December 9, 1990 to the present day

(This post concludes the account as it stands.  I’m still interested in getting a version of this story into print.  I’m open to all manner of revision to make that happen.)

While eating lunch the next day, I met Hendrik, whom I’d last seen at Thanksgiving. We spent the rest of the day sitting at a table talking. Circelia went off somewhere with other women. I slept on the balcony the next night and came in to shower only when Circelia went to breakfast. She returned with a rose and wanted to tell me about someone who had given it to her, but I said I had to go downstairs for breakfast and stayed there. In mid afternoon, sitting with Hendrik, I heard my name called. A man smoking a cigar and carrying a clipboard said something about my traveling back to the United States that night on a private jet with John Connally. This made as little sense as the other things happening to me now;  the only one I knew by that name was the politician, someone I’d ever met.

“Go upstairs and pack, now, and report to the blue conference room,” the cigar smoker said. I went upstairs to grab my bags and told Circelia to grab hers. Guards in the lobby ushered us into a conference room.

“Hostages sit in front of the room, separate from their relatives and loved ones.” one guard said. I took a seat in the front of a roped-off area. I looked back. Circelia stood in the rear with the TV crews.  I saw the CNN crew that met Abu Alaa and me the other day at the desk. Some officials came in and sat on a low stage. One wore a green military outfit like Saddam often did, like Syphr’s. Another man up there wore a striped suit and spoke perfect Arabic and American English as he read off names from the passports in front of him. He checked my face against the picture in the passport before handing it to me.

After we remained there another half hour holding our passports, the man in the striped suit told us all to board a bus for the airport.  Following Circelia, I was the last person to squeeze in.  The bus seemed to carry double its capacity. I rode standing in the door well, watching the city go by: the markets, book sellers, the Tomb of’ the Unknown Soldier, the huge and grotesque Arch of the Swords. The driver, speaking English quite well, said, “You are very lucky to return on Mr. Wyatt’s aircraft.”

I wondered who Mr. Wyatt was, but said, “Yes, I know.  How long has Mr. Wyatt been in Baghdad?”

At the Saddam International Airport, security officials waved us through the customs inspection area: the diary and cash in the money belt stayed with me. We had to present our passports to be stamped before moving into the transit lounge. The cigar-smoker and a woman,  who said they were from the Embassy, counted us, disagreed about numbers in our party, saying something about another busload trying to leave the hotel in time to catch Mr. Wyatt’s plane.

Circelia and I sat in the transit lounge, silent and far enough apart that we could pass ourselves off as unrelated. After a time,  two distinguished looking men emerged at one end of the lounge. One I recognized immediately as John Connally, unmistakable in his white cowboy hat, the former Texas governor and Cabinet Secretary.  The other, I learned, was my benefactor, Oscar Wyatt, president of an oil company. The two walked through the lounge, introducing themselves and wishing us some happy holidays. “I’m sure you folks have a lot of catching up to do,” he said.

When the word came to board the aircraft, we moved quickly and almost immediately took off. We applauded as the plane left the left the ground. When the intercom announced we were out of Iraqi airspace, the applause and hooting was louder although neither time had I clapped with much enthusiasm.

Circelia slept in the aisle seat of the Coastal Boeing 707 while I looked out the window.  My old friends Aldebaran and Betelgeuse seemed distanced, more boreal than at the refinery.  After a fuel stop in Ireland, we entered Canadian airspace after midnight. The waning moon did little to illuminate what lay below.  Were those cumulous clouds against a black abyss, or snowy land with many dark patches of water, and was one of those the lake near where Diana waited?  It pained me that she had to wait, but Circelia had agreed to sign the divorce papers if I escorted her back to the Midwest and past the gauntlet of reporters who “knew” hers to be a story of a brave woman who traveled to Baghdad to rescue her loving husband.  The plane would land at Coastal Petroleum’s airport of choice anyhow, and that meant Houston, Texas.

A few weeks later, a divorce decree finally freed me, although that liberation came with the pain of leaving my children. As I flew into Boston to Diana, the sound of air rushing past the airplane recalled the noise of Asmida, which I’d left less than a month before.  At the arrivals gate, we hugged and wept;  she looked simultaneously haggard and radiant.  I wasn’t sure where to start, but we walked to her car and drove north, beginning an effort to repair our fractured life.

On New Year’s Day she accompanied me to a frigid ocean beach in New Hampshire because I wanted to show her how the mesbah had helped me focus on returning to her, but the January water so chilled me that she saw my swim as evidence of my imbalance, and I felt foolish as I shivered.  I call it my “swim,” but I had waded in only to my knees before turning back, not only cold but also inarticulate.

The “air war” began on January 16, 1991 as I drove home alone from a lay-off meeting with my employer.  When the radio announcer spoke of bombs falling on that moonless night, I felt faint and parked on the shoulder of the road, and sat there until the winter air convinced me to get home.

During the weeks that followed, the order had left my life.  I nearly collided head-on with another car while I drove on the left side of the road, seeing it speed toward me but not registering danger.  Diana took my keys for a few days.  I managed little more work than mucking a stable where Diana kept a horse.  I earned no pay and made no promise from one day to the next that I’d be back.  I bought a TV, which Diana and I never had owned, and watched the news of the war. Whenever I saw footage of a “smart bomb” pulverizing a target, I strained my eyes, wondering if I’d recognize the target as the refinery.  I ignored her requests that I not watch so much.

Several times a week I went to a college library and read accounts in all the magazines I could.  One article included this sentence:  “Heavy bombing left the Khor al-Zubair Industrial area devastated.” This could mean Asmida as well as PC1, the power station, the LNG tanks.  Those emotionless terms veiled thudding concussions that might have killed Ali, Abu Mahmoud, and Umm Kul.  And when I wasn’t gathering news or mucking horses, I wanted to celebrate, while she tried to catch up on work projects that had languished during my detention.

I took the train to New York to see Tom in spring 1991, just after General Norman Schwarzkopf and an Iraqi Lieutenant General signed the truce in Safwan, near the border just south of PC1.  Tom looked older than I remembered.  His story of three months at the Saddam Dam north of Mosul differed from mine in details  but paralleled my emotions.  I told him about my telephone call with Ted and their ordeal camping at the border for a day in August before the Saudis let them cross over.

I thanked Tom for the attitude he gave me, but as we shared stories, he was surprised when I described an incident at the hotel in Kuwait, when I had thought him brave.

“I was terrified. My knees were shaking; that’s why I straightened up in front of that officer.” he said, his right eye twitching.

“What would you really like to do now?” I asked.

