AN
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER NINE. IRAQ: Even if You Turn This Country
Into Heaven
Donovan,
the gunner in my Humvee, was on his second overseas deployment
in one and a half years. Shipped to Iraq almost immediately
after a stint in Afghanistan, he was bitter in a resigned,
almost imperceptible way. I asked him what usually happens
on these patrols. He flipped a CD into his walkman, adjusted
the earphones and laughed: “They shoot at us. We shoot
at them. We kill them. No paperwork.”
It was about one hour before the 10 pm curfew, and Ramadi’s
main street was full of children and Iraqi men dressed in
white or beige gowns. Bored, Donovan started playing with
the red laser beam of his sights, pointing it at random. Oblivious
at first, Iraqis suddenly noticed a crimson laser point on
their chests. Scared, they looked up, spotted the Humvee,
and then – often shaking – rapidly scuttled away.
Others simply froze, watching the red spot move up and down
their bodies. Sitting atop the Humvee, Donovan was having
a good time. Me too, because I almost found the whole scene
funny.
By Ramadi
standards, the night was uneventful. We were fired at once
from behind an ice cream parlor. Soldiers ran out to find
the gunman – cursing after Iraqis on the street who
claimed not to have heard the shot.
Just after
dawn, I left the base again, with another patrol, to sweep
a riverside road – the part of town the battalion’s
soldiers abhorred most. Running along a bush-covered riverbank,
with plenty of abandoned buildings along the way, this was
ideal territory for roadside bombs. Every few yards, a crater
testified to the almost daily explosions. The previous night’s
armored Humvee was taken by another unit this time, and I
sat – feeling myself uncomfortably exposed – in
the back of an open vehicle. A flak vest was wrapped around
the backrest, providing a degree of protection against smaller
blasts.
The road,
usually busy in the early morning, was empty. The gunner,
Aaron Deshay, was fretting while he scanned the bushes. Empty
streets were a bad sign, he told me, because the insurgents
warn the locals – sometimes by writing with chalk on
the road – whenever ambushes are planned. Not knowing
the language, American troops miss these signs. Two children
peered at us from behind one wall. Noticing them, soldiers
threw candy on the road ahead, gesturing at the kids to run
and pick up the sweets. With children around, the attackers
would think twice before setting off the explosives, the soldiers
reasoned. The kids, however, stayed away. In places like Ramadi,
Iraqi parents, not too sure that the insurgents would be so
scrupulous, now barred their children from coming anywhere
near American troops.
As we quietly
moved along the riverside, Deshay noticed an old Iraqi man
who was staring at us from behind a parked minibus, his curiosity
getting the best of him. Rolling in his seat, Deshay trained
the gun on the man. “Look at that hajji. Now, how stupid
can you get?” he muttered. “Little does he know
that he’s our first target if something happens now.”
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© Copyright Yaroslav
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AN
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER THIRTEEN. MALI: A Ballot Box in Timbuktu
As I settled
in the Landcruiser’s back seat, exhausted by the Sahara
sun, a monotonous landscape of sand, rock and shrubs stretched
until the horizon. There was no road – only a backbreaking
desert track across scorching northern Mali, with at least
for more hours to go until asphalt and the first town. It’s
been over an hour since we left the last inhabited hamlet,
at the Timbuktu ferry crossing on the banks of the meandering,
brown-hued Niger. Since then, no other vehicle had crossed
our path.
Just as I
began to doze off, my fixer Sadio screamed in horror. With
a bump and a clunk, the car suddenly lost steering and veered
off track, spinning like a top in a cloud of sand. Knocked
off the back seat, I found myself lying on the car floor,
my brain registering the accident in meticulous slow motion.
When the spinning ended, I stepped out of the car, shaking,
into the blazing heat.
The damage
was clear. All the bolts that connected the front wheel axis
with the Landcruiser’s steering mechanism were gone,
lost one by one in the wilderness. The SUV now rested on diagonally
inclined front tires, pointing back to Timbuktu on the wrong
side of the path. It was a painful sight, like the unnatural
angle of a broken limb.
My driver
hadn’t thought of packing a tool box. Sadio tried to
improvise by tearing a blue Tuareg turban she had purchased
in Timbuktu into narrow strips and then weaving the strips
into a cord that, she hoped, could hold the broken parts together.
Realizing this couldn’t work, she finally gave up and
sought shelter from the sun inside the car. The air conditioning
system gasped, and stopped working too.
It sank in:
we were now marooned in the middle of the Sahara. Initially,
I took comfort in the fact that we weren’t completely
alone. A Tuareg nomad, his face hidden behind a black scarf,
witnessed our misadventure and approached the Landcruiser
without saying a word or even acknowledging our presence.
For an hour, he crouched by the car, silently, looking at
our increasingly desperate efforts to patch the vehicle together.
Like a ghost, he then picked up, mounted his camel and vanished
into the desert haze.
An hour went
by, then another. Sadio sat listlessly, too tired to speak
or move. Trying not to dehydrate, I drank the hot water that
now smelled of burnt plastic, and cursed myself for coming
to Mali in the first place. All this because of a think-tank
report.
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© Copyright Yaroslav
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