Back To School: My Book Report & How I Spent Four Summers

Hey guess what? I'm having my Groundhog day. I'm in Virginia again, for the third week-long assignment in a row. Ick. If anybody ever wants to travel to Vienna, VA, I know all the good restaurants. I forgot my camera, so even if I wind up doing something interesting, I won't be able to share any images. I'm probably not going to do much though. I might go see another concert on Saturday; there's a band I really like named Louis XIV playing.

But I finally got around to reading a book which I'd touted here waaaay back in October aught 6. I'd been wanting to read it for a very long time, but I think I felt like I was still too close to my own experiences in Iraq, so I kept putting it off. I don't know exactly why I finally decided to pick it up, other than that I just needed something to bring to Virginia with me. At any rate, after I finished reading it, I went to the author's website and dropped him the following note:

I just finished your book... I lived in Baghdad (successively in a hotel in the Karradah district, the VVIP airport terminal, and in the Green Zone) for three years, from August 2003 through October 2006. Since I left, the level of both stupidity and insanity which I witnessed there slowly seeped away from my daily consciousness, until I was almost fit for normal human company again. Reading your book was an extremely engaging experience for me as it not only brought all of those old emotions back, but additionally shed some new light on the chaotic events that went on around me which I did not fully understand at the time.

Uh... thanks?

Which about sums it up. It's an excellent book in that I believe he really went out of his way to be as impartial and as nice as possible to the people he was writing about, which in the end only made their grand stupidities even more painful to read. Having lived there during the period about which he wrote, (The CPA's tenure in control of the reconstruction of Iraq led by Paul Bremer from 2003 to 2004) it added another layer of emotion which I find to be inexplicable. For instance, there was an incident near my company's compound in the Green Zone one time while I was covering for Rodney there while he was on his vacation. Rodney was the Irish scalawag friend of mine who'd had a friend working in Iraq who got us all jobs there in the first place back in August aught 3.

Anyway, one night the Green Zone incoming alarm went off, followed by a warning to all CPA employees to stay out of the streets of the Zone. Word came down to us that an American had been stabbed right out in the open inside the Green Zone and that the army was searching for the terrorist that had somehow snuck in and done it. We never heard anything else about it and, with so many other crazy things going on all the time, it was quickly forgotten about. Well, Rajiv wrote about that incident in his book. Apparently it had been quickly discovered that the stabbing was done by a fellow American; the two men had been having a drunken brawl or something. This news was hushed up, and that was that. It seems that the powers that be would rather have had us believe that an insurgent was loose in the Green Zone than admit the truth, and I'm not even really sure why. But I'll tell you one thing, when I read that, I laughed my ass off. I'd always kind of wondered about that stabbing, and it was an unexpected release of, something, when I read what had really happened, over four years later now.

That was one of just a few incidents that I was around for which he writes about from an insider's perspective. He wrote about the bombing of the United Nations building, which had happened just a week after my arrival in Baghdad. One funny incident that he wrote about was when the Iraqi Soccer team won an important match against Saudi Arabia. That night, the Americans inside the Green Zone freaked out when they heard an insane amount of gunfire coming from the city just outside their 12 foot high protective barriers; they all ran for bunkers and basements thinking that this was it, the Iraqis were storming the Green Zone. It was my second night in Baghdad and we were staying in a hotel downtown, NOT protected by the concrete blast walls of the Emerald City. We were inside, probably playing cards or eating strange and greasy local food or who knows what, when a CRAPLOAD of gunfire began right outside on our street. Dave, Scott and I were kind of like, aw hell, we're going to die on our second night here? Rip off. Ironically, my future boss-who-is-now-in-prison was there too; it's where I first met him. Dave tried to lock himself in the bathroom, Scott was standing in the hallway trying to figure out what good hiding was going to do, and I was under me bed. Phil (my future boss) was in his room, gesticulating at all of us urgently (and creepily) to come into his room while holding out a bottle of Jim Beam; I think that he was thinking that hell, if we're going to die we might as well party first. (That, incidentally, should have tipped me off about him right away.) We heard someone walking through the courtyard of our hotel, bullet shells dropping onto the tiles. Oh God oh God oh God, this is it. Phil's security guard walked in with a big grin, because he'd just been outside joining in with the celebratory gunfire over Iraq's victory in the soccer match. I wrote about that in less detail at the time here.

One that really got me was the bombing of the Green Zone Cafe and then the Market on October 14th 2004. I knew that date off the top of my head, and could have told anyone who asked when that happened without having to look it up. I'd quit my first job in Iraq and began working for Phil on October 12th, 2004. Rajiv called the market and cafe bombings the beginning of the end of the CPA staff's illusions in the Green Zone (I'm paraphrasing). I'd been to the cafe with Scott a few times, and we'd frequented the market during that summer. I think I also wrote about that in a mass email at the time, here. (This other page that I keep linking to by the way is a companion blogpage where I posted a bunch of mass emails I'd sent to friends and family from my early days in Iraq, before I had a blog) I was two blocks away from the market when a suicide bomber blew himself up, along with one of my favorite shops there; A tent where a nice old Iraqi man and a young Iraqi John Lennon lookalike sold songbirds and various other bric-a-brac.

It was a sobering omen of what was to come, and it certainly saddened me in ways that few other bombings which I was around for did. For the remaining two years that I was there, every time I drove by the area where the market used to be, I shook my head like an old man, and even indulged in a tut-tut occasionally.

