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.
-30-
©Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq
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.
-30-
©Tom Kinton, Baghdad, Iraq
posted by tomk at 8:28 AM
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