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
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
posted by tomk at 8:09 AM
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