Baghdad blast hits close to home

Two years ago in Baghdad, I stood across the street from the Al-Hamra Hotel. It was midnight, and the streets were empty because a curfew was in place. Absentmindedly, I had remained in an Internet caf? into the evening, sending e-mails and ignoring the clock. Now, I simply had to walk across the street to the Hamra, my temporary home and headquarters for many journalists writing about the war in Iraq.

But I was frozen.

I stared into the hot, wartime night. In the distance, U.S. soldiers barreled down a more central street. If only they would turn down this one.

Earlier that week, while waiting for an order of roasted Tigris carp, I had boldly crossed one of the busiest boulevards in the city to work at another Internet caf?. My translator and driver watched from their seats at the outdoor restaurant, wondering, I am sure, about my brazen determination in a country where women and Americans were at risk. But off I went. The fish was overcooked, but we all returned safely to our residences at the end of the workday.

The night on the stairs, however, I was entirely alone. Parked cars haphazardly lined the curbs, and, with the streetlights dimmed to an urban yellow, I imagined hiding places for snipers between each of the vehicles. “If I were a sniper …” – I banished the idea.

Should I run and risk appearing as afraid as I am? Should I walk and pretend I am fearless? What if a stranger stops me?

Finally, I walked slowly into the dark, my eyes focused fiercely ahead. Approaching the Hamra, I spotted an Iraqi man with an AK-47. I slowed to see if I recognized him. I did not. Too late to turn back. He will either shoot me, I thought, or he won’t.

As I passed by, he looked up from his perch on the step. He was a security guard. “Good night, Madame,” he said. The whole time, he was protecting me.

If that same polite man were sitting on the steps of the Al-Hamra last Friday morning, he is surely dead now from the bomb explosions there. Or if he was in a mosque or marketplace I visited, I doubt he could have survived the bombings that took place there during this war. For more than two years, I’ve watched as familiar places – and many lives

– have been destroyed.

But the Al-Hamra hit closest to home, largely because, for a month, it was my home. I shared a room there with my then-new husband. It was our honeymoon suite.

Reading about last week’s bombing of the Al-Hamra reminded me of a story my husband told me in Iraq about a day three decades earlier in Vietnam where he saw his first bomb crater. It was strewn with shards of kitchen pottery and the limbs of a child’s doll. A bicycle had wrapped around a tree like a ribbon. Against the war in Southeast Asia from its start, he was de-politicized in that moment. He looked at his clock. It was 10 minutes until noon. He searched the sky for God and said: “I don’t care who wins

this war. But can you please make it end by noon?”

As the bad news continues to pour out of Iraq, as the death toll rises daily, as I grow even more disillusioned with this war, I am tempted to ask questions of God, too. What good can possibly come from this continued engagement? Are you there? An ill-founded, ill-prepared war machine didn’t work 30 years ago, and it’s not working now. Suicide bombing isn’t working either. Homes and communities and families far more important than my sense of the Al-Hamra are being destroyed.

“It was a clear and sunny day,” wrote my translator and friend Sa’ad al-Izzi in his report about the Al-Hamra bombing in Saturday’s Boston Globe. “But on the street, the dust was so thick it obscured the entire area in front of the hotel. I walked out the hotel’s main entrance, past rows of smashed cars on either side of the street. I wanted to see how bad the damage was, but once I got to the blast site and saw the grieving relatives of the victims, I wished I had never gone that close. Across the street, only a few shards remained of the glass fa?ade of the Flowers Land Hotel.”

And here I had been afraid of the dark.

The day after the Al-Hamra bombings, Sa’ad sent an e-mail to me. “I’m OK and not hurt at all,” he wrote. “There is not a single scratch on me, thank God. It seems that my guarding angel is still in good shape and working hard.”

I am grateful Sa’ad is alive. I hope his guarding angel continues to work overtime. But apparently there aren’t enough angels to go around in Iraq.

So God, could you please make this war end by noon today?

Alicia Anstead writes about arts and culture for the Bangor Daily News.

She reported from Iraq in July 2003.