Babylon's Ark, page 12
By now everyone at the zoo had gathered around to witness the thieves’ humiliation. Some of the staff laughed derisively. It was the most effectively degrading punishment we could have imagined.
Except Sumner had a better idea. Instead of showing the looters into our makeshift “Baghdad Zoo Jail,” he instructed his men to lock them in one of the largest cages and give each one a scrubbing brush. For the rest of the day, the looters scrubbed. And scrubbed, until the cage was as clean as it was going to get.
Husham’s broken English resulted in him referring to these thugs as “lootiman,” and as the information boards outside the zoo cages gave English, Arabic, and Latin names for each occupant, I suggested we pin up: “Lootiman/Ali Baba: Humanus horribilis.”
Eventually Sumner let them go. They never returned. And with these “work as punishment” tactics, looting began to decrease.
I took an instant liking to Captain Sumner. He was a hard worker, honest as the day is long, and totally committed to the zoo. We could have been unlucky and got some average jobsworth. Sumner was anything but that. His wry sense of humor, philosophical outlook, and huge work ethic set him apart from some of the more regimental officers we came across.
To cap that, Sumner was a master haggler and his specialty was exotic guns. Iraq had been at war, internally or externally, low- or high-intensity, for almost thirty years. For a firearms aficionado, it was a candy store. And during the advance to Baghdad Sumner took full advantage of that, amassing an impressive assortment of unusual hardware captured from Iraqi soldiers. These he skillfully used as barter with gun buffs from other divisions for fridges or batteries or whatever other essential equipment we needed. Indeed, the industrial deep freeze still thumping away in the zoo’s administration office is courtesy of a deal involving a World War II Tommy gun. This was my kind of guy.
Almost as soon as he arrived, Sumner appointed me administrator of the zoo. Our friendship also boosted morale among the zoo staff, and Sumner probably was the first American in uniform to earn the absolute trust of ordinary Iraqis. This was a profound compliment. At the time, just weeks after the city had officially fallen, there was understandably much mutual suspicion across the divide.
However, even with Sumner firmly on board another major problem loomed—one that could hamstring the project as surely as the looters. It was money. Or lack thereof. Of my original stash, fifteen hundred dollars had disappeared, either at the zoo or at the Al-Rashid, and was nowhere to be found. And we weren’t going to last forever with what I had left.
I was single-handedly financing the zoo’s desperate regeneration attempts, and no other help was visible on the horizon. Buying donkeys, scrounging food from pavement stalls … each day or so was tantamount to widening the gaping hole in my pocket. In addition I was footing the staff’s wages and paying exorbitant black-market rates for piping and any other essential equipment we needed from the shadow economy. Every emergency that cropped up—which happened with regular monotony—cost me money one way or another, and there was no way to get more in.
Sumner promised to try to get some funds and place the staff on the ORHA (Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, later called the Coalition Provisional Authority) payroll, but he first had to get that passed by newly arriving administration clerks coping with a host of other issues affecting the ravaged city. Cutting red tape for the low-prioritized zoo could take forever, and time was a luxury we did not have.
In the interim, I kept paying out. This wasn’t because of innate generosity. I would have been more than happy to shift the burden onto someone else with a bigger checkbook. There simply was no one else.
EIGHT
A FEW DAYS AFTER the “ostrich run” I called the team together. Previously our energies had been focused on foraging food, moving animals from Uday’s palace with dangerously rudimentary equipment, and lugging water—one damn bucketful after another—into the cages.
Our next task, I told them, was to completely clean the cages. These were not only foul beyond belief, crusted with slime and excrement and gore, but the festering filth was a putrid fly magnet also.
Indeed, it was impossible to walk past a cage without thousands of flies buzzing your eyes and ears. Apart from the appalling hygiene issue, the insects were driving everyone bananas, as they usually attacked when you were burdened with raw meat or water and thus couldn’t swat them off. And you didn’t even want to think about what those disgusting midges had been feeding on.
