Christenson: When blood stops flowing, tears take its place

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.mysanantonio.com/specials...989&xlc=986131 Christenson: When blood stops flowing, tears take its place

San Antonio Express-News

Web Posted : 04/25/2003 12:00 AM

Sig stands next to Saddam Hussein and a horse in one of Saddam's palaces on April 5. He lost 40 pounds on military chow, rejoiced in a hot bath in a Kuwait hotel, and lamented lost reporters and soldiers of both sides in the Iraq war.
Bahram Mark Sobhani/Express-News

Tuesday, April 22: I sent a message to my Mom this morning. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Mom:

The tears kept coming to my eyes today. I kept crying.

It wasn't battle fatigue.

I was reminded of something I'd written. It was about Atul, a waiter at the Kuwait City Marriott's lunch buffet who wouldn't allow me the luxury of indulging in a debate about whether my glass of water was half full or half empty. After my six-week war, I'll never engage in that debate again.

I eyed my plate and then bowed my head before cutting into the fish with cumin, pasta, pesto and a single slice of veal ? food the likes of which I hadn't seen in six long weeks of downing the bland but usually filling Meals Ready-to-Eat.

That's when tears welled up in my eyes and a flood of raw emotions ran through me. I did my best initially to not let anyone else see me, but then I brought the napkin to my eyes and stopped caring about it.

I kept thinking of my visits with Mike Kelly, the Washington Post columnist and former Atlantic Monthly editor-in-chief. I kept flashing back to the Iraqi militiaman who lay dead in the middle of a bridge, blood staining his colorful tunic. I thought of the Republican Guard soldier frozen in the front seat of a blue sedan on Highway 8 in Baghdad ? bloated, with dried blood on his uniform and hands, flies swirling over his head. A short walk away was another Iraqi soldier, his brain and face gone, but skull still partially intact.

One by one their bodies were wrapped in white plastic sheets and carried away by young American soldiers to graves a few feet off the road.

I'll never forget the stench. It followed me everywhere in Iraq after that, right up to late Monday as we drove to the airfield for our flight to Kuwait. The sweet, sour odor of decaying corpses is as much a metaphor for postwar Iraq as it is a sensory reality.

But it also is personal. I kept thinking at the time, over and over and over, how that could just as easily have been me at that bridge not far from Karbala or on Highway 1 outside Saddam International Airport the morning the black-clad, fanatical Saddam Fedayeen ambushed our convoy. Three RPGs passed within 15 yards of my hiding place next to an M-577 armored personnel carrier. One of those exploded above my head, rattling my eardrums.

Every time I replay the audiotape of that firefight, I hear the boom and a familiar voice scream, "What was that?"

I was terrified, but no one heard me. The soldiers were too busy shooting back for that.

My eyes welled up once more as I thought of the opulent palaces used by Saddam Hussein and his friends. Those palaces had it all ? floors and walls of marble, fine Victorian furniture, fancy silverware and gold-plated faucets. That was such a contrast to the rest of Saddam's country, where dusty streets, homes with earthen or brick facades and no running water and no power were more the rule than the exception. How one man who grew up desperately poor in those same dusty streets could turn his back on these people was way beyond me.

"It's disgusting that he had all that money for a palace and didn't spend it on electricity, schools or houses," Mohammed Thaer, curator of the reconstructed palace of King Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, said in a story I read in the Arab Times during my lunch today. "He must have hated the Iraqi people."

I thought back to the man lying dead on the bridge, an AK-47 in his hands, and even then wondered how anyone could throw life away for the likes of such a leader. This fighter no doubt wasn't much different from many other Iraqis I've met, including a pair of brothers I spent Monday with in Baghdad. They struck me as good, decent men caught up in something they didn't control.

I could identify with that.

More than 80 reporters were embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, and at least two I know of didn't make it home ? Kelly and NBC reporter David Bloom, a young and seemingly healthy man who died in Iraq of an embolism.

Bloom and I were on the bus that took us out to the units we were embedded with, but I didn't know him. I had gotten to know and like Mike, though, and I still mourn his death.

Mike and I walked 10 miles along the Kuwaiti shoreline one sunny day before the war, talking about how our health and families had affected our career decisions. He had quit the Atlantic to spend more time with his wife, kids and in-laws. I told him how I was trying to spend less time in the office, get my weight down and health back.

We last saw each other on a sunny morning following a 3rd Infantry Division battle to take a bridge. Two nights earlier, only hours before the Army blasted its way through the Karbala Gap, we had talked about the astounding nature of modern war. Our long Army columns would stop for hours as the Air Force bombed Iraqi tanks and troops, then the skies would flash as Task Force 3-69 Armor's artillery, "Glory's Guns," shattered the night air.

Then we'd move on.

It was methodical, even calibrated. The Iraqi army, Republican Guard and Fedayeen never had a chance. Mike and I also talked about the division's quiet but confident commander, Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, and we both liked his work ethic and the way he carried himself.

Mike had a hell of a book in the works on the division's role in the war, but then tragedy struck. He was killed when his Humvee veered off a narrow road and flipped into a ditch as we closed toward Saddam International Airport, the task force's final objective of the war. Maj. Mike Johnson, one of the top officers in the task force, woke me at 2 a.m. as I slept on top of my Humvee.

Mike dead?

I still can't believe it.

Mike and I ought to be here, walking those 10 miles again, stopping at a Subway booth on the waterfront near the Al Sharq fish market, drinking bottled water and talking about the families we've come to miss so much and would soon embrace.

Instead, I'll walk alone.

I know now what the characters in "Full Metal Jacket" meant when they talked of being "in a world of (expletive)."

I just left it.

Last night, after filing a story, I drew a hot bath and soaked in it for a half hour. It was the first time I've bathed in more than a week. It took a while for the dirt to wash off. The stuff seemed to be part of my tan.

When I got out, the tub was full of sand. I later got a Q-Tip and, after running it through my ears, saw it dark with crud.

When I awoke shortly after noon I put on a pair of jeans that wouldn't fit me when I arrived here March 4, the night after my 46th birthday. They were fresh, clean clothes, not the filthy desert fatigue slacks, socks and T-shirts I've worn for weeks at a time.

I cried a little more.

Good food, a bath, clean clothes and rest are all things we Americans take for granted, but in this journey to Kuwait and Iraq I've come a long way. I'm not even remotely the same man I was before March 4.

I think of Mike, those violent little ninjas on Highway 1, that pitiful Iraqi whose life and potential ended abruptly at the bridge, and all those palaces.

I look in the mirror and see a much thinner and healthier man ? 40 pounds thinner ? and have as much trouble making sense of that as I do a world in which so many men die badly, far from their homes and from the people they love.

I cried today out of sadness and extreme joy. So much has been lost, but I'm freshly scrubbed, full of good food and a million thoughts.

Best of all, I'm alive, soon to go home and hug you, my wife and my friends ? the best friends in the world.

My tears are bitter and sweet, and they just keep coming. My glass, half full.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sigc@express-news.net