They say that the days are slow but the weeks are fast. I agree. Actually, the days are pretty fast here too. I know a lot of guys with very dull or repetitive jobs; they get caught in the Groundhog Day mentality- no matter what they do they end up at the same place the next day and start all over. There’s a repetition in some of my routine- waking up in the same box, the same loose showerhead, the same double-door entrance with the same marine guard, and then there’s the DFAC (the “dee-fack”- our new term for ‘chow hall’: dining facility), when you enter it feels like you were just there a couple of hours ago. Because you were. But, again, the key to this place is resisting complacency.
I got a text message. In Arabic. Political parties are campaigning via cell phone. The Iraqi National Front wanted to remind me to stand up against terrorism. I wonder if people are going home after work and finding 32 recorded messages on their answering machines from Jaafari or Adel Abd al-Mehdi. Or Laura Bush, maybe.
So animals are born with that ‘fight or flee’ instinct. Something triggers their behavior after a nano-second of calculation. The instantly weigh their survival rates in either scenario and -bam- they commit. I think the process got dulled during our evolution. Or we’ve been socialized into something like a herd mentality. A situation is only dangerous if 51% of us think it is. Anyway, all hell broke loose last night here in Baghdad and we thought it was the big one- they enemy had broken through the gates and it was going to be down to the last man. So that was the thought that ran through several of our heads. Our actions spoke otherwise. A couple of us were hanging out, watching the ‘Best of Jimmy Fallon’ SNL episode. Gunfire rips out from every direction. The crackle and thumps of weapons near and far erupt. We look quizzically at each other. “What do you think that is?” It’s really only the big booms that you have to worry about, and if you’ve heard it, then you know you’re okay. It’s the one you never hear that will get you. But the volume of the gunfire was what was raising eyebrows. The TV went from mute to off. Nobody wanted to be Chicken Little, but nobody wanted to be a dead duck. I opened the door, and red tracers were arcing across the sky. Outside, you could tell that there was gunfire from every direction; we debated the options- some kind of assault, a running firefight- just weren’t sure. The Embassy loudspeaker came on with the emergency message, but the noise was too loud to make it out. Maybe we were under attack, but then again maybe we weren’t. We noticed that there were a lot of tracers going up into the sky. Which generally means there’s about five times as many bullets also being shot there too. And bullets come back down. We decided to head over to the bunker. There’s a concrete barrier, like a three-sided box with no bottom placed every so often around the compound. When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to have about six inches of concrete between you and the rest of the world. We heard a couple rounds ping off of the gravel around us. And the trailer roofs aren’t going to stop an AK-47 round returning from orbit. I’ve seen celebratory gunfire for weddings and funerals, but only up in Tikrit- and never that much for that long- and you usually knew why… Well, what the wizards in our intel section failed to predict was that Iraq might beat Syria 4-3 in a sudden-death shoot-out, taking the West Asia soccer title.
