I feel like I swallowed an icepick, and have for three days, but it was so worth it.  It all started when this Iraqi paramilitary police bunch of crazies put on a demonstration for some of us, lots of smoke and noise, most were firing blanks, but a few shots had that distinctive echo of live ammo.

Afterward like thirty of us went upstairs in their bombed out headquarters to feast.  A 20 foot long table, piled high with huge baked river fish, lamb, every possible variation of chick peas, the best damn hummus I’ve ever had, and lots of other stuff I couldn’t indentify or even really describe.   We crowded round, standing, and ate with our hands.  I was in heaven.

I knew there were people with typhus in the building, that there was raw sewage outside and in the cellar, that Iraqis don’t share western concepts of personal hygiene, but it was too good to miss.  And now I pay dearly for it, digestively speaking.

The next day, before the consequences of my gluttony were showing, I wound up at the Martyr’s Monument, an enormous turquoise onion-shaped dome, split down the middle and offset a bit, like two 150 foot tall half-onions, built to honor all the Iraqis who died fighting Iran.   It’s gorgeous, and it looks like the kind of thing that will endure.

Across a system of ponds, an amusement park was in full swing, heathens screaming on rickety roller coasters, young couples riding the sky trams, the smell of falafel carts or whatever the hell Iraqis would eat at baseball games.  Watching the ferris wheel turn slowly, hypnotically, when a huge column of smoke and fire rose in the distance behind it, followed by a low, insistent concussion, the kind only the really huge bombs make, the kind that smashes glass for a mile and causes instant reverence and wonder.

We stayed at the monument for a few minutes longer, took some pictures of the ferris wheel and the angry black cloud behind it, and moved out to the site of the explosion.  It wasn’t hard to find, lots of people on foot were on their way there, and the buildings were low enough to follow the smoke.

There were hundreds of people milling about seven incinerated cars, the upside down carcass of a shuttle bus, smashed buildings, smashed asphalt, smashed people.  Twelve of us in four vehicles, we got out, minus the four gunners, and strode up to the crater.   Smoldering cars hissed and steamed as firefighters sprayed them down and the soapy, oily water mixed with blood to form a deep black puddle in the crater.

I was trying to photograph the city’s emergency services in action, they seemed to have things on the way to being under control, doing a good thing for their country, and I wanted to try and highlight that for my fishwrapper of a newsrag.  Photographed a young man in shock, the thousand yard stare, palms outstretched near a overturned car, as an increasingly violent mob swirled around him.

People jumped on the twisted cars, screaming at us, throwing asphalt, waving posters of Muqtada al-Sadr that appeared from thin air - in seconds they were chanting some kind of threat at incredible volume, closing around us quickly.

You can learn a lot about yourself, and the people around you, when your small party is the focal point for a huge mob’s violent rage.  A thousand ideas, possibilities, maneuvers flashed through my mind - keeping a mob at bay can be done, but it requires one to think fifty moves in advance and do absolutely whatever it takes to keep them from organizing.

We tightened into a small, pointy object bent on holding our ground for the twenty seconds it would take for our gunners to bring the trucks in and get us.  When it became clear they weren’t coming, we pushed through the crowd, slowly, deliberately, trying to conceal our vulnerability with cool and control, then dashed the last five feet into the gun trucks and sped off, rocks flying in the air, people running after us, trying to head us off at the next block and there it was, huge, taking up the whole windshield, an Abrams battle tank, 70 tons of Law and Order thundering past us, toward the mob, firing a heavy machine gun in the air, scattering everyone, and I thought to myself, breathing deeply - America. Fuck yeah.

I saw it on the news later that night, apparently the camera guy was on the roof and caught a lot of it.  God, I’d love a copy of that tape.  It was funny, because on our way to the Martyr’s Monument, I’d joked that our little sightseeing trip would probably wind up causing some kind of international incident.

Ben