On the left is Auf, my dearest friend in all of Iraq. When it seems as though there is NO hope and when I think I cannot tolerate one more news broadcast about dead people in market places along comes Auf to calm me down a nice long email from Auf to say Dearest Cherie, I live another day. This is us in Amman Jordan with another good friend getting ready to go to visit the World Bank to plead for money for a water project. We are given some idea of how HUGE the World Bank is but no money. I love Amman. It is a modern little Kingdom with a great dead sea. It was always for me that place between Iraq and Israel where I could unwind, let down, relax, and gear up for the next round. I rented an apartment in Amman last year and worked as the Project Director for a short time for LIFE for Relief and Development an interesting group that started working in Iraq before we American's "liberated" it. Back when I first traveled to Iraq we flew into Amman and overnighter at the Petunia Hotel. I met up with a team from Veteran's For Peace and we took the first of many 12 hour trips for me across the desert from Amman and into Baghdad. Once upon a time it was easy to go back and forth by road and I did it frequently. Once when we were living in Palestine and I was tired of being chased around by Israeli tanks I convinced my poor son Dan to take the road trip with me from Amman to Baghdad. I really wanted him to see this amazing city and what with Saddam missing. We hired a car and since there was no real government so no visas necessary and they were just taking down the statues of Saddam on the outskirts of the city we just cruised right through the boarder check point without hardly slowing down. We met some American troops who were all hanging out by a tank and they asked us what we were doing, I said we were tourist. Which actually looking back we sort of were. We got to Baghdad after having passed at least a thousand burned up cars and tanks. That nice road into Iraq was trashed and when those missiles or whatever they are that the US is so fond of hits a tank all that is left is something black and crispy. There was still fighting as we waved good-bye to those soldiers and took on off the road in and we had to pay a hundred bucks extra just to get a room at the Palestine Hotel on the 23rd floor which frequently had no electricity. Of course there was no food, no one had a clue who was in charge of anything. Half of Saddam's statue (that the American soldiers pulled down with their tank) was on one side of the road and the other half was up the street. Just a shoe here or there ... But no one seemed to care. There were US tanks all over the road but we flashed our white faces and some American kid said, "I don't think I'm suppose to let you in here" at the gates to the Palestine Hotel but we showed him our passports and I flashed my drivers license and then he said oh well go ahead. It is not that way these days! The place was filthy, and our driver kept saying this man Alibaba, this man Alibaba, pointing out different people he thought might try to take some of our money that he had in mind to take himself. He then proceeded to try to vastly overcrowded us and we told him that he was Alibaba and that he was also surrounded by the US Army so he took the twenty cases of beer he had stashed in the back of his 4 wheel drive and went off to peddle it. Dan struck up a friendship with the kitchen staff in the basement (long walk most of the days) and was able to buy some of the major news networks leftover food and water for a price. US Soldiers would wander by saying things like, Gee, I haven't heard a phone ring in weeks and ask if we were journalist. I was carrying around a huge Satellite phone I bought before leaving so we could call our friends with updates. Hey, we made it!
We met up with Dr. Yarub who was the head of LIFE for Relief and Development the group that I met with the vets and he took us on a ride through what was left of Baghdad. Okay during Saddam's time you could say that there were some things in a state of disrepair but Baghdad once was a beautiful city with tree lined boulevards. Those tanks ripped those trees right out of there and we could just see remnants of semi familiar land marks. The green zone wasn't the 'green zone' yet. Just a hotel with a bunch of US Tanks around it. We walked around wherever we wanted. We went with Yarub to visit a hospital where a guy actually walked up and bunched Dan. At the time everyone just said that he was 'crazy' it wasn't too much later that people were getting their heads cut off and here I was running around Baghdad with my military age son through the crowded streets. We went to one of my favorite restaurants from previous trips and had lunch and attempting to get back to the hotel was a challenge. The soldier let me through a crowd of picketing Iraqis but I somehow lost track of Dan. The crowd relieved him of some of his money but the soldier got him safely through some wires they had thrown up. When I think back of what I risk I put us through I know absolutely that I was insane. But I had hung out in Baghdad before and it was a rather quite, organized, city not a war zone! Well with Saddam gone, the tree's gone, the tanks everywhere we felt almost like we were back in Palestine. Check points were non existent though and we hung out until it got hot enough for us to head out. No regrets though and we look back at the trip and all of the great pictures and say wow! we did that?
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