BACK TO BAGHDAD, letter #1

BACK TO BAGHDAD, letter #1

Our guy in Baghdad is back for a second tour in economic assistance work!


T
aking attendance.
[La] Plus ca change . . . and so on. Think of this as an update of where I left things and people in June. My general feeling is that the streets look more normal than the news reports suggest, but this may be misleading. I hear more and larger explosions at night, perhaps because itr’s true or because I am on a side of the building that makes them more audible. I also sense an increasing tension and impatience between Americans and Iraqis on both sides. However, I am not confident in these observations. I’ve been here too short a time and too much of it has been under confinement.
Absent. Spider, the deeply grounded and intelligent PSD [a private security contractor] who had suffered PTSD, “relapsed,” becoming weirded out and generally berserk. He had to be sent away fast. Joker (Mike), the scrap iron PSD who loved classical music and wrote poetry apparently melted. He has been away over a month. He promised to return but now seems to be unreachable. David, the man-mountain who liked to weapon up and look for a good fight as a volunteer PSD even though he was a construction manager, was fired after playing PSD for a convoy near the border with Syria that may have resulted in the deaths of two Kurdish PSDs….
Sinan, the accountant/computer geek who supported his whole family and was anonymously threatened from inside the compound, has gone off to die … of AIDS (kindly called cancer here out of respect for his lifestyle and general delicacy). Kathy, the grandma director of the food services who also threw the best parties, went home to Texas, Frances, the Indian contractor who ran the kitchen is gone but apparently not replaced….
New kids in class. James has taken Spider’s role at the head of security. Like Spider, he has a strong special forces background, and came here one month after retiring from the Army. James does not seem weird enough to have a nickname or uptight enough to have the position. Even his 700 tatoos are like everyone else’s–no death heads and up to inches of his body undecorated…. Noor is the Iraqi daughter of doctor/hospital owner who stays in Iraq despite being kidnapped. She outearns her doctor mother 2:1 by making travel arrangements and translating here. Kay replaced Kathy. She is always perfectly coifed and manicured, but with skin that proclaims she is either 106 or has been abusing drugs since she was a kid–probably the latter. Layla, who, like Noor I met working for others on my last tour, lived in fear for her fatherless kids and begged me to help her get them out of Baghdad in exchange for teaching me to swear in Arabic. Alas, it is a skill I have lost and must regain, as Arabic cursing is both terrifically colorful and obscene well beyond our American forms. In my limited experience, I do not even know anyone who can perform the acts I used to be able to describe. Since Layla came here she has earned enough to send them to Kurdistan, where she has some family and they are safe.
Heartwarming confirmations. When you need laundry done, the housekeepers pick it up, identify it and you, with an Arabic note on a ripped scrap of paper, and return the finished laundry to you with the slip. When I looked on the back on my slip I saw the fine prose of our 250 page Iraqi Business Center Best Practices Manual. And the State Department told us our work was useless.
I’m installed in a spiffier room than before. Pretty much like any Ritz Carlton worldwide, e.g., it has walls. Anyway, my sofa and chairs have benefitted from the death of many naugas, the room was painted during this century (or at least the last). The shower is a bit smaller than the Ritz’s. It is a two foot square marked off on the bathroom floor and masked by a shower curtain the guage of the plastic bag in which the cleaners gives you back your pants. It pours into a drain in the middle of the room. Given my shape, I can only wash my stomache and butt on alternate Wednesdays.
Two people who were here before (including Sadi, the 7 of Diamonds and so far untouched, though I am thinking of ratting him out) have been promoted. In both cases, their first order of business seems to have been to install gold toilets (honest) and chandeliers (Sadi has three, talk about lipstick on a pig), plus “live-in maids.” Speaking of toilets–OK, it is a phony segue–some of the rooms here have become unoccupiable, because Sandi hired and housed a bunch of Turks to exploit on a local construction projectin the IZ. Turks work cheap and Iraqis are not allowed to work in official American government areas (one of the many ways we support economic rebuilding, social equity, and good will). Since the Turks are used to a floor toilet, they ripped out and discarded the toilets that were there so that they could go directly into the sewage pipes, throwing the useless toilets into the hall. I am imagining that if that Commie Nancy Pelosi causes the U.S. to ‘cut and run’, Halliburton may be able to help Iraq out through porcelain and glass sales–my last investment advice.
More cultural news on entrepreneurship. Except for our team, work habits here are somewhat “relaxed.” How many Iraqis does it take to change a lightbulb? Six, I think. One to give the order, one to threaten the worker’s family if he does not comply, one to supervise, and one to supervise the supervisor, and one to change the lightbulb, and of course a toilet salesman for the supervisor’s supervisor. Meanwhile, Jason, an American PSD, dreams of opening a Dairy Queen (which he will call Dairy King) in the Green Zone PX. It will feature his version of the blizzard, aptly renamed the sandstorm….
My first walk on Tigris–I’ve had only one so far–show that the green glassy river has been replaced by something that looks like the lumpy gravy remains of a bad Thanksgiving meal at a coffee shop. I am guessing the river’s condition is seasonal and soon will revert. And the food, let’s just say that if I stay long enough I will be able to wash my whole self in the shower at once. Anyway, that is not why I’m here. As my pal Hunter Thompson used to say, I am, after all, a professional….
Changed tone? So far, Americans seem less of a presence in Baghdad that before, actually replaced by Iraqi soldiers in many places….
Things seem to be returning to abnormal following the Saddam verdict…. The hourlong flight from Amman, including time spent waiting, took ten hours, from 4 am to 2 pm. And, of course, I worked form 2:30 to about midnight, with various drop-ins to say hi. I could not sleep, so I was up for the call to prayer at 4 am the next day. I could hear it for the first time ever in Baghdad–because there was a strict lock-down anticipating the verdict. I love the first call to prayer. Now I listen for it every morning. It is… quiet, beautiful, and eerie in a way you never quite can get used to. The lockdown and anticipation of security “issues” continued following the verdict, screwing up our State meetings. After the announcement, there was much gunplay and firing into the air. Apparently lockdown means different things to different people. There probably now are Iraqi deaths attributable to bullets falling through the top of the head. (I think Israeli conservatives bent on destroying the Palestinian population need only find ways to make them happy–they will shoot themselves to death. This probably would work better than the current policy.) Despite the curfew, people around here gathered in the streets in small knots to talk . If you watched CNN carefully, you saw my current neighborhood, literally what I see out my window. It also is well described in Packer’s Assassins’ Gate….
By | 2006-11-10T20:15:00-05:00 November 10th, 2006|Blog|0 Comments

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