We’d already given the cleanup duties occasionally to looters as punishment. It was the kind of job that you wouldn’t wish on an ordinary worker, but it had to be done. I knew the only way to tackle it was to set an example and get cracking right away myself. So I stripped down to a pair of shorts, grabbed a bucket and a scrubbing brush, and got down to work. Adel, Husham, and the others joined in.
It was a horrid task. The filth had scabbed solid and wouldn’t dislodge. While we scrubbed, squadrons of flies and mosquitoes blitzed us mercilessly, gorging on our sweat and biting any patch of exposed skin until we were all covered in fiery red bumps.
Dr. Adel said we were whistling against thunder unless we could find some industrial-strength detergent and insecticide. I agreed and sent some of the staff into town to see if they could buy any. But with most shops still barricaded tight against looters, it was futile. Even the loot-laden pavement stalls mushrooming all over the city didn’t have any.
So I decided there would have to be another way. I would have to use my bartering skills.
“Tell everyone to take a break,” I instructed Adel. “I’ll get cleaning stuff for us.”
He looked at me as if I was mad.
DESPITE THE WAR, I soon discovered that with persistence and innovation you could scrounge the most amazing things necessary to persevere in Baghdad. As in all survival economies, trade was based almost exclusively on barter, and by now I had become an expert forager, swapping goods or services for whatever I could rustle up as exchange. Consequently I knew there had to be a “deal” where I could source industrial-strength detergent. I just had to nose around.
My trump card in most bartering situations was my satellite phone. I found this out by chance. I was pilfering food and utensils in Saddam’s abandoned Al Salam Palace kitchens when a soldier confronted me. “No access here,” he said. “It’s all off-limits now.”
Damn, I thought. They’re starting to get a bit organized. Previously security at the palaces’ kitchens had not been too intense, and so once or twice I’d been able to keep the zoo fed courtesy of Saddam’s stockpiles.
Despite my pleading with him he was adamant—no entry!
While we were talking I saw his gaze switch to the satellite phone hooked on to my belt. After a pause he said, “Does that phone work?”
“Yes. I can ring anywhere in the world.” I suddenly grasped the significance of what I had just said. “When last did you speak to home?” I asked the soldier.
“Months ago.”
I felt terrible but knew what I had to do. I asked if his family would like to know he was safe. “And what about a girlfriend? Do you have one?”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I could let you use the phone, but it doesn’t work right here. To get a signal you have to go around the corner, about fifty paces away.”
He knew exactly what I was getting at. “How do I dial?”
I showed him and as he walked off with the phone, I bolted through the kitchen door in a flash, grabbing desperately needed food and supplies, which I stacked in the back of a Humvee belonging to one of Captain Burris’s men, knowing that he would drive them to the zoo for me.
Half an hour later I retrieved my phone from the palace guard. He smiled knowingly as he handed it back.
My sat phone was probably one of the only civilian communications systems working in the city. Once it was known that I was happy to let homesick soldiers use it, my popularity at the Al-Rashid Hotel and the Al Salam Palace, earmarked as the future coalition administration center, soared.
My ability to keep essential supplies flowing to the zoo also increased exponentially. I now passed through roadblocks in record time, got regular supplies of bottled water and MREs, and was allowed into off-limits areas and soldiers even gave me lifts wherever I wanted to go.
The downside was my phone bill. During those first six turbulent weeks it rocketed to seven thousand dollars as battle-begrimed GIs whispered endearments across the stratosphere to families and sweethearts. But the goodwill it generated had no price.
Thus I wasted no time in getting the word out to anyone within earshot that I urgently needed pesticides and detergent—adding that, by the way, my sat phone was working just fine.
I didn’t have to wait long. And on this occasion I didn’t even need to lend out my phone. Instead, it was thanks to my old friends the photographers.
It happened the evening after our abortive first attempt to clean the cages. I was describing the Herculean task we faced in restoring basic hygiene to the DOD photographers when they suddenly looked askance at one another. Then they nodded. They had made some silent decision.