“I’d like to go back to Iraq,” he said, without hesitation. “Things I saw along the highway, especially in Kurdish country where I was held, make me even more curious. I’ll bet there are carpets and kilims there better than any I’ve seen.”

Diana and I eventually gave up.  I moved to a trailer in the woods not far from her.  Tensions crackled so much whenever we met that we spoke only on the telephone for a while until that too became unpleasant.  Then we would see each other only when driving—we’d meet on the road, moving in opposite directions, wave, but continue.  I watched her in the rear view mirror, hoping to see her brake lights come on, but they never did.  I moved to another state, leaving information with our common friends in New Hampshire so that she could call or write.  When I finally called her number more than ten years later, it had been reassigned.  She moved on, and so did I.  Drop by drop, hope of our meeting again spilled completely away.  The wound has healed.  To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau’s sentiments upon leaving his retreat in the woods, I accept that I have several other lives yet to live and can spare no more time on that one.

Before the current war started in Iraq in 2003, TV and the Internet carried footage of beheadings.  Many of us saw them, maybe more of us chose not to see . . . a dozen hostages in Southwest Asia, mostly in Iraq, their lives ending in front of a camera, blindfolded and hands behind the back. I tried to imagine the bound wrists stressing against the lower back as the victim strains painfully at shoulder sockets and torso.  I heard the scream at the very instant metal touches the neck. In those days, I would catch myself putting my fingers to my neck, massaging the soft tissue and tougher muscles and ligaments there.  Wondering how quickly a blade could work through, I probed the vertebrae at the back of my neck, feeling for the gap between any two convenient ones. “Struggle!  Bite!  Head-butt the ogre with the knife! I thought.  I imagined I’d not sit idly at that instant.

Yet, when would I begin the struggle?  Soon enough to survive, or . . . ?  In June 2006 I listened to a National Public Radio reporter reading emails sent to the NPR website in response to a story about two US soldiers captured alive—outgunned and outnumbered, surrounded, cut off from any way to escape—and then beheaded.  One of the emails, paraphrased, went like this:

“Of course I am horrified by this execution, but if it had been me, the videotaped killing would never have happened because I would have gone down fighting.  After all, if my choices are to go down fighting to avoid capture or to be butchered in front of a video camera, I’ll choose the former.”

The bravado in that email did not convince me.  The writer’s choice to fight at the point he described would surely have resulted in his death, and that is why I think his answer is wrong.  My life was at stake during the four months that began on August 2, 1990, but I made other choices than to fight, and through these there was the possibility of survival.  If I had attacked and gone down fighting, clearly, it would have been suicide.

My nightmares still happen.  In one, I sit in the front seat of an Iraqi army truck driven by Colonel Syphr along the Shatt-al-Arab where Saddam had placed huge statues of soldiers pointing toward Iran. As we drive past, these statues come to life and point to Syphr. Gunfire erupts from every side. One bullet’s impact throws Syphr, his bloody head, his blood, onto my lap. Before I reach over and grab the wheel, the truck careens into the Shatt.  I swim to safety. Climbing up the bank, I turn and look behind me. Glossy blanched bodies float down the waterway, having spilled from the back of the truck.

In another nightmare, I am back at the mesbah with fellow “guests” from that time in 1990, sitting at one end of the pool, comfortable; my fellows express no bitterness and the flies aren’t hungry.  The world seems harmonious.  At one point, I walk to the wall where I would shower and bask in the sunshine while looking over to see if the guards were coming.  Mr. Mohammed walks towards the pool, and I wonder if he will ask for a list of needs.  Then I notice an unfamiliar group of about ten armed guards trailing him, about thirty feet back.  As he turns the corner, he speaks in a loud voice.

“I have news for all of you.  Please come over here by the wall.”  He says, smiling.

“Good news or bad news?” I ask, walking away from the wall, suddenly very afraid.

He disregards my question and repeats with more enthusiasm than before, “Over by the wall, everyone.  I have news.”

The guards turn the corner and draw their pistols.  I know the time has come.  I rush toward them, wondering how many I can take down.

What might have happened to the guards like Colonel Syphr, Kamal, Abu Alaa, and the others . . . perhaps they died in the Shiite revolt in March 1991.

As for Saddam Hussein, when his end came in late December 2006, I sat transfixed at a computer.  He stood flanked by two men, wearing dark sweaters and ski masks, cutouts for eyes and a tip of nose, crowded into a space with a low ceiling.  Supposedly this was a place his regime used for torture and execution.  His face was like blank paper, unforgiving light leaching most of his color. What was he thinking, I wondered.  Was he frightened?  Was his mind vacant?  His unnatural black hair and matching eyebrows suggested youth, but the eyes downcast, maybe closed, belied any sense of vigor.  The trimmed beard looked gray, the color of cement, cold wet cement.  For a shroud he wore a red scarf and heavy wool overcoat, his frame erect, arms at his sides, hands no doubt bound behind him.  The masked men adjusted a rope attached somewhere above them.

Did he study this noose as he scaled the steps, or avert his eyes?  Did one of the masked men tie the noose, or someone else?

The masked man on the right held the loop against the prisoner’s scarf while his partner rammed the noose against the condemned’s left ear.  Was he worried when that noose tightened?  What thoughts raced in his mind in these last minutes?  Of an afterlife?  His nation?  Did he feel remorse?  Or terror about the humiliation of hanging, with its involuntary out-gushing of bladder and bowels after death slackens all muscles?  Or fear of pain?  Was he listening for a moving trapdoor latch?   Was he praying for an angel with a scimitar to slash the rope?  Was he telling himself that a heroic leader follows this path to martyrdom?

Did 1990 matter to him anymore?  It does for me.  Maybe I was just lucky, but I made my choices.  A group of Iraqis and I had our battle.  We all won because no blood spilled, no life expired.  I swam in the waters of Babylon, and survived.  Some day I’ll return.

News chronology:

December 9:  Coastal role in my flight out of Iraq

December 12: NYTimes article that mentions me.  The article gets some things wrong.

This ends the account as it stands.  I am open to dialogue in the comments section.  If you wish to discuss in a different forum, send on email:  parrotlect (at)  gmail.com  and put babylonia in the subject line.

December 8, 1990

“When Abu-Alaa said he was driving you to Baghdad, you trusted him?” a new friend named Donna recently asked.  She had learned of my Iraq sojourn seventeen years after it happened, and asked questions I’d long forgotten to address.  So did I trust him?

