Axis of Evil World Tour - An American's Travels in Iran, Iraq and North Korea

by Scott Fisher

  Driving from place to place in the vast, walled-off compounds revealed how comfortable life had been for the dictator and his elite. Though Hussein kept on the move for many of his final years in power, shifting places every couple of days to avoid attacks, being able to use such facilities, or at least know your family and valued underlings could use them, must have helped make life on the run a little easier to bear.

  Groundhog Day

  When I first arrived, people told me to expect life to be like that old Bill Murray movie, Groundhog’s Day, where he wakes up every morning to the exact same day. After frantically learning the job and hoping nothing would go wrong the first couple of weeks, by weeks three and four everything had settled down into first a stable, then a pretty boring, routine.

  About the only time things would liven up was when shockwaves from car bombs and mortars rattled the hell out of the windows and trailers. After a while even those started to get old. I found myself sleeping through some, working through others. Unless one really blasted the glass in the office window, three feet from our faces, we never even bothered with the blast shield. It ended up only coming down at night so I wasn’t silhouetted for snipers.

  Over time, I really came to enjoy the downtown Baghdad view out our window. More mornings than not, I found myself starting the day by staring off at the distant cityscape. I watched as smoke billowed here and there from car bombs and the previous night’s fighting. In the air above, pairs of Black Hawks buzzed by, returning from night missions or ferrying people through the dawn sky. The morning call to prayer from a nearby mosque always added an exotic soundtrack.

  Perhaps the hardest thing to get used to as November turned to December was the cold. Having seen all the media coverage about the ferocious desert heat I was surprised by how low the temperature started to get. During the day it wasn’t bad, usually in the upper 40s or 50s, but night, in a barely heated trailer, got damn cold – occasionally even dipping below freezing. Even better was waking up in the middle of the night, peeling off the heavy blanket, and having to head outside and down the street to use an unheated latrine. The cold poured in as soon as the blanket came off. Worse still were the same walks in the morning, knowing a cold shower awaited. Thirty degrees is one thing when you’re leaving your heated home to get into your heated car. It’s quite another standing naked in a cold-water shower.

  Of course, I wasn’t out in the desert for days at a time living in the dirt trying to avoid getting shot – the cold was just a surprise. The mortar fire and hostile locals were things I expected and was fine with; it just felt weird to be cold in a place normally associated with overwhelming heat. From talking to others, and seeing what clothes they had brought, I wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Heading to Baghdad in the winter? Don’t forget a jacket and warm blanket.

  Another part of life in Iraq that struck me odd was the almost complete lack of contact with any actual Iraqis. Other than the calls to prayer in the distance, I could’ve almost been at a base in some really dangerous part of a U.S. city. Sure, there were a couple of areas inside the camps where Iraqi merchants operated souvenir shops (mainly pirated DVDs, plus a wide selection of holsters, hookah pipes, and ‘Persian’ carpets), plus there was the occasional group of Baghdadi cleaners, but you really never saw that many locals. You could speak more Arabic in DC or Dearborn, Michigan than on a coalition post in Baghdad.

  One thing the few Iraqis we dealt with did do a lot of was money changing. The Iraqi currency had nosedived under sanctions and with the start of the war. More than a few people I worked with had bought hundreds or thousands of dollars in Iraqi currency hoping it would someday regain its value and they could get a 100 or 1000 percent return on their investment. This speculation delighted the local Iraqis, who could make an easy commission simply by exchanging their nearly worthless dinar for valuable dollars.

  The oddest encounters with the Iraqis came when you ran into a cleaning crew in one of the buildings. As you passed the first one would yell, “traffic” and everyone else would stop cleaning and back away so you could comfortably pass. It would take those guys forever just to mop a few flights of stairs because of having to stop and scurry out of our way every time someone walked by. It made me feel weird, like I was some sort of king banishing the rabble from my presence. I finally got to the point where I just avoided the crews, feeling silly to have people back away like I was some kind of reincarnated Hussein.

  Of course, rumors were also rife that many Iraqis on base were really working for terrorist groups and inside only to scout us for weaknesses and try to improve the targeting of the mortars. And I’m sure that was true in some cases. But the main thing I remember from talking to those guys was the look on some of their faces when I asked whether it was dangerous when they left base and went home. There were stories of killings, bombings, and ‘disappearances’ that painted a truer picture of what was happening than anything I ever heard in the media. Some of those people were scared to death to leave base – they knew that working where they did meant execution, for them and their families, if the wrong people ever got wind of it. I’m sure many would have happily stayed on base for good if they hadn’t been kicked out every evening before nightfall, or needed to take their earnings home to support their family. For me, the limited contact with Iraqis seemed a weird, isolated way to ‘experience’ a country. Though I met and spoke with more locals than I did in North Korea, it seems odd and insufficient to count such isolation as having truly visited a country.

