Out of Iraq

I flew out of Baghdad this afternoon and landed in Amman a couple of hours ago. I'm excited to spend a couple of days here going to Petra and the Dead Sea, getting a massage at the luxurious Four Seasons and doing a bit of shopping.

That said, I'm really sad about leaving Baghdad. Our crazy frat house had become my home, and the guys had become my brothers. And as war-torn as the city itself may be, I feel like it's my war-torn city. Saying goodbye was really hard -- everybody came outside to wave me off, and I wanted to cry. J, my American coworker, is one of my favorite people in the world, and I hate that I won't get to see him every day anymore. I think it's going to be very strange to go back to living alone.

Fortunately, A is in Amman at the moment as well, so I don't have to totally divorce myself from Baghdad quite yet. We're going out on the town tonight and to Petra tomorrow, so hopefully it'll take my mind off of being sad.

The roof

I have a confession to make that will disappoint most of my good friends. When I moved into our house, directly next door to a 12-story hotel, it didn't occur to me to go up to the roof of said hotel. Even when I began spending most of my leisure time in the hotel, I never went higher than the third floor. I'm a failure.

That said, I finally made it up yesterday. Oh my lord, it's amazing. I'm disappointed in myself for not seeing it before now. You can actually see the entire city from up there. The Tigris glimmers on three sides and the golden minarets of mosques tower in every corner of the city. I lost my breath for a moment marveling at the beauty of Baghdad, and spotting the carcass of a bombed car a few blocks away didn't totally ruin the feeling. My head felt clearer during my 15 minutes on the roof than it has since I've been here.

A couple hours after I discovered the roof, J and I were driving by the river. J glanced at the sun setting over the Tigris and sighed. "Sometimes I love this city," he said. I couldn't agree more. Everybody warned me that Baghdad would get under my skin, that I would love it so much that I would never want to go back. I won't go quite that far; I'm pretty excited to see the Bay Area and New York and all my favorite people. But Baghdad has become part of me, and I couldn't be happier about that. I may have to find a way to get back here at some point.

Tomorrow I will take pictures from the roof, I promise.

Time marches on

I don't think I was under any delusion that life in the U.S. would stop altogether while I was gone. I accepted early on that people would keep going to work, eating and sleeping and ::sigh:: even having fun without me. But I don't remember giving people permission to keep having all these life events while I'm thousands of miles away. And yet, my small circle of loved ones seems to be having a tremendously eventful summer. In the past few weeks:

• A friend got engaged
• A family friend got married
• OFH started his senior year of college
• So did my baby sister -- yikes!
• A close friend moved to DC
• A friend left my company and moved back to NYC
• Another moved to a new apartment in NYC
• At least three friends got their first grown-up jobs
  
• One good friend had a painful breakup
• A friend was officially cured of cancer, six years after I sat in her hospital room
  
• THREE favorite people, including the best friend who was already too far away, moved from NYC to Boston so two of them can get Ph.Ds or some ridiculous thing
• I lost one intolerable coworker from my very small office and gained a wonderful one
  
• One good friend moved to NYC to start law school

Maybe that's the normal rate of life, but it sure feels like the world is on fast-forward back there, and it makes me feel left out! Gchat and phone calls are wonderful, but I would give anything to have been there for any one of these events or these people. Last night one of the new Boston residents was describing a hilarious scene involving four of them hauling stuff into a fourth-floor walkup because the movers weren't going to get it all done, and it actually made my heart ache. I've got all these people describing their new lives -- new homes, jobs, relationship statuses, etc. -- and I just want to be there to lug boxes or hang pictures or buy beers. I want to feel like I'm being a good friend to people who should have good friends around, and it's hard to do that from here. I'm having flashbacks to freshman year, when I had a huge fear of being left out by my older, cooler friends.

So I have a request: can you all start having more boring lives for a couple of weeks? I'll be back soon, and hopefully you'll all be willing to help me play catch-up in person. But honestly: no more moves, no more weddings/engagement/breakups, no more new anything. Just for three weeks, okay?

Love,
Briony

Questioning my cynicism

Some small part of me has always thought about doing something to make the world better instead of just writing about the people who do. A friend that I deeply admire is starting law school this week after teaching in an innovative school for low-income boys for a year and then working as a paralegal for a homeless services organization for another year. Unlike many of the people who are going to his top-five law school, he isn't interested in the whopping $200,000 many first-year associates are now earning -- he wants to continue work for disadvantaged people and/or to teach. Being in Iraq, where literally everybody is suffering, makes me feel somewhat guilty that I'm not also making the world better, whether in New York or in Baghdad.

I know that storytellers have an important role in the world too, but to some extent it's that of a middleman -- get the information to the people who will actually do something about it. Supervisors have praised me for my critical eye toward happenings both in DC and Iraq, but there's a fine line between criticism and cynicism -- a line I find myself crossing fairly regularly. It sometimes scares me that I'm jaded at 23, that my mind ascribes political or self-aggrandizing motives to anyone who claims to be making progress in Iraq.