Of course, I knew he’d driven Olivier, Reiner, and Jurgen to Baghdad for release because they’d gotten in touch with Diana once they arrived back in Europe free to freedom among their loved ones.  What made my “liberation” complicated was the presence of Circelia in Baghdad.  The trip north felt like an extradition.  Abu-Alaa, if ordered, would have tortured or killed me.  I knew that.  Left to his own devices, as he had been, he showed friendship and hospitality.  Rather than take me north via the teahouse in Hilla, he could have invited a friend along, spoken Arabic the whole way, relegating me to the back seat.

As I waited for Circelia, I felt less free than I had in months.  I stood there, holding my bags, in a windowless hallway, fearing what lay ahead.  It was a fear quite different from the one I’d overcome in Iraq.  I suspected Circelia had come with an urgent agenda:  take custody of me and convince me to annul the divorce proceedings.  I stared at the floor contemplating that, in the next seconds, my sanctuary would implode.

“How were things where you were?”  The words came from one of the women sitting at the table with the minders. Her voice sounded far away. I didn’t really know how to answer. Her question presumed an intimacy I didn’t want. My experience was mine to share with whom I chose when I chose. The hallway closed in, and I felt like I was drowning.

As Circelia approached, her heels clicking in the hallway, a wave of emotions built within me, reaching tsunami height by the time she appeared.  I saw her face as smug, a triumph in her eyes I didn’t understand. I wonder now if I really could recognize those attitudes. I kissed her cheek and, mechanically, hugged her.  Feelings of violation and confusion swirled in my brain as I followed her, silently, down the hall.

“Why did you come?” I asked, setting my bags on the bed beside me, happy the room had two beds.

“I had to rescue you,” she said.

I resisted an urge to retort, “You didn’t need to rescue me.” Rescue was a loaded word for me.  My American boyhood taught that was what males might do for females, a noble ideal maybe but one that had left me vulnerable to manipulation.

“How are the kids?  How’s Junior’s eye?  Where are they?” I asked.

“Relax. They’re well taken care of. Don’t worry,” she said.  “Let’s talk about us.”

Again, I struggled to stay silent. It’d been two years since I’d filed for divorce, almost three years since we’d shared a roof, much longer since we’d shared a bed, and yet the tension had lost none of its volatility. “Don’t worry” and “Relax,” two forms of the imperative made my throat constrict. Her social commands had already touched nerves that could jerk me into a rage. How dare she command me to do anything, politely or otherwise.

“How long have you been here?” I asked, looking toward the balcony.

“Only two days,” she said. “You look thin,” she changed the subject.

“Well . . . I have lost some weight,” I said, realizing the absurdity of my statement.  My brain struggled for clarity. I didn’t want her to talk about me, make observations about my health, or express feelings about me or my plight.

“When are you going back?” I asked. I feared her controlling this conversation. I wasn’t conscious then how I scattered the conversation all over to avoid sinking at all below the surface.

“The same time as you,” she said.

I was no longer thinking about returning—not that I had lost desire to see Diana or my children, but just that I felt netted anew. I’d gotten out of Asmida, only to have emerged in a worse bind: to my imagination, Circelia represented an unexpected weir that extended all the way back to North America: the only way to see my children was to go with her. In the months since August, I saw only the obstacles that existed in Kuwait and Iraq, concluding these were all that separated Diana and me. Now I stared at a much larger quandary, one that I thought I’d stepped away from two years ago when I decided to divorce.

“But I’m going to New England when I leave here,” I blurted out, not really to her.

She inhaled deeply. “I suppose you’re going to see your stupid girlfriend there.”

I studied the door to the balcony, as if it led to a safety exit.

“I heard that you wanted your stupid girlfriend to come instead of me. But where is she? She was a chicken, just like your family. Your parents, your brothers, they were too scared to come.”

I blinked, many times. Her voice grated and my eyes stung.  Blinking felt good because it kept me from cringing at the sound of blood rushing through my inner ears and  head. After months of losing fear and hatred, it jumped back in front of me, coating my eyes, stifling me.

“You should love me. I saved your life. Your stupid girlfriend didn’t. And you should call off the stupid divorce.”

“I need some air,” I said, quietly, looking toward the balcony.

“If you go out there and leave me, I’ll scream,” she said, moving partway to the sliding door outside.

I got off the bed. This threat was absurd, but maybe she thought I’d jump. I took my bags with me out to the balcony. They contained my calendar and survival supplies, what was left of them.  The most recent installment of the diary, which had helped me cope, would be harder to deliver to Diana than getting the two previous parts to her.

In the darkness I could make out the Tigris below, less than 500 feet away.  The black water shimmered with reflections from the buildings on the far bank, river water as murky as in August, probably as in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and before. I imagined myself becoming a hawk, gliding off the balcony and outward to splash into the river whose opacity could hide me. I could transform into a turtle and stay under for 300 miles southward through swamp, under the reeds, around the fat buffalo and fish, to the Gulf, and then . . .

“Come back in here,” she said. Maybe she added, “You coward.” I couldn’t remember if my life depended on it now.

For some time, my back to her, I ranted, reciting lies and the least intimate recollections I could so that I didn’t have to hear her, so that I stayed fenced off from her, off-limits and unapproachable.

“Oh yeah, it was quite difficult.”  I said.  “The other hostages and I . . . we supported each other. The guards were horrible. All Iraqis are terrible. We never talked with them. The guards were so horrible. I hope they all die . . .” I seethed on and on, not letting her say anything.

Until she gave up and went to sleep, I babbled, suspending enough measure of self-control that she’d think I’d slipped over the edge of sanity, maybe then she’d leave me alone. While talking, I’d stared at the river, the current slowly making its its to the Gulf and the world’s Oceans.

I stayed on the balcony much of the next day, watching the Tigris. Circelia was free to leave the hotel and tour the city. I was not. I was still a hostage, still confined to this hotel floor, still prevented from choosing my own roommate. Part of my behavior I knew to be petty, maybe even mean:  I could have acted grateful, or just gracious, but what prevailed was the thought that she should not have come, especially not with a group that seemed to be unaware of our impending divorce.

News chronology:

December 8:  A digest of news from the New York Times

December 8:  Tariq Aziz and Joseph Wilson speak.

 

December 7, 1990

Abu Alaa and I left Asmida at one, exactly the time he had told me. I couldn’t believe I was going through the gate a last time in Ali Baba’s Mercury. I concentrated on surroundings I would never see again. Abu Alaa saw two women near the gate, waiting probably for the bus to Basra. He stopped, leered at them in his rearview mirror, winked at me, and backed up. He rolled down his window, “Come on, let’s go,” he said.

The women declined, acting disgusted by his offer.

