27 February 2004

PART IV - WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?

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Baghdad

My focus has changed inexorably.

I’m down to my last few weeks.

Last weekend saw the departure of the combat engineers who have been my friends and escorts since I arrived. They had been here about twice as long as originally ordered. This is a common hazard with overseas work, it seems, no matter the employer. They won’t be going straight back to Arkansas, but they’ll get there eventually, once they serve four to six weeks in Falluja pulling ordnance disposal duties (fairly light work, unless there’s an accidental discharge).

They asked me to join them at their going away drunk at the Al Rashid. And we did, for they bypassed the long and sobering lines at the bar in favor of bringing their own bottles, which seemed magically without bottom. These guys I will miss. Mostly lads, early twenties. The oldest was thirty-one. Reservist enlisted men. As quick to bitch as they were to laugh. Skillful and accomplished professionals. And really, how could I not like them – they were all buying motorcycles when they got stateside. Granted, the unanimous plan was for chromed out bar hoppers, but who was I to tell them the error of their ways.

I rarely have the same feeling about the officers. Too many of them are only so much management – large, bureaucratic, top heavy management.

Chuck left Baghdad this week as well. Pressure from home was more than his assignment here could bear, so he bugged out a few weeks early. Chuck’s departure marked the beginning of the end of we Ungrateful Whiners. Although three of us had left prior to Chuck, they were all replaced in due course. Chuck will not, nor will I, or anyone of the rest of us. The end of the Fellowship, if you’d like to think of it that way.

A rare fellowship, to be sure. This will be my twentieth season doing this work, and I have never been a part of such a group, with little prior contact or knowledge of one another, thrown into a bizarre and high pressure situation, and yet work so well together. The Whiners I’ll miss. Not enough to get me to re-up, but enough to compare all future alliances against. Well, there’s a little part of me that would re-up, but they would never meet my price of triple what they pay me now – plus weapons.

Many from our group will return. Both bachelors are eyeing the tremendous tax advantages of working overseas for 330 days in a year. Many more will return for just a couple of weeks about a month after we leave. Despite the best efforts of the scores of planners and bureaucrats walking the halls of the PMO, the contractors who will replace us won’t be announced until the week after we leave. As such, it will be another month before they get here. They’ll need some help in deciphering what we’ve done for the past five months. Good luck to them!

On this end, I've got fourteen days and a wakeup (as they say, but it’s not like I’m counting), and then fly back via Amman and Amsterdam to enjoy what's left of the Minnesota winter. I won't miss Baghdad.

I was at a going away bashment for the Senior Advisor for the Ministry of Water Resources two nights ago, hosted by the Minister of Water Resources, who asked me, "What is your favorite part of Iraq?" At this time, I'm not sure exactly where I went with the answer. I'm just glad I was sober enough to make up something in short order. Something like, “…blah, blah,.. people.. resource,… blah, blah,… opportunities,…”

How could I tell him that I’m still searching for a rhyme for “shithole”.

The appeal to this place is not what Iraq is, but what she was thirty years ago, and could become again – her potential. But today, the climate is unsuitable, there’s no rain, the predominant color is dirt, there’s little industry, the infrastructure is in tatters, let alone the fact that the CPA lifestyle is wholly unnatural, and there’s people trying to kill us.

What’s there not to like?

This limerick, for one. The meters way off, as well as the rhyme.

The palace sits beside the Tigris.
The mortars? Some day they may not miss.
If I weren’t in this shithole
I’d be eating fresh cannoli
And from afar the Mid-east I would dis.