder what life will be like in a palace where the marble could be measured in acre-feet, like water.

The convoy mission worked; we are in Baghdad and start our new gig with CPA.

-30-

Copyright, 2oo3, Tom Kinton

Just Enough

She walks there with the hope of a child, yet she is a woman of sixteen.

She knows fear; eats with it, sleeps with it, shrugs it off daily.

She slips through the crowded market in search of just enough; she has almost that much.

She brings home the just enough, prepares and shares it, and today it becomes just enough for them.

He comes and goes; works, maybe. Hopes a little. Stays away from the men and their ideas. He brings her some; it’s more than they had before. Some is enough.

They don’t talk about the future. Tomorrow is farther away then Now.

Now is complicated and simple at the same time. Now rakes across the embers of their life sorting the live coals from the dead and all the time they scoop the hotness together to keep themselves alive and warm. Now demands; screams; tortures them with choices.

They don’t care. Their children are hungry. They need more than they have but today they are together and they have just enough.

The Mr. Pepsi soldiers drive by and wave.

Her family will go to bed tonight and tomorrow they will all wake up, alive; together.

For now, that is just enough.

©Tom Kinton, 2003

The River at Babel

Black, now, and moving right to left from my window I see it. It carries the silt of civilization down the slowly sloping ground moving through the time we are apart.

This river does not know you, America. My anger and the blood of hundreds of thousands moves right to left with the current, moving away from my brief existence here and carrying cries of women, children and torture rooms away from this place; carrying out the badness; making room for something.

Black, now, and no moon. I see small waves of excitement and currents of hope across the carved channel of fish and thick water. The small children run across the water in my vision like nymphs in a seafarers dream, happy in their ignorance. They are carried through their lives on the currents of hope flowing inside the blackness of potential, unseen to most, visible from the right point of view.

This river does not know you, America. Our expectations, paradigms, rationales and excuses sink to the bottom of hundreds of thousands of years of culture and contention, discord and bargain; the give and take of life on the edge. Analogy and rhyme are lost inside of this river. Baselines of data echo off of the hard shapes of life here in this place, in this reality. The sonar pings of consultants and organizations deliver only the outline of a shadow of life twisted in the current of thirty years of this dark river flowing evil and twisting like the first serpent through this withered and untended garden.

Black, now, and no moon. I follow the pieces of a disposed country bobbing and floating next to the excitement and hope, sharing the space of time and life; Adam with Eve, Man with Woman, good with bad. I see them all from my window. The children of this place dance across the roofs of the torture chambers, play games with discarded rules and policies, take false aim at us with their squirt guns.

This river does not know you, America. Your intentions and plans, ideas, schemes and machinations take formed shape in the reticle of the rocket in the young boy’s hand as he squeezes off the lives of your sons and daughters. The boy knows this river. He knows that his time is now, not tomorrow; not waiting on your “almosts” and “studies” and “get back to you’s”. His intentions and plans, ideas, schemes and machinations run a full twenty-four hours out and no further. His long-term development consists of some dirt, a brick, a can of soda, and words of fear and hate and intolerance and rage, fueled by, of course, money.

Black, now, and no moon.

-30-

Copyright, Tom Kinton, June, 2003, Al-Hillah, Iraq

Tom Kinton was deployed with an Army unit in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Where are they?

Every morning I conduct a briefing for our coalition staff. Today was no different except at about 8:05 the building shook, which means something because we are in the basement of a very solidly-built building. Right down the hall from our office is one of Saddam’s bomb shelters. We sort of took the ‘boom’ in stride; we all try to fake confidence to different degrees. We went through the slides and after we finished I noticed that there was only one Iraqi in the room which isn’t normal because they try to get here before nine.

We just got word that the noise we heard was a car bomb at the Assassin’s Gate. What a pun. It’s also funny how we don’t know shit about what happens outside. We hear a big boom and just carry on with our day; then we get on the internet and see the corner less than three blocks from here with flaming cars and dead and dying bodies all around and after we check our email we see that the ‘officials’ are listing three wounded. Total. What a farce.

So Rana my secretary hasn’t shown up, along with her sister and about forty other Iraqis and the phone rings and Rana’s sister is shaking, trying to talk and telling me that they were in the car on the other side of the street when the bomb went off. I ask to talk to Rana but she is crying and can’t talk anymore. About an hour later, while I am in the middle of looking for the rest of our people, Rana calls me. She is still crying and telling me that her father is downstairs yelling at the TV that his daughters won’t go to work with the Americans anymore. I don’t blame him.