I tuned him out for a while, focusing instead on the checkpoint and machine‑gun nest built up with sandbags, the railroad track, and the archway at the end of the driveway.  We turned onto the road to Zobair and passed the checkpoints, the power station, the slag heaps in the desert, the old cars, the blast furnaces, and the antennas.

Before the turn-off we passed the ruins of the ancient mud-brick structure. “Was that once a caravansary?” I asked.

“Caravansary? I don’t know,” he said, shrugging it off.

But I was really interested. “A khan?” I tried again, using a synonym that he might recognize.

“Khan! Yes, khan, I think,” he said, but showed not interest at all.

I suppose it was predictable. He was a secret police creature, not interested in an old, derelict market.

As we approached Basra, he offered a choice:  take the two-lane road following the Tigris, through Qurna and Amara;  or the highway along the Euphrates, through Nasiriyah and Babylon, actually Hilla. I told him Babylon. He remembered a conversation we’d had weeks earlier: I’d told him he had to take me to visit his home in Babylon.

He seemed pleased as he turned towards Babylon. The highway was excellent, like an interstate through wide open desert, even marked with large blue and white highway signs identical in design to those along American interstates. However, horrible wrecks haunted the road, obliterating a sense of efficient, trouble-free driving.  Soon after the on-ramp, we pass the remains of a black Mercedes 600 sedan, blood-covered broken windshields, partially covered with sand, demolished against an overpass abutment on a perfectly straight highway. Had the driver fallen asleep, was it suicide, was he forced off the road, had the driver crashed after being hit by strafing fire from an attack helicopter? Farther north a dump truck loaded with beer was overturned, and men dressed like Abu Mahmoud gathered unbroken bottles from the sand.

Abu Alaa drove between sixty and eighty miles per hour. “Go. Babylon before dark.” he explained. We chatted and smoked his cigarettes, my first since the Sumer cigarettes I had the days after being taken from the hotel in Kuwait City months before. I studied the civilian buses and convoys of military vehicles moving south. A military cargo plane took off from the desert a dozen or so miles southwest of the highway. Near Nasiriyah we passed a thirty-foot high berm that went on for miles. I watched the odometer from the corner of my eye: the fortification extended at least ten miles. I wondered if the designers intended it to stop enemy tanks or to prevent eyes like mine from seeing what lay beyond.

We chatted about the highway itself—one of the English words he’d wanted to learn at Asmida. “How old is the highway? How is the highway in Boston?” He still expected to be my houseguest someday. The rapport between us usually felt not unlike that between student and teacher, though it was not clear who was what. Maybe both of us assumed the two roles simultaneously.

Around 4 p.m. he’d turned on the radio to hear the news. After thirty seconds, his jaw dropped as he turned to me. In an astonished voice, “el raees now releases all of the hostages immediately. Al-hamdullilah.” We shook hands and smoked another cigarette.

We were more than half the way between Basra and Baghdad. I’d never see Asmida again. Yet I felt farther from freedom than ever: zawaj talaq was in Baghdad waiting for me. The thought of seeing her troubled me. Abu Alaa was smiling. “Al-hamdullilah,” he repeated. He knew of my confusion, but he also knew that I was headed home, as were all the guys he’d guarded for so long. He would soon be reassigned to other duty, maybe something more exciting, I imagined.

“You should be thankful. This is another Thanksgiving Day for you,” he said.

“Not yet, you know that, Abu Alaa,” I said.

 

At dusk we followed a marriage procession into Hilla. It was strange to think of a wedding now, here, on a dusty shortcut between the highway and downtown Hilla. Cars decorated with streamers, drivers blowing car horns; a young woman in a white dress and her man in a black tuxedo together stood up through the sunroof of a Mercedes, waving. Dust kicked up by the cars painting the date palms brown. This dirt road changed into busy streets in the center of the city. Abu Alaa asked if it was all right to stop for five minutes to chat with friends. “Let’s stop for a few days,” I said. He laughed.

Abu Alaa parked alongside a curb where six or seven men were gathered.  They gathered by his door immediately, laughing, shaking hands, kissing his cheeks.  Abu Alaa introduced me simply as Mr. Will.   We all shook hands, a warm and matter-of-fact meeting. Maybe they’d heard from him about his assignment at Asmida. He may have similarly introduced Reiner and Jurgen a week and a half earlier, though I didn’t think so.

“You want tea,” he asked after a quarter hour that I’d stood on the street corner watching as he talked and laughed with his friends. As we walked across the street to a busy teahouse, I inhaled deeply the delicious smells of spices and meats roasting on fires.  Families crowded the sidewalks and laughed, raising their voices with a range of emotions.  Car horns sounded cheerful and songs from passing car radios brought me out of the robotic existence I’d too long endured.   The constant background roar of industry and its accompanying acrid smells were finally gone.

. “This . . . istikhan (teahouse) good,” Abu Alaa said. Dozens of white light bulbs hung on several wires strung along the ceiling, like Christmas decorations. We drank a glass of hot syrupy tea, standing, leaning against a blue and white-tiled wall that reflected the lights in this busy istikhan where a dozen men conversed in loud excited voices.  Spoons clinked inside tea glasses.  Dishes clattered onto the counters.  The sweaty face of the tea man standing in front of an aromatic wood fire built inside an earthen stove, the stained white skullcap, the coarse red hands holding a large brass kettle with its aroma of tea. . . all seemed as ancient as Babylon.

When we returned to the car, I heard someone call “Mr. Will.” I looked at Abu Alaa and turned around. One of Abu Alaa’s friends came over with a bunch of grapes.

“Please take,” he said to me.

I wished I’d had some token to return to him to reciprocate the welcome he gave me, with his simple gift that glimmered of common ground between us.

When we got into the car, another man entered and sat in the back seat. He sat in the middle, so Abu Alaa and I could both half turn to make eye contact with him as we talked. I wished it had been daylight. There was much to see, and both men seemed eager to explain the sights. At one point, Abu Alaa pointed to an area maybe half a mile off the road.  Dozens of mercury vapor lights illuminated dark boxy structures, but I couldn’t see them clearly.  “Babil,” he said, and his way of saying Nebuchadnezzar.

A road sign announced Baghdad  layless than 50 miles ahead. We may have passed farmland between the rivers, but it was too dark to tell.  The moon was waning again.  Abu Alaa turned on the radio, found some music. and turned the volume up;  he and his friend sang along. When the song was over, he said, “Iraqi rock. You like Iraqi rock?”