Alistair McLarty stood up first. He said there was another secret storeroom in one of the hotel’s bunkers, even bigger than the one we raided when I first arrived in the war zone. That was merely a pantry; this, said Alistair, was a veritable supermarket. Perhaps I would find what I needed there.
The photographers had discovered the storeroom some days back while exploring the building’s underground innards and had kept it quiet so they could sneak out some of the goodies for themselves. But now … well, I hoped they reckoned that I was a worthy cause. I was one of them. I wondered if I hung around long enough what other unknown treasure troves would be revealed.
Alistair led the way down the stairs into the maze of cellars, passing through various vaults that had been specifically designed as bombproof command centers. He knew his way around, and we arrived at a thick steel door that he creaked open.
It was indeed a storeroom—massive, half the size of a sports field, stocked for a siege with crates of food ranging from canned sardines and baked beans to rice and maize meal sacks. There was also enough booze to float a battleship, with top-name brands like Moët & Chandon champagne and Johnnie Walker Black Label.
But as far as I was concerned, the biggest bonanza was finding large barrels of high-potency industrial detergent and disinfectant, as well as stiff-bristle brooms, mops, and scrubbing brushes. It was better than stumbling upon diamonds.
I took what we needed as well as extra food supplies for the hungry zoo staff. Both the hotel and the zoo were government institutions, which meant they had belonged to the Hussein family, so I regarded this as just an “interdepartmental transfer.”
It was indeed a heady form of wealth distribution. And when I arrived at the zoo the next day, courtesy as usual of Sergeant Diehl and his Humvee, the stunned Iraqis were silent for a long moment. Then they said I was a magician. Where had I conjured up all this stuff?
I shrugged. “I found it on the side of the road,” I said, which sparked delighted guffaws. The food was divided equally and then we got back to work.
IF WE HAD THOUGHT lugging water in searing heat from sewage-ripe canals was backbreaking, we hadn’t bargained on cage cleaning. It made water duties look like a walk on the beach.
We started with the lions’ cages, herding the animals out of the pens into the open-air enclosure. We then flooded the cement floors with liquid detergent, got down on our knees, and started scrubbing.
The first wash made no discernible difference whatsoever. The grime was so deeply epoxied, no elbow grease could make a dent.
So we sloshed the floors with more buckets of water and industrial-strength soap and began once again. This time we also drenched everything with insecticide, which Husham had quite amazingly sourced from a street stall. The effect was immediate and the flies dropped like … well, flies. They covered the floor in a disgusting carpet of tiny corpses, millions upon millions of them. There wasn’t a square inch of cement visible. There were too many to sweep out, so we sluiced them out the cages down the stairs and into the drains in solid black jets. When too many thick-matted rafts clogged the pipes, broom handles were used to free the gunk. Husham dubbed it “the river of flies.”
The next day we began again and slowly the glue of filth began to loosen its steel grip and grudgingly wash free. By the end of the following day the cages were almost clean.
Once the lions’ cages were at least what I considered to be hygienic, we started on the tigers’ cages … then the bears’ … and so on, until each inhabited den was reasonably clean. With an uncompromising hygiene program now in force, I knew the weeping wounds and mangy sores that had been festering on most of the animals would slowly begin to heal.
I also used this period of muscle-sapping manual labor to instruct staff on the importance of completing cycles of action. The buzz phrase was “put order into confusion.” For some of them it might have been the first English sentence they heard, and they heard it often. If they started something, they knew they had to finish it before beginning something else. They had to focus solely on the job at hand.
This was imperative for the zoo’s survival. For if any of us, including myself, stood back and looked at the bigger picture we would despair. It was simply too mind-blowing to envisage—too impossible to contemplate headway. But no one dared say that.
Thus I stressed again and again the merits of completing cycles of action, completing a single job at a time, no matter how minor. On one occasion, while squirting flies with insecticide, we came across a gang of young looters and I instructed Husham and his team to finish what they were doing. They could chase the looters off later, which they did.
