June 2009 Archives
TASH, ANBAR PROVINCE - When Marines leave a city, they do not leave neatly. They are not raptured up, riding ghostly Humvees and MRAPs to the next life, and leaving behind nothing but the imprints in the sand where their bases stood. The process is ugly, and it is what I have come to this base -- a small one, with not more than a few dozen Marines -- to see today.
Read MoreKARMAH - Lt. Peter Brooks, the infantry officer at the base I wrote about a few days ago, flattered me with an invitation to speak to his Marines. Brooks teaches an SAT class, and he wanted me tell them about good writing. I was nervous. I have never taught anyone anything. I did, however, remember the description Kurt Vonnegut, a veteran teacher of writing, gave of his job: he said each student had a spool of paper lodged at the base of his tongue. All Vonnegut had to do was gently open the student's mouth, pull the end of the paper out little by little, and sit with the student see what was written on it.
Read MoreFALLUJAH -- I was sure he would cancel the meeting. The night was intensely dusty. Blizzard-like conditions made driving hazardous, even at the single-digit speed limits posted in some areas around the Marine base. But the Mayor of Fallujah defied the elements, penetrated a gauntlet of security checkpoints, and showed up on base to talk with the Americans anyway. The ePRT members and one Marine gratefully set a table for him: water, Fanta, and individually wrapped Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, each secure and inviolate in a shield of plastic.
Read MoreKARMAH -- A dispatch by Rod Nordland of the New York Times asks whether the violence in Fallujah -- lately viewed as a model of an Anbar city pacified and handed over to the Iraqis -- is really in remission. His excellent report, filed from Fallujah and from the even more restive nearby town of Karmah, where I just spent two days, leaves the question unanswered but suggests a reality darker than the version the Marines describe.
Read MoreFALLUJAH -- Every Marine officer who sees me reading The Ugly American (another MWR library treasure) nods in recognition and asks me what I think of it. At first I thought the Marine Corps had recruited an unusually bookwormish class of junior officers. Later, a lieutenant told me it was on the Marines' required reading list. I can think of few better texts for their curriculum.
Read MoreFALLUJAH - Anbar may no longer be Iraq's most dangerous province, but it is still the dustiest. If you are imagining a constant powdery film that settles lightly over everything, you have at best a partial appreciation of the juggernaut of particulate that can, and does, stop all productive activity for days on end, when the desert feels like coughing up a real storm. Yesterday started with blue skies. By sundown, they started going orange:
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FALLUJAH - In 2004, I asked my friend Yasir al-Gabara, an Iraqi Christian, whether pork was cheap here. He said no: very few Iraqi butchers stock it, so it tends to be an expensive and rare treat. Yasir's father was a chef for Saddam, and the proud son knew something about the food business and about butcher's bills. "Beef is more expensive than lamb, and pork is more expensive than beef," he said. Then, with a grin, "but most expensive of all is American contractor."
Read MoreA MARINE BASE NEAR FALLUJAH -- When media describe Fallujah as "an insurgent stronghold outside Baghdad," they don't quite convey just how close the cities are. A fast car (if you don't have a fast car in Iraq, I recommend getting one) will bring you from one city to the other in considerably less than half an hour. The first time I made the trip, I was fiddling with my bags and hadn't even buckled my seat belt when we arrived on the edge of Fallujah, at a gas station full of men giving me icy stares.
Read MoreTHE INTERNATIONAL (ex-"GREEN") ZONE, BAGHDAD - In war reporting, the cliche is to pronounce any violence-free day "eerily calm," and then to survey the atmosphere for all its most exotic and menacing details: the "muezzin in the distance"... the "streets, empty of vendors and children"... the "locals," "biding their time."
Baghdad is calmer than at any time since I have known it. But there's nothing eerie about it: it's just sleepy and tired. It's as if a massive, citywide carbon monoxide leak set everyone into a profound torpor.
Read MorePassenger terminal, an air base in Kuwait - I wrote earlier about how all big military bases resemble each other somewhat. What makes Kuwait distinctive is its volume of traffic. At any given time it hosts an enormous transient population of contractors and servicemen. Outside its passenger terminal, blue signs indicate where to line up for destinations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those destinations -- a couple dozen in all -- are the sites of this war and the temporary homes of tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel.
Read MoreAn air base in Kuwait -- The State of Kuwait looks a bit like Darth Vader's helmet in profile, with Darth looking west, away from the Persian Gulf. Kuwait City is where Darth's ear would be, and somewhere inland toward his brow is a U.S. military base from which soldiers, contractors, and embedded journalists deploy at a rate of roughly two thousand per day.
Read MoreOver southern Iraq -- I first flew over Iraq in November 2004, when the country was still in flames. From my KLM seat I could literally see some of those flames below me. The in-flight map indicated we were passing over Fallujah, and bright flashes from enormous explosions illuminated the ground. No other passenger seemed to notice. (For a few minutes I felt delusional, like John Lithgow or William Shatner in The Twilight Zone.) Watching the flashes was exactly like looking up in the minutes before a storm to see lightning pass from thunderhead to thunderhead -- except these flashes were 35,000 feet beneath me, and the skies above were starry and calm.
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