I wondered about the next hour, meeting Circelia. “Please, Abu Alaa. Drive me to the Jordan border. You know I don’t want to do this, to see her.” He laughed, but I couldn’t. Inside Baghdad, he seemed to drive the alleys more than avenues, but along the avenues I saw jewelry shops, windows with fashion displays, people standing in front of restaurants.

I was trying hard to imagine an evening on this town when we turned into the parking lot of the Al-Mansour Melia. I reflected on the eons that’d passed since we left this hotel in August, a lifetime that had brought deaths—real and imaginary—of friends and selves and relationships. Four months had spawned friendships with fellow hostages and Iraqis like Umm Kul and Mr. Ali. And a sense of victory.

An odd couple, Abu Alaa and I entered the hotel lobby. He led me to the reception desk, seeming unsure where to go.  As he talked with the clerk, I felt like an accompanied minor on an outing with my guardian, exercising no control of my goings and comings. At one point,  two men beside us approached another desk clerk. One of them held a large video camera with CNN printed on the side. I glanced at the face of the man holding the camera. As I studied him, thinking only that he looked like one of my college roommates, his eyes brightened. He straightened up, and mumbling something, poked his partner in the ribs with his elbow, and raised the camera to his left shoulder, squinting into the eyepiece. The man beside the camera operator became aggressive. He stepped toward me. “Are you an American?” I guess the T-shirt with the map of the coast of Maine and a whale offered a clue.

In the split second I hesitated before answering, Abu Alaa grabbed my arm and half dragging me to the elevator, said, “Run!” I did, leaving the TV crew without a word.

“Seventh floor,” he said to the operator. These were my last minutes with Abu Alaa. The car ride from Basra had felt like a celebration, a return from a campaign that’d turned out well for both of us, and the news report we’d heard halfway had capped my personal joy: everyone I’d left behind at Asmida was also to be released soon; the lives of the workers there—Abu Mahmoud, Ali, Umm Kul and all the others—were to be returned to normal soon, or at least relieved of caring for us captives.

The elevator opened to the same hallway on the seventh floor I’d left in August. Unfamiliar guards sat at an improvised desk, a low round table strewn with papers, coffee cups, telephone cord, and overflowing ashtrays. Beside these guards sat two American women.

“Which one are you?” one of them asked me. Just like that, “which one.” I felt myself choking. I wanted to be back in my cell or the mesbah or the car with Abu Alaa. Anywhere but here. I didn’t want to give her my name. She didn’t belong. She couldn’t possibly be the one I reported to. The past months had been my battle and the battles of the men I was with. She had no doubt had her own battles. And I could be happy she’d survived her ordeal, but that, I felt, gave her no right to be here sitting at this table with these guards asking me who I was. I interpreted her question as an attempt to assume control over me that the guards previously had held.  I could have killed some guards and had chosen not to.  Similarly, no guards had brutalized me or any of the others I knew.  We had negotiated a feigned mutual respect.   I hadn’t figured out all these feelings right then; all I knew at that moment her question and attitude felt all wrong.

This was like one of the nightmares I’d had weeks before where I went over the back fence at Asmida, running across the desert, evading detection by patrols, stealing a bellam, navigating by night past Umm Qasr and Bubiyan Island, getting into the Gulf, approaching what I knew to be safety in the form of a sailing dhow, and then getting targeted by that MiG 23 of so many months before carrying missiles. I’d awakened from my sleep as I dived into the Gulf while a glossy white missile streaked toward me.

“Will.  Will Van Dorp,” I mumbled. This was like surrender, like swimming into the net. The woman who’d stayed silent until then turned and yelled down a hallway behind her, “Quick, tell Circelia her husband is here.” I should have made up a name, or refused to answer at all and just found a way out now that el raees had decided we could go. But it was too late.

Abu Alaa, still standing beside me, saw my face and said, “Be good. You’re still in Iraq.” Then he turned and disappeared down the backstairs.

News chronology:

December 6:  What led to Iraq’s decision to release all hostages… read here.

 

December 1-6, 1990

“Go pack,” said Abu Alaa, walked into my house around 10:00. “You should be happy. You are going to Baghdad to meet zawaj talaq.  Just you.” Of course, I’d never really unpacked in months.  It was December 6, 128 days since the invasion, and 114 days since Tom and I had put our bags in the car and driven out of Manqaf.

 

Now this news confused me. I actually wanted to stay. I had no sense of being spared. In fact, I felt that I was betraying the others who were left behind.  I’d actually begun looking forward to a Christmas service at a church in Basra.

Abu-Alaa‘s grin said he was enjoying my confusion. The least charitable part of me felt that, unknowingly, Circelia had collaborated with Saddam to prolong a form of torture. I now think I was being petty, but her arrival in Baghdad as my savior was more nauseating than it was weird.

And I did consider it quite weird. Whatever altruism I can allow her now from a distance of more than a decade and a half, I couldn’t see on that December morning in 1990. 1 locked onto an interpretation of her intentions.

It was time for battle. Leaving now meant immersing myself in activity so as not to think about Circelia: doing laundry in the sink, hanging it on the roof of the my house, checking it every 15 minutes to see if it’d dried.

I went to find Ali to say good-bye.  He was wearing a yellow hard hat dismantling some piping when I found him. “Is this your welding inspection hat or your hostage hotel manager hat?”

He laughed.

“I’m very happy for you, Mr. Will,” he reacted when I told him the news. Then he hesitated, and took off his helmet, looking around. “Please. I want to apologize for this,” he said quietly.

“Mr. Ali, thank you for everything you did for me,” I said. “I feel I understand you and think you are a good man. Take care of yourself.”

“I am very happy you are leaving, Mr. Will. During the war with Iran, there were long battles right across the water here in the Fao peninsula, but we kept right on working in the refinery. Now we pretend to work, but all the workers here really are afraid.”

“You’re a good man, Ali, and a damn poor hotel keeper, but I’ll never forget you.” We shook hands, and he laughed and put his yellow hard hat on and went back under the pipes.

Behind the mangeriyah I found Abu Mahmoud. “Yallah. Come cook for me in America. You’ll like it,” I told him. Still wearing the usual patched trousers and stained brown shirt I’d first seen him with back in August, he smiled, “Zane. Zane?” He had never changed his manner, his question.

“Aiwa. Zane,” I repeated, shaking his hand, then punching his shoulder.  He laughed, looking nervous.

When Umm Kul came into the house, I held out my hand for her to shake it. She wouldn’t. I took from my backpack some earrings I’d bought in Kuwait for my daughter, jointed fish made of silver. “Give these to your little daughter.”  I meant the one I used to see pushing the cart of drinking water along the road to the mesbah.” I kissed her cheek, impulsively.  Then I took the tinned food that had weighed down my bag long enough now.  “Take what you want and give the rest to Mr. Ali.”