Gradually this policy began to pay off. By completing one task at a time the zoo staff was starting to see progress, albeit in minuscule fractions. We were sourcing enough food to keep the animals alive, although we still could not buy donkeys in advance, as looters without fail stole them. Sometimes we couldn’t get a donkey and the carnivores went without food for a day, but never two days. And somehow, no matter what, we kept that critical trickle of water flowing into drinking troughs.
However, the war was always with us. Most of the Iraqi zoo staff who walked to and from work braved a daily gauntlet of bullets, looters, and murderous fedayeen keen to slit the throats of anyone associating with foreigners. Despite being senior-ranking veterinarians, Dr. Adel and Dr. Husham also trekked the hazardous miles from their homes, taking the same chances as the humblest laborer.
We never knew who would pitch up each morning, and we never blamed those who deemed it too dangerous to make it that day. If there was a firefight on the street by your house, it was better to stay at home.
Understandably, our nerves were raw from the terror of the daily grind. And when one morning a massive ka-boom thunderclapped close by, I led the way in diving for the floor, shouting for everyone to do likewise. Outside the window we could see rubble and grit spew up in a lethal fifty-yard cloud.
For several minutes we lay on the cement, waiting for a second blast or retaliatory gunfire. None came. When all was quiet apart from a ringing in our ears, we warily got up and went outside. The mortar blast had been on the far perimeter of the zoo, with the wall taking the full brunt. Fortunately, nothing inside the grounds was damaged. I pried a piece of shrapnel out of a tree as a souvenir.
On another occasion while at the hotel we heard an explosion in the park. The DOD photographers rushed out to investigate.
It turned out that the explosion was near the zoo and through the murky film of dust they noticed a group of children huddled about one hundred yards away. Some were sobbing; others looked dazed, as if drugged, staring at the smoldering heap of rubble rendered by the blast. Most were bleeding. The photographers called out to them, asking if they were okay.
The children looked at them fretfully and then ran off.
It later became clear that the kids had been playing with unexploded ordnance and something had detonated. It seemed one child may have been killed, but if so, the body was dragged off before the soldiers arrived. Few questions were asked at Baghdad’s sardine-can mortuaries in those turbulent times.
However, it was a somber reminder of the dangers we encountered every moment of our lives. The next day Adel and I called the staff together to warn them again not to stray off the paved sidewalks.
This was easier said than done, as there were no functional toilets and our only latrine was the sand outside. While I am used to a “bush toilet,” in Baghdad there was no paper, nor were there any leaves in the desert, so sand was all we had. We all walked gingerly off the beaten track, and not just because of unexploded bombs.
To compound matters, almost everyone in Baghdad except the locals suffered from diarrhea. There was no respite; it was just a matter of varying degrees. Good days meant no runs; bad days, continuous dashes outside. And so it was for almost my entire stay in Baghdad.
I now know why ancient Arabic law stipulated slicing off a person’s right hand if he or she had committed a crime. With only a left hand for wiping, it meant you would never be properly clean.
I WAS UNDER STRICT MILITARY ORDERS not to remain at the zoo overnight, and when darkness fell I would grab a lift from the nearest Humvee and head back to the Al-Rashid. After long days in the sun, there was not much to do in the evenings except chill out—although with summer galloping toward us, chill was hardly the right word.
Our main meeting place at the hotel was a makeshift coffee shop at the reception desk that had been renamed the Baghdad Café and was run by Sergeant Diehl, a tough, no-nonsense tank man and highly respected character in the Third ID.
For many of us, the Baghdad Café was the highlight of those grim early days, and it happened totally by accident. In one of his letters home soon after the Third ID had commandeered the Al-Rashid, Diehl—or Sarge, as everyone called him—wrote that there was no decent coffee to be found anywhere in Iraq and he was craving the stuff. His wife told her sister, who told a friend, who told another friend … and pretty soon when the post arrived Sarge had enough caffeine to keep him wired for a decade. So he decided to stop brewing ersatz mud at his tank and set up the Baghdad Café at the reception desk. Here select customers could get the only decent cup of coffee, Colombian or Brazilian or otherwise, in Baghdad.
