Tales from Baghdad

Baghdad Burning
... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Wednesday, March 23, 2005


Two Years...We've completed two years since the beginning of the war. These last two years have felt like two decades, but I can remember the war itself like it was yesterday.

The sky was lit with flashes of red and white and the ground rocked with explosions on March 21, 2003. The bombing had actually begun on the dawn of the 20th of March, but it got really heavy on the 21st. I remember being caught upstairs when the heavier bombing first began. I was struggling to drag down a heavy cotton mattress from my room for an aunt who was spending a couple of weeks with us and I suddenly heard a faraway ‘whiiiiiiiiiiiiiz’ that sounded like it might be getting closer.

I began to rush then- pulling and pushing at the heavy mattress; trying to half throw, half haul it down stairs. I got stuck halfway down the staircase and, at that point, the whizzing sound had grown so loud, it felt like it was coming out of my head. I shoved again at the mattress and called E.’s name to help lug the thing downstairs but E. was outside with my cousin, trying to see where the missiles were going. I repositioned and began to kick the heavy mattress, not caring how it got downstairs, just wanting to be on the ground floor when the missile hit.

The mattress finally budged and began to slip and slide down the remaining 10 steps, finally landing in a big pile at the end of the staircase. I followed it in a hurry, taking two steps at a time, expecting to feel a big “BOOM” at any moment. I tripped on the last step in the mad dash for the ground floor and ended up in a heap on the cotton mass on the ground. The explosion came the same moment- followed by a series of larger explosions that didn’t sound like the ordinary missiles we had been experiencing the last 40 hours or so.

The house was chaotic that moment. The parents were running, dad trying to locate his battery-powered radio and mother making sure the stove was turned off. She was also yelling orders over her shoulder, commanding us to go into the “safe room” we had specially decorated with duct tape and soft cushions, or ‘bomb-proofed’ as my cousin liked to say. The aunt that was staying with us was running around, shrilly trying to find her two granddaughters (who were already in the safe room with their mother). The cousin was rushing around turning off kerosene heaters and opening windows so that they wouldn’t shatter with the impact. E. hurried in from outside, trying to keep his expression casual under the paleness of his face.

Through all of this, the bombing was getting louder and more frequent- the earth rumbling and shuddering with every explosion. E. was saying something about the sky but the whooshing sound coming from above was so loud, we couldn’t hear what he was saying. “The sky is full of red and white lights…” He yelled, helping me rise shakily from the mattress. “You want to go outside and see?” I looked at him like he was crazy and made him help me drag the mattress into the living room. We rushed back into the safe room and the bombs were still falling loud and fast, one after the other. Sometimes they felt like they were falling right next door, and other times, it felt like they were falling a few blocks away. We knew they were further than that.

The faces in the safe room were white with tension. My cousin’s wife sat in the corner, a daughter on either side, her arms around their shoulders, murmuring prayers softly. My cousin was pacing in front of the safe room door, looking grim and my father was trying to find a decent radio station on the small AM/FM radio he carried around wherever he went. My aunt was hyperventilating at this point and my mother sat next to her, trying to distract her with the voice of the guy on the radio talking about the rain of bombs on Baghdad.

A seemingly endless 40 minutes later, there was a slight lull in the bombing- it seemed to have gotten further away. I took advantage of the relative calm and went to find the telephone. The house was cold because the windows were open to keep them from shattering. I reached for the telephone, fully expecting to find it dead but I was amazed to find a dial tone. I began dialing numbers- friends and relatives. We contacted an aunt and an uncle in other parts of Baghdad and the voices on the other end were shaky and wary. “Are you OK? Is everyone OK?” Was all I could ask on the phone. They were ok… but the bombing was heavy all over Baghdad. Shock and awe had begun.

Two years ago this week.

What followed was almost a month of heavy bombing. That chaotic night became the intro to endless chaotic days and long, sleepless nights. You get to a point during extended air-raids where you lose track of the days. You lose track of time. The week stops being Friday, Saturday, Sunday, etc. The days stop being about hours. You begin to measure time with the number of bombs that fell, the number of minutes the terror lasted and the number of times you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire and explosions.

We try to put it out of our heads, but it comes back anyway. We sit around sometimes, when there’s no electricity, or when we’re gathered for lunch or dinner and someone will say, “Remember two years ago when…” Remember when they bombed Mansur, a residential area… When they started burning the cars in the streets with Apaches… When they hit the airport with that bomb that lit up half of the city… When the American tanks started rolling into Baghdad…?

Remember when the fear was still fresh- and the terror was relatively new- and it was possible to be shocked and awed in Iraq?

- posted by river @ 5:36 PM