And the steel pipe, I removed it from my bag and carried it out hidden up my sleeve to the service road, and dropped it into a gutter where the water was opaque. Maybe it’d been silly to have such a weapon. I never did like the feel of it or the strain of imagining it an ax coming down upon wood to be split. I wonder now if the others had weapons. We never discussed them after Max had mentioned the need to prepare ourselves that night after the German reunification party.  Rather than uniting with my fellow hostages, I had mostly fled them.  Now I didn’t go say goodbye to any of them in that other Control Room.  A war had been fought here, and we’d all won it: me, Ali, Umm Kul, Abu Alaa, Reiner. And all the others. The victory was our never having to use the weapons we held. The guards were people like me; except they had guns, which they really didn’t want to use. Maybe another secret of life is never to assume we know who our real enemies are.

 

November 23-30, 1990

Abu Alaa entered for breakfast, just returned from bringing Reiner and Jurgen to Baghdad. He and Saad moved to a corner of the mangeriyah to talk. Then Saad left for Basra.

Abu Alaa smiled, pointing to a bag he held with his left hand.

“From Baghdad, I bring sekesiveejoo,” he said, winking.

I had no idea what he meant.

“A sekesi vee joo,” he repeated.  “You want see?”

“Sure,” I said, not sure what I was getting myself into. He pulled a VHS tape from the back.

“Come see,” he said, winking more.

Leaving breakfast, I followed him through the gate and to the clinic. I got somewhat nervous when he locked the door once we were inside.  The guards never locked doors. He turned on the TV and put the cassette into the VCR. The video began with a naked woman alone on a bed touching herself.  Her skin tones were green; lighting, harsh to toxic; background music, scratchy. Words and names in the credits were Slavic but in Roman alphabet. After a fade, a new scene began: the same woman and now a man sat on a bed looking at each other. After twenty seconds, on cue, they kissed and stripped, without lust. His erection seemed automatic.  He entered her, like one machine part fitting into another. No voice, no pleasure, no sound except the slapping of body parts and scratchy music. They didn’t grunt or moan.  I wondered if they breathed. But Abu Alaa was transfixed, and—honestly—so was I.  I suppose I reconnected with my own ability to desire, or to remember it.  And he and I had found a lowest common denominator between us, that which we had absolutely in common: two men without women watching a sekesi vee joo. It attracted our attention and occupied the vacuum; for me it was a glimpse of another life. Neither of us spoke or looked at each other;  we connected in no way, but we shared a moment, of isolated sex simultaneously. It wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t want him to shut it off either.

In the next scene, two women on the same bed began taking off each other’s clothes. Abu Alaa got up and turned it off. “The Koran this no good. Haram (Forbidden).” I was angry that he shut it off, but didn’t protest. When I said I had to go, he unlocked the door. “No tell!  No tell other guests sekesi vee joo.”

I went back to my house, feeling lonely.  When I got there, Umm Kul sat on a chair, fuming. I’d never seen her sitting before.  At first she just stared, mute.  Then she said. “All morning all morning in the police house. Why?”  Before I could answer, she left.  Had she missed our morning banter, our improvised Arabic study?  Had she looked in on Abu Alaa and me watching the video?  I’ll never know.

The following day she came at her usual time, just after breakfast, and announced that her anger was finished. Then she gave me a kiss on the cheek. A kiss like a sister would give, but in this context, it astonished me. And then she talked.  Her manner was non-stop and frantic.  She captivated me. She talked about a grandfather who hunted the marshes near Qurna with bow and arrow.  I missed most of the words and interpreted her gestures. And then somehow she transitioned to telling me emphatically that she wouldn’t wash clothes for the guards although she would do it for us.

“Wash, police? No. Never. You? Yes. British? Yes. Japanese? Yes. Police? No.” I wondered why she told me this, but we never discussed why’s for things. She dusted for a while, then came back and looked at Diana’s picture.

“Why doesn’t she come to get you?” I thought she asked.

“Inshallah,” (God-willing) I said. I didn’t know how to say, “Diana would if she could.”

That afternoon I burnt up nervous energy by swimming: without Reiner and in the increasingly chilly water, it took a higher level of effort just to keep at it. The Gulf would now be too cold for any long distance swim without hypothermia.  The mesbah was about training for escape now; the exertion exercised rage, like swinging the pipe, fury about the situation. It was exertion as struggle, not sensual.   No more warm sun, my body covered itself with goose bumps, which felt like scales or pointed armor plates with spines, skin like a reptile’s, a sea turtle’s. I couldn’t conjure up images of Diana. While swimming on my back, I saw no birds that had migrated away south; instead, I saw contrails of high-flying jets in the southwestern sky over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Several times an aircraft leaving a trail approached the Iraqi border and then veered off. The BBC said the UN had just authorized the use of force. I could hear a distant rumbling. Test firing, the systematic demolition of Kuwait, the imminent loss of my future?

At night I walked at a furious pace around the refinery, wondering if sometimes I frightened the workers on duty. But most places were too dark for them to see who strode past with such speed and determination, looking skyward for stars most of the time. The moon waxed large.  I felt stronger, and I sometimes walked one more lap than the previous night. Four laps tonight, five laps tomorrow night, six laps a few nights after that. I imagined that like the Biblical Joshua, I could eventually make enough laps, blow a horn or scream, and the walls and barbed wire fences would tumble down. Maybe a rogue wave on the bay would flood inland, swallow me, and send me home, even if looking like a glossy white drowned mammal.

One night, I stopped to talk with a tanker truck driver loading up with drinking water from a fill pipe near the gate. He spoke no English, but I jumped up on the running board, smiling at him and saying routine greetings while studying the controls:  air brakes and a 10-speed transmission like a truck my older brother once drove: I could drive this, I imagined, following reckless thoughts of breaking out with a semi trailer for a final glory ride.  How far I could get and through how many fences and roadblocks and how thrilling the trip before I died?

Abu Alaa had become more patriotic than ever. One night the news brought him to his feet. In response to a mob of Saddam supporters marching in Baghdad, he chanted, “By my spirit, by my blood, I’ll ransom you, Saddam. By my spirit, by my blood, I’ll ransom you, Saddam,” dancing, stabbing an index finger in the air; the look in his eyes suggested he was surprised I didn’t join in.  It amused me that he spoke of ransoming Saddam although I was the hostage, but I kept those thought to myself.

