The quest for alcohol

We're throwing a party tonight because I'm leaving tomorrow, which led to a hilarious quest to buy beverages. It was sort of a ridiculous proposition in the first place -- buying alcohol in an Islamic country, on a Friday, during Ramadan. Poor planning led to the Friday part of that equation; the rest was fairly unavoidable.

There are a few remaining liquor stores in Baghdad, and a few of our guys -- a Christian and a couple of lapsed Muslims -- know exactly where to find them. We asked G, the Christian, to go to the liquor store where he usually buys Amstel and Corona, but it's closed for the entirety of Ramadan (which raises a question about how its proprietor supports himself, no?). We knew the location of two other stores, but they were closed too. At this point, we began to panic a little bit, because we had invited 25 people over and we figured they would be expecting alcohol. Somebody told us that there was a liquor store near the PX in the Green Zone, but we soon learned it had been shut down because soldiers were buying alcohol, which they're not allowed to drink.

And then a British security consultant next door told us about the "tactical shop," which reportedly sold beer out of a sketchy little trailer in a remote part of the Green Zone (U.S. officials call it the International Zone, or IZ). We got step-by-step directions and set out. Getting there requires a complicated series of turns at intersections marked only by small yellow signs proclaiming "tactical shop." We drove off a paved road, essentially into a dump, and saw a series of battered trailers. Sure enough, one of them had two signs: "Tactical Shop" in yellow and "IZ Liquor Store" in green. The trailer couldn't have been more than eight feet wide, and the passageway was even narrower than that because of the cases of beer stacked high on both sides. We got two cases of Corona, one case of Amstel, four bottles of wine and a bottle of Absolut (for mixing with pomegranate juice).

The party is on.