  Though I was feeling isolated on post, people back home took to emailing and asking my opinion about conditions in the country. Most people, especially the Fox News watchers, were wondering if conditions were improving more than they were hearing. It was as if they saw in me a route to the ‘true’ story that the media was ignoring.

  I hadn’t been around long enough to make many comparisons, so I could only report what I saw and heard. I wrote home about the guy I replaced, and others who’d been in-country even longer, telling stories of sightseeing in Babylon and going to dinners at restaurants downtown when they first arrived. Luxuries that people in late 2004, when I was there, would have thought insane and the authorities would have no doubt tried to prohibit. I told them how during my first couple of weeks in camp I watched as most offices and public buildings (theater, gym, etc.) had their windows sandbagged and blacked out. Or I told them about the towering, shrapnel-blocking cement barriers going up around the dining hall and near some of the living quarters. I’m no military genius, but I doubted any of those precautions meant things were getting better, or were expected to, anytime soon.

  All that was aside from the reports I was reading, or the opinions of the analysts I was working with and talking to. They, of course, had a variety of interpretations on how the war was going and how best to proceed. But they did all agree on one thing, and that was their frustration at the ongoing bureaucratic tussles, or ‘reorganizations’, ordered by those in charge. As commanding officers rotated in and out, each seemed intent on reinventing the wheel and staking their own claim to resources and personnel. People grew increasingly frustrated as the infighting interfered with the progress and patience of those doing the actual work of the war.

  To me, all the frustration was best summed up in an angry exchange between two Army intel lieutenants I worked with and had originally met back in training in the U.S. (where they’d shown me how to wear my uniform and carry some of the gear we’d been issued).

  “I’m glad the troopies on the ground know what in the hell they’re doing, because no one around here knows jack shit!”

  To which his friend answered, without skipping a beat, “Yeah, I don’t ever want to be promoted above captain, because that lobotomy sure must hurt.”

  Of course, to their superiors this frustration was normal. I remember one meeting when a big shot summed up the thoughts at his level with, “The troops are bitching, so things must be going right.” A comment that surprised me,
but didn’t seem to phase anyone else.

  I’m not a military man, but all the infighting seemed a curious way to run a war. The people I felt for most were the majors and warrant officers, always seemingly caught in the middle. They were often trusted and confided in by those below them, yet also most directly tasked with implementing and enforcing the decisions made by those above.

  Since I was basically in charge of my own office, with a lot of latitude as long as the job got done, I had a front row seat to everything that was happening, though without getting too caught up in it myself. To me, the oddest, most ironic, and in many ways the most irritating point, was that for all of the energy expended on bureaucratic tussles and reorganizing, and the frustration it created, nothing ever really seemed to change; tomorrow also seemed to be the same as yesterday. Nearly everyone was busting their ass, working as long as possible and doing whatever it took to help, but things outside the wire just seemed to keep getting worse.

  For me, coming from a pre-government employment background where I had mainly worked on my own, the fixation with turf battles and internal politics was new, sickening, and oddly entertaining. Of course, ‘entertaining’ in the way people slow down to look at traffic accidents.

  I got a more personal taste one day in early December when some admin people came to look at my office. After checking the size and confirming that only three of us worked there (in an office meant for 8-12), they asked if I would mind giving up some space so they could move in a couple of other ‘components’ – government-speak for ‘people’.

  When I readily agreed, they looked at me like I was nuts. To me, we had plenty of room and it seemed like common sense, especially as many of our office’s responsibilities had already begun to ‘devolve’ to other outfits. To some of the admin people however, my decision was surprising and naïve. To them I was committing bureaucratic hari-kari by so easily surrendering space in an office turf battle. After seeing the surprise on their faces, I briefly thought about changing my mind and blazing a no-go line in front of the office door, but soon realized I just didn’t care. If it made sense for someone to join us in the palace office, let’em in.

  So, other than the increased turf tussles and declining work flow, not much separated one day from another. Once adjusted to life on a military base and in a warzone, the days and weeks simply rolled by without much change.

  Search for Excitement

  Visit to Baghdad International

  After a few weeks on base I was starting to feel cooped up. Things were under control at the office and I’d gotten a pretty decent handle on the camp. The big lake in the middle, various palaces, and neighboring bases had all been interesting at first, but that was fading. Walking through the nominally off-limits Baath Party headquarters, where the ‘shock and awe’ air war was first unleashed, had also started off intriguing. But after several weeks solid in the same confined area I was dying for a change.

  Plus, I wanted a drink. General Order #1 for U.S. forces in Iraq, government, civilian, and military alike, prohibits owning or drinking alcohol. It was a rule perhaps even more widely ignored than the speed limit. The hard part, moderately hard anyway, was actually finding a place to buy an item obviously not stocked by the PX or sold, openly anyway, by the base’s Iraqi merchants.

  After some investigating I soon learned about a duty free store on the commercial, Iraqi (i.e. not the part controlled by the U.S. military) side of Baghdad’s airport. Apparently, the place sold alcohol no questions asked, plus the country’s general lack of law and order meant that no one made a fuss if you wandered, without a ticket, into the part of the airport’s departures area that housed duty free.