In the next breath, he would sometimes ask, “I can come to visit you in America?” He seemed to recall the US as the ally that supported Iraq against the Iranians.  I felt no malice toward him or Saad. It was easier for me to pity than either hate or fear at this point. They were just misled pawns, dangerous ones. They showed no malice.  Saddam was the mastermind: these guys, just the footmen. I wasn’t on their side: I was on the same side as Joe, Nigel, and others whom I couldn’t bear to spend time with and now rarely did. Actually, I felt mostly on the same side as Ali, Umm Kul, and Abu Mahmoud, victims imposed on in a similar way.

Yet I no longer doubted that, given the need, I could bring the pipe down on the head of Abu Alaa. I respected him, as I would respect the sea, the cold, a killer, any killer no matter how charming. And these guys had charm, if only vestiges of the hospitality legendary of Ali Baba and Sindbad: an element of a life that was gracious, simple, traditional still existed in them—though not so much so as in Umm Kul or Mr. Ali.

So far, I’d not been hit, bound, locked in an actual cell, tortured, really even threatened. On the contrary, we’d gotten acquainted to a certain level, I’d bargained for better living conditions for myself and others, made jokes. None of these guards had been sadistic, the rules here forbade their incubating and satisfying that urge, it seemed, as it forbade our watching two women make love. Bored young men, the guards welcomed opportunities to chat, drink tea, watch TV together.  As I write this now after the horrible legacy of Abu Ghraib, I feel compelled to emphasize these points.

Over ten weeks before, Kamal had announced the move into the refinery where we would die if the bombs came. I had expected to die soon after that move. It felt like death row. I’d become fatalistic, accepting the events of each day as they came. Losing fear was liberating. This must be a secret of life, the one that allows people to endure adversity. I wondered what other secrets I had to learn.

November 15-22, 1990

Abu Alaa wanted to know the details of the divorce, but before I could answer, two men came into the room. One had an unmistakable Arab face. He wore a green uniform with no markings and a heavy jacket; the desert was getting cold. On his right hip rode a holstered pistol, stains on the flap covering the grip, as if it had been opened or shut with dirty hands. He came in and sat down. The other man, who went straight for the tea thermos, wore a similar uniform, but he was blond. At first glance, I assumed he was a new hostage, but the uniform puzzled me. When he’d filled two glasses with tea and stirred the four cubes of sugar he dropped in each, he came over, and set both cups on the table. He greeted Abu Alaa with a kiss, then offered his hand for me to shake. He seemed to speak fluent perfect Arabic with the other two.

“We’re on leave,” said the darker man, “from police work in Kuwait.” He spoke English very well, but my eyes kept going back to the blond who seemed to speak no English.

The first man took a sip of tea. “You think my blond friend here is from your country?” he laughed as he spoke. “We Iraqis come in all colors, even blond.”

“I from Mosul, north Iraq,” said the blond.

“Ahlan,” (Welcome) I said.

The first man changed the subject. “Why do expatriates generally not talk highly of Kuwaitis?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I wanted to say he’d just have to ask “expatriates generally,” but I decided to stay quiet.  I’d found in Kuwait my friends tended to be anyone but Kuwaitis but chose to avoid talking about this.

Later, back in my bed, I couldn’t sleep, troubled by a renewed sense of powerlessness.   I repeatedly gripped my steel pipe, sometimes swinging it through the air for practice. As the pipe whistled through the air, I was puzzled about my behavior.  I maintained decorum outside this cell.  Why didn’t I strip, run amok, destroy equipment, attack civilians in the factory? Why not surrender to my fury and force a change, any change, even if it meant I’d not survive?  Of course, I knew my answers to all those questions were like Patty Hearst’s about people expecting that when the Symbionese Liberation Army took her hostage, she would just “spit them in the eye and get killed.”

When I tired of alternately trying to sleep and swinging the pipe, I sat at the window. The sill spanned a wall almost two feet thick; I considered it a table across which to look into the refinery. Straight ahead was the RO water plant, a quarter-mile, five-story building topped with huge fan units, each with mist coming from them.  Toward morning, a slight wind carrying some comforting moisture into my cell whetted my appetite.

At breakfast I learned from Reiner that Jack was gone.  Two guys fitting the description of the ones I’d met the night before took him to Baghdad to meet his wife.  He’d had only ten minutes to pack.

Umm Kul was waiting for me when I got back to my cell.  Her mission that day seemed to be giving me a five-dinar bill:   she walked in, stopped in front of me, reached into her housecoat, and pulled out the money. Maybe she’d heard we’d stopped at the market on the way back from the mesbah.

I refused it at first: I had no need for cash. I had other things on my mind anyhow.  But she insisted, going on and on, I think, saying that I, like her son Kul*, a military conscript in Baghdad, needed some pocket money. It seemed a strange name, Kul.  A word with the same sound meant everyone, if I’d learned the word correctly. Her description of Kul made him seem as much a hostage as I was: when she talked of him, she held up her hands as though they were bound. Did I understood her logic that her son was subjected maybe more even than I was to the whims of people from Kamal to Saddam, or was she talking about herself? When talking with her, given that my vocabulary was so limited, I never knew if I was just hearing what I wanted.  I suspected the less I understood her language, the more passionate it sounded.

She talked with uncharacteristic urgency.  She even referred to muhandes Saddam; muhandes (engineer) was a term of respect. She always referred to Mr. Ali as muhandes Ali, which technically he wasn’t.  I hadn’t heard her use this term for people beyond the refinery before. But now she talked of muhandes Saddam, muhandes Jaber Al Sabah, muhandes Bush even. She usually let on her dislike for Saddam: however, this morning, she was talking about some British and muhandes Saddam. She may have been talking about Jack, who was now in Baghdad, possibly to meet Saddam and then leave for home, Great Britain or whatever. Then I must have missed the language connection somewhere because she mimed acts of torture like pulling out fingernails and attaching electric probes. For an instant I wondered how this uneducated, traditional marsh Arab woman—she’d said she was originally from Qurna, the mythical Garden of Eden—how she knew about such things as torture?  Then I wondered why we had so far been spared learning of it first hand.  A few weeks before, Ali seemed hurt about reports in European newspapers called us “mistreated.”  Torture, other than at its broadest definition—deprived of rights to move—never  happened yet.