It's probably healthy that there's still part of me that wants to run away and join the Peace Corps or something, but I find it difficult to balance the two sides of my personality. I realize that dedicating my life to community service wouldn't put me in a position to solve the big problems of the world, but very often I feel powerless to fix even the small stuff. In the last three days, two close friends -- one in Iraq and one at home -- have, in different ways, lost people close to them, and it drives me crazy that I can't do anything about it. I realize that joining the Peace Corps wouldn't put me in a position to fix my friends' broken hearts, but wouldn't doing something for someone be a step in the right direction?

Okay, okay

So there are people reading. This is good to know. I got comments from everyone from my favorite NYC blogger (who should take her own sentiment to heart and post more often) to my high school physics teacher (who would like you to know that Berkeley High is amazing). And my mother, of course. I will keep posting on whatever happens in life, and at times when that's nothing I'll rail against bad media coverage and stupid politicians. Capiche?

I talked to a man this morning who has just sold his house in Baghdad. He moved to Syria when he started getting threatening letters at his home here, but it took him two years to sell the house. Even then, he sold it for less than one-third of its estimated value. In fact, he sold the nine-room home for just enough money to be able to afford the monthly rent on a two-room apartment in Damascus (his menial salary as a salesman pays for other life expenses). He is a Sunni whose neighborhood in Baghdad was taken over by the Mahdi Army, the major Shiite group. Fortunately for him, his Shiite next-door neighbor helped him sell the house and wired the money to him in Syria.

The man started crying when talking about his home, which his parents built a few years before he was born. He compared the feeling to losing a child -- not because he is materialistic (he clearly isn't), but because a lifetime's worth of memories were made there. He had planned to raise his children there, then pass the house to his oldest son, just as his father did. When I asked him to describe the house physically, he couldn't do it. He started to mention the backyard with the swing set and the bedroom with the secret crawl space, but he stopped and said he couldn't keep talking about it. He was in tears.

The people who have moved out of Baghdad have lost nearly everything -- family members and friends, their sense of security and freedom and the city they love. For this man, his home was the physical reminder of how much the last four years have taken. I nearly cried too.

21st century barbarism

I never read editorials. I don't like that a group of people sitting in an office can shape the direction of the country by writing about places they've never been and people they've never spoken to. That said, I read today's Washington Post editorial about Iraq because it was the most-read story on the web site, and I felt compelled to link to it here.

I actually can't decide what I think about this piece on its merits. The only conclusion seems to be that the situation is bad in Baghdad, which anybody could have told you. But despite -- or maybe because of -- its lack of recommendations, I found it particularly powerful.

"ONE REASON the debate over Iraq can seem so perplexing at times is that the nature of the violence can be so horrendous as to be nearly unfathomable. The inexcusable killing of civilians by insurgents and militias is so common as to go almost unremarked upon. But four simultaneous truck-bomb explosions in one small community in northwestern Iraq on Tuesday night, all directed against defenseless civilians, provided a savage and jarring reminder."

Despite the fact that this writer has never been to Iraq, he managed to capture some pretty common sentiments among the people I interact with here. There's no difference other than scale between this attack and the ones that happen every day within a five-minute's drive of my office. But despite the fact that it's 250 miles away from here, this one feels particularly sobering.

In looking for the ways to solve Iraq, it always seems to be the people with the least information that have the loudest voices. My inbox is filling up again with e-mails from people saying everything from "that moron Bush needs to pull out right now!" to "stupid liberals need to stop supporting the enemy." And of course, those of us on the ground know that basically all of those people are wrong, because none of the answers here are simple. I'm glad an editorial acknowledged that for once.

Halfway there

It's hard to believe, but my time in Iraq is slightly more than halfway over (I return to the States on Sept. 11). The frustrating part of that, of course, is that I feel like it's taken me this long to get comfortable here. It's not just that I know the difference between Mansour and Saydiya or that I can recite the entire family history of Moqtada al-Sadr, it's that I have Iraqi friends, that I have finally gotten used to the food at home, that I have a username and password for the internal al-Qaeda in Iraq web site. Although I don't plan to call Iraq home any time soon, I feel nearly as comfortable here as I do in Washington.

Of course, the biggest thing I miss about the U.S. is the people. The worst part of this experience is that it can feel a bit isolating at times because the people I'm closest to aren't here. And as much as I've tried to communicate the experience through this blog, I'm not nearly a good enough writer to express Iraq. It doesn't mean I'll stop trying, though.

People

I have a tendency to underestimate how much I depend on the people closest to me. In this case, I'm only now (T-minus 2 days) realizing how difficult it will be to live in a war zone--an already challenging situation--without the people who mean the world to me. Obviously I will miss my family, but that's nothing new for someone living 3,000 miles from most of her relatives. Over the last five years, I've developed an East Coast family made up of my closest friends, and this is the longest period of time I've been away from them too. I've never gone two months without seeing MHG or IVK in the last five years, and I'm not really looking forward to the idea of it. Even since I've moved down south, I've had a relatively easy 4-hour drive to see most of my closest friends, and after a bad week I've been able to sprint straight into OFH's arms.

And as much as I complain about the new city, there are at least a few people I'll miss here too. KH, MC and AK have kept me sane for a whole year, and I'm still counting on MMS to help do it for the next year. I never thought I'd hear myself saying I'll miss this city, but there it is. There's a William James quote that says "Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world," which sum up my feelings about my current locale exactly. By that logic, I suppose I can handle Baghdad too. I'll be putting uite a few minutes on that international cell phone, though.