Tuesday, October 21, 2003

16:00 – Baghdad. The back hurts large. Could be an after affect of the Anthrax booster I received this morning. Could be from sitting in an evil Iraqi chair for twelve hours a day. Could be the bad bed and little sleep in Baghdad Central, code for the too huge bedroom I share with a hundred others. Some of the crew have already moved into better billets, so I expect a similar upgrade within a week.

We need an upgrade in the office, as well. The eighteen foot cube now has eleven in it, and we spent an hour this morning optimizing what little space we have. Tomorrow, two more from Baker arrive, and we have no place to seat them, let alone the fourteenth due to arrive at the end of the week. With another table (if we could scrounge one from who knows where, we’ve already scrounged the best we can), we could fit the additional two slated for tomorrow, but this place is packed as it is, and we’ll be at each other’s throats soon. The murmurs are in the background, like crowded rats before they start cannibalizing the pack.

And speaking of food, at lunch, some of the entrees looked familiar (the bacon cheeseburger, grilled cheese, and Chicken Kiev, to be exact). It’s a process that, unless the work stays interesting, is sure to drive me stark raving. Wake, shower, work, breakfast, work, lunch, work, supper, work, two beers at the Al Rashid, sleep, repeat.

Oh, did I say, “Al Rashid”? I must have.

After days in Kuwait drinking near beer and fake bacon (chicken bacon, veal bacon, beef bacon, lamb bacon,…), I was actually looking forward to a couple of beers at the Al Rashid, a (formerly Iraqi Government owned but now a) U.S. Government hotel at the north end of the Green Zone. Gary found a Sport Ute somehow and we motored there after work.

My prior impression was that it would be full of alcoholic press people, hard luck reporters with a hard nose for hard news and a hard hankering for hard liquor, like the press club in Year of Living Dangerously, only more drunk.

Nothing of the sort. The drunkest thing there was, well, nothing. It was all very sober. And not well attended at that. You would think that the only bar in Baghdad (the Green Zone anyway, home of at least 10,000 folks) could pull in better than 15 people on a week night. At least, that’s what I thought, so I was a bit surprised when we were much of the crowd there.

Two half liter lagers later and we were done, and drove back to the palace down mostly dark and deserted streets, through unmanned checkpoints, past quietly idling tanks, the city deathly still.

Throughout the day, there’s a real bustle going on at the palace. The marble walls echo each voice and footfall to generate a steady roar all day long. Eleven working consultants in a small room is annoyingly loud from six to twenty (morning to night, as they say). But the streets of the Baghdad Green Zone are silent after dark.

Except for the gunfire.

Really, it’s no worse than the Ankeny house on a Sunday morning, when small arms would report from small-armed Reservists at Fort Dodge and over the lake. For me, as long as the noise comes from outside of the relatively distant wall, I’ve no problem. And there’re a few thousand well armed servicemen here to keep it that way.