It’s 11 AM and I can’t account for two of my paid staff, and I have no way of finding them. I take a female staff member with me and we go out to the checkpoint to look for familiar faces in the line. We get out past the guards and see smoke everywhere, sort of like fog, but not right down to the ground. The line running up to the checkpoint is longer than usual, because when the bad guys pulled the detonator the green zone locked down all the entry points, and nobody could get to work. The line goes all the way out into the street.

The difference today is that the line doesn’t really stop, it sort of fades into a wider group of people who haven’t decided if they should come to work or keep watching in the direction of the bridge checkpoint and the car bombing. I don’t blame them, either.

I leave the staff member (consultant) at the last checkpoint and walk out into the slop and smoke that is Iraq. I think the Arabic word for trash can is Baghdad, and if you walked around here for a little while you might agree. It’s a mess. You walk through triple-strand on each side which looks more like some kind of machine designed to catch plastic trash bags and is fed by cigarette buts. But there are some good things about Iraq. In Iraq, hot food stays hot. In Iraq, cold food stays hot. In Iraq, everything’s a dollar. In Iraq we are the customer. The day after the war, in Baghdad, you could by a folding stock AK47 with two clips and ammo for a dollar. I guess Semtex is cheap too, because the word on this little street corner is that somebody used a thousand pounds of it today. It worked.

So you walk from the last US post through this gauntlet of trash and sharp steel wire and it fans out into the street just like the people looking for relatives among the dead and the living. I look, too. I’m looking for anybody I recognize so that I can sleep tonight: just found two in line. Both ladies, and both dependable employees. Good. Only 30 left.

I don’t see anybody else out here so I turn to walk back through the slowly moving shuffle of Iraqi workers who drove past twenty bodies worth of smoking human remains to pass through three checkpoints so they can earn ten dollars today. They mostly smile at me and I wonder what they really think when they notice that I am dangling an MP5 under my jacket and passing all of them. I get up to the Iraqi checkpoint, tell the guy ‘ani DOD’ make my way past the search booth for the ladies and the monster tea pot and back into my world.

I don’t know what they think of me. I can’t even imagine. They just put up with all of this and maybe it’s because this is better than then.

I wonder if it should bother me that none of this bothers me.

-30-

© Tom Kinton
Baghdad, Iraq, 2004

Rehan and a friend. 

Rehan

I see here waking and sleeping. Her smile takes the place of every piece of pain and each misstep I have made here. The image alone forgives and becomes more than forgiveness; it is reason in print; the meaning of everything for everyone. Rehan has become for me all of that. In Al-Hillah we lived at the gate to the ruins of Babylon. Our team went out every day for operational and administrative missions, and Rehan’s family lived just outside the gate guarded by anxious Marines. We first met her on top of an empty ziggurat; we were coming back from town and just decided to finally drive up and see what was there. When we got to the top she was there with her brother, and they had run up the side of the four hundred foot man-made mountain just to see us. The children spoke to us through our translator. They just wanted some cookies from our MRE’s. We gave them what we had and asked them if they wanted a ride down the hill in our humvees; Rehan sat on SSG Otero’s lap and ate her cookie on the way down. At the bottom of the hill we drove through the axle deep moon dust out onto the paved road, where we let Rehan and her brother out to go home. She ran across the road and brought her big sister (photo) who begged us through our translator to come to her house for dinner. We agreed to come back the next day.

On the next trip past Rehan’s house we saw her sister outside and stopped to say hi. She ran to the house and brought out her mother and father. They asked us to come that evening for a chicken dinner. We can’t stay out after dark so made plans to come back the next day for lunch. Rehan jumped up into SSG Otero’s lap and the smile on her face and Otero sitting there like the displaced father for all of us and the light in her face and the camera in my hand went off like an anti-depression grenade piercing our body armor and mending our hearts with nothing but the image of that smiling happy innocent child of everyone’s dream which fixed and transfixed us; killed us and baptized us and we came up out of the water the next day at their house for lunch.

She became for me all of this; the good, the bad, the hard, the soft, the heat and wind smoking our cigarettes for us; she was Iraq. She was (and is) what keeps me from the slow spiral down into the depression that could grip anyone here if they really thought about the job we have to do. It’s nothing, really. Just turn around a country which runs on fear like a train down a hill on greased track. Just grab on and stop it; turn it around in the right direction; push it up the hill to the switch and set everything right.

Rehan’s million-kilowatt smile turns me into superman; I grab onto the train of life here, put my head down, and push. We all do. Everybody has there own reason. My reason is Rehan.

