Ah, Baghdad is finally back to its normal violent noisy fatalistic self, after 36 hours of spooky quiet as the constitutional referendum came and went. People seemed excited to vote, and spoke of a strong sense of civic duty to participate. One guy gushed about how he voted twice, beaming at how good a citizen he felt he was. Turnout at the places I went to, both Shia and Sunni neighborhoods, was significantly higher than you could expect anywhere in the US.
The Shia ghetto of Sadr City was a challenge, lots of rocks in the air and my gunner got hit with a little bottle of used motor oil, covering his heavy vest with black goo and glass, glittering in the sun. Adhamiya, the heart of Sunni-dom in Iraq, was much less chaotic, but much more heavily policed. We were supposed to keep a low profile while people voted, but I found myself traveling in a huge armored column, and passing tanks all over Baghdad.
A day later, the stacatto cracking of automatic rifle fire cuts the hours into pieces, the only ticks on the clock that have any real meaning here. The hours breed paranoia when you can’t hear and feel the pulse of the war. A finger stiffly on that pulse is how you stay safe here.
one of those days that seemed like it was a scene in some movie glorifying war, you know, the kind that doesn’t show soldiers pissing in bottles and burning their shit in the rain, the kind where they play opera music during the worst of the fighting. the light was rich and red out in the desert wastes south of the city. there’s really no violence out there, just a few farmers growing tubers and endless dust and wind. people seem curious about us down there, like they know they’re on the fringes of something big, but they never really see it. tall wispy trees, little canals, so so quiet - it’s where i would want to live if i had to live in iraq. we were observing mortar fire, crouched in an old bombed out concrete bunker - four bombs hit it, three exploded - leaving the hulk of a 250 pound aviation bomb in our midst. the mortars hit about 300 meters away with a satisfying crunch and a low blast wave like a little kid punching you in the gut. as they fell we radioed the mortar crews and guided them to the target they were practicing on, to calibrate their systems for the next combat mission. huge black and white vultures circled the black and white clouds thrown up by the mortars, diving into the blowing dust then soaring up over it, diving again. driving back into the city, the sun burned cool and low, huge against the power plants and the smokestacks belching fire in the distance. the time changed today and it gets dark early, the night is obscuring the black smoke around us always, stars punching through implacable like the farmers pulling turnips from the desert south of the doomstruck city.