  So, one slow day about three or four weeks in, a couple of co-workers and I jumped in the office Land Cruiser and headed towards the airport. We flitted from base to base, inside the wire for most of the trip.

  As we neared the airport, we exited the bases and I finally got my first chance to go into the ‘real’ Iraq. The last part of our drive even took us along Route Irish, the media-dubbed ‘Road of Death’ that so often rattled our office windows with car bomb explosions. This was the only time in Iraq that I took out my weapon with the idea I might actually use it. A year before I’d been an English teacher and grad student, now my little Beretta was the vehicle’s sole ‘protection’. Both of the guys I worked with were contractors and forbidden by the terms of their contract from being issued weapons. Ironically, both were ex-military and probably knew a hell of a lot more about how to use that little 9-mil than I did.

  I kept the Beretta in one hand and a clip at the ready in the other hand (no reason to load it and accidentally shoot my foot off). My eyes scanned the area and approaching vehicles just like they’d taught us in training. I pictured myself, also as they’d taught us in training, loading quickly and firing through the window. I had practiced all of this during the pre-deployment weapons and evasive driving training course back in the States and now everything came flooding back. It was an invigorating change after the monotony of the office but luckily, other than a little extra adrenalin, nothing showed up.

  From the street, Baghdad International, though somewhat dusty and barren, looked like any other large international airport. We rolled by the two wings of the main commercial-side terminal before bringing our vehicle into the parking garage. Other than the little sunlight that filtered into the basement level, there was little light other than from our headlights. Piles of debris lay here and there, and everything looked decrepit and run down. Adding to the image of destruction and abandonment, the whole parking garage smelled like a sewer.

  We got out and, feeling our way carefully in the dim light, made our way to the stairwell. We first headed to the top of the parking garage for some pictures of the main terminal. Once at the top we had a great view and I lined up in front of the sign for the obligatory ‘Baghdad International Airport’ photo. After the cheesy photo-op we headed to the airport entrance.

  The terminal was nearly empty except for a line of U.S. government contractors waiting for their chartered flight out of the country. After a brief pang of jealousy – it must be nice to have regularly scheduled flights instead of having to wait around for hours or days, we continued further into the airport. A short distance away we came across a small line of Iraqis and foreigners waiting in a different line for one of the airport’s few commercial flights. Baghdad International actually offered a couple of domestic flights, plus an international connection to Jordan. So yes, you too can vacation in Iraq.

  We now headed into the Nineveh wing of the terminal. The two main wings were labeled Samarra and Nineveh in honor of the historical importance of those Iraqi cities. After walking for only a couple of minutes the lines and people at the main entrance were far behind. The three of us walked alone down the eerily quiet corridor.

  Rounding a corner we suddenly came into the heart of the Nineveh wing. Dim light filtered down onto frayed carpets and worn tile. Empty check-in counters stood awaiting a revitalized country. The atmosphere was hushed and menacing. We paused and glanced at each other, then skirted past the counters toward the departure area.

  Now empty, we quietly walked past the security check that would have been the farewell point for years of travelers and families. Next came the abandoned passport control desks, now dusty and covered in grime. Once around them it was down a short hall until we finally hit the departure area. Dead ahead we saw the promised duty free shop, while to the sides were closed up restaurants and empty waiting areas.

  I looked around a bit (partly for a rumored new restaurant serving steaks and cocktails), then joined the others in the store. To one side were displays of holsters, ‘tactical gloves’, and other mildly useful items for those new to a warzone. Aside from that little section though, imported alcohol dominated the shop – the managers obviously knew their market.

  As we stocked up, a couple of other foreigners quietly came and went, both seemingly visiting the airport for the
same purpose. Keeping in mind we had to be able to smuggle anything we bought into our hootches, bottles proved far more popular than cases of beer. And, like all duty free shops, Nineveh Duty Free proved more than happy to take dollars. After making our purchases, including some special orders for co-workers left behind at the office, we carefully hid everything in a couple of backpacks and returned to the departure area.

  On the way out, we ran into a couple of cleaners, both fascinated by my digital camera and its ability to show the pictures on its screen as soon as I took them. We talked for a bit, in broken English and my barely-existent Arabic, and I took their pictures. Though they didn’t know anything about digital cameras, each of them had a Yahoo email account and asked me to send them the photos. When I asked what they thought of the war and ongoing unrest they looked around, thought about it a minute, then avoided the question. Instead, they decided to ask me if I’d give them my camera. Surprised at first, I soon got the point – stupid, dangerous questions bring nonsense answers and silly requests.

  After that it was back outside to the truck, difficult to find in the gloom of the dim parking garage. We piled in, made sure no contraband was visible to security, and headed out. We drove around the airport once more for extra pictures – it was strange seeing green highway signs, the exact same kind you see in the U.S., pointing to ‘Baghdad’.