But these are some of the moments I felt while reading his book because of how I experienced them, not what the book is really about. It's really about how the Bush Administration not only did NOT have a real plan for Iraq after his wrong-headed war, but how even more egregiously they sent people over to fix the country they'd just demolished who were chosen for their jobs because of their affiliation and loyalty to the Republican party. People who actually understood Iraq and what needed to be done were short-shrifted, shunted aside, even fired and removed in favor of Bush loyalists, most notably Jay Garner for Paul Bremer but also hundreds of others. Quoting from the book jacket:

...the case of the 24 year old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad's stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe [other] Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons specialists from defecting to Iran! (that's my favorite one, by the way); Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe vs. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer's ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule.

Of course I wasn't even close to being directly involved in any of that stuff, but I was around for it and witnessed a lot of the side effects. I heard all the talk... the Green Zone was a small community in those days. I highly recommend 'Imperial Life In The Emerald City'  by Rajiv Chandrasekaran as a clear minded journal of one of the most embarrassing moments in American history. And yes, I was a part of it in my own small way. Yay.

On a final note, I want to say that one of my proudest moments in Iraq was when I got to be rude to Paul Bremer. Dave, George, Scott and I were eating dinner in the CPA building when who should walk right by our table, but Paul Bremer and Dan Rather, followed by a gaggle of reporters and suck-ups on their way to a quiet corner of the Republican Palace for an interview. As I saw him coming, I loudly whistled Darth Vader's theme. For my trouble I was rewarded with a sharp look from Bremer and some very frightening glares from his body guards. In retrospect, especially after reading this book, I realize that he was not so much a Dark Lord as an opportunistic incompetent, and it would have been more apropos to whistle the Animaniacs' theme.

Comments

[Miss Luongo]

I like the guy who wants to have drinks before he's shot dead in a hotel room in a country he has no business being in and will probably get kicked out of and jailed. That's a great character.

[messiestobjects]

Yeah... character. That's what all of the investigating officers and news reports had to say about him.

He was also a raving lunatic. He could be really nice and generous one minute, (His Iraqi employees were the highest paid Iraqis for equivalent work in the Green Zone) and frothing at the mouth about something ridiculous the next.

[Miss Luongo]

Well, having character and being a character are distinctly different. One allows for "raving lunatic" and the other doesn't.

[messiestobjects]

I know I know... I'm just being wry because of all the insanity I had to put up with from that guy, in between all of the other insanity going on inside the Interzone.

Interzone is my personal name for the Green Zone; William Burroughs renamed Tangiers to Interzone in his novel Naked Lunch. Tangiers was an International Zone at the time, which is what they tried changing the name of the Green Zone to after Paul Bremer and the CPA (C.an't P.roduce A.nything) left.

[linus r.]

Perhaps all of us should stay away from Iraq, and instead just hang out with Farida at the Queen Beatrix Palace in the Netherlands....
http://www.faridamaqam4u.com/index_en.php

now that's my cup of tea....

[messiestobjects]

Sounds like a hoot. Ah, the dulcet squealings of traditional Arab music... How I miss them.

[Sissy]

"As I saw him coming, I loudly whistled Darth Vader's theme."

Priceless. Better than the movies.

[messiestobjects]

It was pretty sweet. Also, rather unheard of... most people over there were blustering Republicans. Negative talk about Operation Freedom To Be Occupied was frowned upon. Scott, Jeff and I especially always felt rather out of place.

[Sissy]

Speaking of Mr. Vador, this is my fave Eddie Izzard number.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw

[messiestobjects]

Eddie Izzard is funny. Weird and funny.

But speaking of Star Wars humor...

[linus r.]

I saw a copy of this book at the local Costa Mesa library, thanks for the recomendation.... I'll check this out eventually....

[Richard Kelly]

"But speaking of Star Wars humor..."

Feh - this one rocks the cock like Krista Now.

[messiestobjects]

Glad my book report turned someone on to reading it! Mrs. Wright would be so proud of me. You'll have to let me know what you think of it, linus.

I'm sorry Richard Kelly, but Southland Tales was so bad that nothing you ever say again will carry any weight. And while James Earl Jones doing his pimp voice is funny in a sort of default sort of way, it doesn't go for that gut laugh like something like this does.

[Richard Kelly]

You take that back or I'll have a jetliner dropped on your head and your stash of child porn discovered!

[Richard Kelly]

Wow, why'd it post twice? Did I open up another rip in the space-time continuum?!

I gotta watch that.

[messiestobjects]

What are you talking about? You're weird, Donnie. Why you gotta go all smart on us?

[Richard Kelly]

Whatever. None of this changes the fact that James Earl Jones and I are pimps - and pimps don't commit suicide.

[messiestobjects]

I'm afraid I can no longer discuss this with you. I could lose my job.

[Miss Luongo]

I'm worried that I might have the sort of amnesia Boxer Santaros had. You know, the kind where you remember everything.

[Richard Kelly]

Try twiddling your fingers comedically.

It won't help, but it'll make me laugh! I'll let you do it in my next movie! Repeatedly!

[Miss Luongo]

I'll nuance my performance by bugging my eyes out and shifting them quickly from side to side. It's a trick I learned from watching professional wrestlers.