Baghdad reveals itself in layers, from trash filled slums and street side markets to gated communities where men and women wear western style clothing. No two parts are the same. A piece of our mission is here is to deal with the contractors who are helping to rebuild the infrastructure of the city which means we have to travel to different areas to negotiate prices and check on the status of existing projects. One thing I have determined from this is that during the invasion we must have targeted masons. There don’t seem to be many skilled ones left. Uneven brick walls grow on the sides of existing buildings like gray stone tumors and not just in the poor areas. Most of the new construction in the city is done by hand and let’s just say that Baghdad is fortunate not to be near any fault lines. I’m a contractor’s son; I can’t help but be a little critical.
A few days back, after we had been given the full tour of the inner workings of a factory that seemed to manufacture nothing but sparks like the backgrounds in 80’s hair metal music videos, we were taken to the main hospital for the entire country of Iraq. While somewhat dated in comparison to a modern American facility, the inside of the hospital was years ahead of any building I’d been in prior. We were there to inspect the elevators that we had paid to have replaced, I think. While, as far as I know, no one in our group of was a licensed elevator technician, we eventually decided everything seemed to be in order after looking at a few different specimens. You press the button and some time in the next ten minutes the door opens, bam, progress. Like their cars, Iraqis try to stuff as many bodies as is physically possible into any moving container. In a space where 8 Americans would have stood comfortably, somewhere near 20 men and women crammed together and waited for the door to close. When the door finally closed it immediately opened again and repeated this little dance three times while the faces of its passengers looked on with something between languor and boredom. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t hold it. Those on the elevator didn’t share my enthusiasm. Occasionally I am a truly obnoxious American.
A week or so has passed since I wrote those first two paragraphs. I wish I could say it’s been all quiet on the western front but we haven’t always been lucky. I doubt it would be worth going into much detail about the work I've been a part of but suffice to say, I wake up most mornings with the image of it staring back at me. I used to think I wanted to be the exact same person when I got home that I was before I deployed but I know now that it would be a waste. I can think of nothing worse than giving a year of my life over to get back the same perspective I had before. Adulthood, or the awkward and sometimes painful opening chapter to it, has proven to be not so much and answer to the questions of adolescence, but rather a continuing dialogue with possibility and experience. It’s sad and beautiful and you begin to understand why art springs forth from our fingers and our mouths; why we have to create. Something has to make sense when it all starts falling apart.
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