©Tom Kinton, 2003

January, 2004 

Mr. Pepsi

Our feet dangle close to the pavement moving underneath the humvee along with the waves of heat and pieces of trash on this road into Al-Hillah. Today we are admin, going shopping. The convoys from Kuwait are spotty and our office is out of toner for the third day in a row. Al-Hillah has everything, and we are headed to where everything is, the suq. The suq is sort of like taking everything and everyone in Wal-Mart and putting them all in a garbage compactor, along with the garbage. It is May (or June, or July, or August) and we pass by the kids, who are everywhere. “Mr.! Pepsi!” they yell.

Mr. Pepsi has become the name that everyone calls us. Of course we know that they just want to sell it to us, but after thirty or fifty or a hundred missions like this it starts to sound like we all changed our names. Mr. Pepsi.

There are some good things about Iraq. In Iraq, everything’s a dollar. In Iraq, hot food stays hot. In Iraq, cold food stays hot. In Iraq, we are the customer, and our name is Mr. Pepsi.

We keep driving and reach the suq and pull up over the curb and onto the plaza. All of the kids know us and are close to us as we pull ourselves out of the trucks. They are all talking to us at the same time. We become more alert; two shooters per vehicle and the rest move into the suq to find the computer store and buy the toner. Now there are four guys surrounded by three hundred Iraqi’s of different ages and all with some sort of agenda.

They know that forty years ago Americans built a rocket, lit the fuse and ended up walking on the moon. So you would think it wouldn’t be a big deal when an older gentleman reaches through the crowd with a scrap of paper and asks in perfect Oxford English if we could use our Thuraya phone to call his brother in Canada and let him know that everything is ok.

Of course we want to, and of course we can’t. There are twenty other people yelling at us to make phone calls, asking for mai bareda (cold water), food, even the empty MRE pouches. They cut up the pouches and actually sew the plastic into handy little bags with handles. Then they sell them back to us for a dollar.

Mr. Pepsi buys everything for a dollar here.

The day after the war, in Baghdad, you could buy a folding stock AK74 with two clips and ammo for, you guessed it, a dollar.

Mr. Pepsi, Mr. Pepsi. “Beish?” “Thelatha dolar waheda” (three for a dollar). “Eindek thelidge? (Got ice)” La, La. No. No. Zein. Thelatha pepsi, minfudluk. This is how we kick start Iraq’seconomy, one dollar at a time.

The team comes back with the toner and three rotisserie chickens with bread so good it make you want to leave home and write bad checks just to buy it,.

The Mr. Pepsi soldiers load up into the humvees and say goodbye to the kids who should be in school. The shooters climb up into the trucks, one up on top and another in the front right seat. We pull out over the foot-high curb and drop down into the street again, merging into traffic. The cars are so close you can kick them; we sit sideways so you have to be careful not to catch your feet on a vehicle as it passes.

We drive out past the Polish compound that used to be a school, past the grain elevators with truckers waiting in line to dump their loads, and reach the outskirts of Babylon. More street vendors here: Mr. Pepsi, Mr. Pepsi. La, La. We drive on; passing through the wire and the guards and go to get fuel at KBR (they do everything here). Then back to the TOC to eat the chicken. With Pepsi.

©2003, Tom Kinton

The Reservist

There are over a hundred and thirty of them; away from home, young, nervous, playful at times. It’s not normal for them to be here. They’ll stay for a year, at least; maybe more if things change.

Each morning I see them getting ready. Their uniforms set them apart from the others. There are a few who would rather be somewhere else, but my job is to keep them all here, all together, and get them all home.

The training given me over the years helps. Task, condition, standard. Praise in public; counsel in private. Work smart. Respect, leadership, attention to detail. Each day I reinforce these traits they grow a little. I work them hard so they will make it. What they are required to do is simple, but the environment we are all in makes even the simple things difficult.

The environment is harsh; the toilets are a long ways away and work sometimes; the twenty minute lunch breaks split a long day into two unequal parts. It’s hot. There is no air conditioning. Fans help, but they can’t reach everyone. Guidance from higher-up is contradictory and sometimes (usually) illogical, and even though my job is to put a good face on all of this, they all know I see right through it. I do my job anyway. They do theirs.

Sometimes, thankfully not often, a letter goes home to parents. Everyone knows what it means. I hate to write them. I tell the parent I did everything I could; the reassurance is likely cold comfort.

At night, when they are sleeping, I am awake and thinking about the ones whose parents got the letter. I wonder if I could have done more. I think about my childhood: working, church, my morals and beliefs. They are used and challenged every day. Sometimes it seems like more than one person can do, but tomorrow I will get up and take them through the day again. Tonight I will write two more letters home. I’ll wonder if I could have done more. It’s late. I’ll finish grading their papers now.

It’s what I do.
I am a teacher.
They are in 7th grade.
©Tom Kinton, 2003