Circelia’s planning to come here was so crazy that, much as I wanted to see Diana, to be with her, an idea emerging recently was of imprisonment as perverted security. I wondered if this was what causes ex-convicts to commit more crime to “free” themselves from the uncontrolled life outside the security of the prison. Circelia would beg that I call off the divorce and torment me if I didn’t. Continued detention—even along with its death threat—gave me respite, an opportunity to float along in time that had slowed down, almost stopped.  Days didn’t matter.  I had no deadlines of any sort; death might arrive on its own schedule with ten of fewer minutes notices.  If I escaped, made it to Saudi Arabia and then back to Diana, I’d still need to navigate the wiles of Circelia. Clocks would start ticking again. Security behind walls and barbed wire had an appeal.

I went on learning Arabic, sounding out words in the dictionary when no one was around to help. Seeing a drawing of a mermaid in the dictionary, I guessed it would be pronounced harous. One day I told Saad I wanted to go to the mesbah to see the harous: without missing a second he said, “No, that was a dead toad.”

“But no,” I said. “Harous is there.” I wanted to see such a creature as I swam, the stuff of fantasy and the substance of Diana. I would follow wherever it led. “Harous is my zawaj.” He laughed some more: but I didn’t want to amuse him—only make him doubt my sanity, suspect me so delusional that I saw hallucinations under the water. I wanted those hallucinations to happen, dreaming of her enough.

I ignored all fellow hostages except Reiner.  My after-supper routine started with playing a few sweaty games of ping pong with him.  Then I’d put on the stiff new steel-toed shoes Ali’d finally got for me, and hike a few laps of the factory to break them in and develop the right set of calluses. Speedwalking around the refinery roads, I gazed at the moon, almost gone again, and bright stars I imagined were Al-Mareekh (Mars), Aldeberan, Betelgeuse, my new guardians, brothers in the sky I talked to like harous in the mesbah. These lights needed names and it didn’t matter if I mislabeled them.  Then I’d go to the guards’ house to drink tea and watch the 10 o’clock Baghdad news. One night while I was sitting there, a soldier came in, bundled against the cold. I assumed he was one of those dug into the desert around the plant. The guards offered him tea and cigarettes. While I sat there, he asked the guards nothing about me. He noticed my shoes; they were just like his. Did he suspect the guards, secret police, might not have this bizarre situation under control? The police slept in beds in a building; he went back out to sleep in the desert, I supposed. Did he resent this? Revealing nothing, saying little, he left.

The lead story on the Iraqi national TV news was Jack, his wife and six other couples. The women who’d come two weeks earlier to plead for their husbands had been granted an audience with Saddam. Saddam, after telling the women and their relatives his opinions, announced they could all go home. We saw our own Jack, the uncompromising, now a changed man in spite of shaved head, shake hands with Saddam. Was this what Circelia intended to do as well?  Would I maintain decorum and shake Saddam’s hand?

Ali stopped by as he did sometimes when he worked the night shift. He asked about the improved food served at lunch the past few days.

“If it was my decision, I would send you home this hour,” he responded to my saying they should send us all home, as they had with Jack, rather than try to improve our food.  “Since we can’t send you home, we really are trying to make you all as comfortable as possible, Mister Will.”

“I appreciate the excellent food these last few days,” I assured him. “But you should continue to expect complaints.  Food is very personal. I don’t even like my own mother’s cooking after I visit her for a few days, because I’m used to my own cooking now.”

“I understand some of you don’t like Abu Mahmoud’s cooking,” he said, adding, “I went to Italy a few years ago, and what I disliked most about Italy was the food.”

I was shocked until I thought about pork. “Tell me more about your trip to Italy, Ali.”

His smile seemed broader than usual as he told about his travels eight years earlier. Part of the problem with the food was pork, prohibited by his religion, as was the case with wine. But he had gone there to bologna for a metallurgy course, the high point in his life.

“If I could, I would invite you to my house to see the souvenir I brought back from Italy, a model of a gondola. It’s on a shelf in my house. It’s a little like the boats here in the Iraqi marshes, the bellams.”

When I pressed him to show me, he laughed. “The police don’t want that; otherwise, believe me, I would.” We went on to talk more about food. I asked if we could have more variety, like olives.

“You like olives?” he asked, surprise in his voice. There was so much we didn’t understand about each other, weren’t supposed to, probably, but we tried.

“And you, Mr Will, do you and the others want to go to a church?”  He seemed genuine, and I said I did.  “Mr. Yusuf is also Christian.”  Ali explained that he knew Christmas was an important holiday and promised to arrange a trip to an orthodox church in Basra at Christmas—if we were still here—for anyone who wanted.  I assured him I would appreciate that.

He stayed for over an hour. “By the way, Ali, how much notice did you have at Asmida that “guests” were coming to the factory?”

“Just four days,” he said. “It was an order from the police. When they came, the D. G. called me to the office. He said I was responsible to prepare for about a dozen guests. I knew nothing more than that.”

Talking with Umm Kul remained one of the strands of sanity.  It seems strange thinking that now.  Picture this:  she would walk around the room with a broom, mostly not touching the bristles to the floor as I accompanied with a flyswatter pointing at objects.  One day I’d point at some something and ask “Ish hatha?”  (What’s that?) again and again.  I’d write the word on a paper phonetically.  The next day, I’d point to those objects and test my memory and pronunciation.  And ask for new words.  She’d supply words, laugh at my mispronunciation, and make commentary I’d not understand.

Not that we fully understood each other about very much.  When she arrived one morning with a bottle containing a small wet rat, suggesting—I thought—that I keep it, maybe as a pet to replace Biggles, now long gone, I insisted it go outside.  My fellow hostages tolerated my conversations with the Iraqis, but the keeping a water rat would have crossed a line.

One morning Saad said Americans needed to be ready at 9:30.  It was Thanksgiving. I stood on the landing waiting. I’d put on my usual jeans and T-shirt, my favorite one with a map of coastal Maine on the front.  When Umm Kul saw me, she strongly disapproved.  “Laa, Muzavne,” (No, bad.) she said, pointing to my outfit and pulling up her nose and pushing forward her eyebrows. She said other things that sounded like lazaam sawa sheikh (must be like a sheikh),  repeating it and pointing to other clothes enough that I assumed she meant to put on my new gray suit and white shirt. Umm Kul stayed near my cell as I dressed for the “ruckus,” her word, the Arabic term for a party with dancing, I guessed. I liked the connotations of this. Through the grapevine she knew about Saad’s instructions and Mr. Mohammed’s visit a week or so earlier with Abed al Khaliq’s pickup.  In the pickup bed was a pile of new white shirts and double breasted suits, grays and ivorys;  I presumed Ali Baba had looted them from a boutique in Kuwait.  Like everyone, I’d chosen a jacket and pants, hung them up, and forgotten about them.  Later when Abu Alaa asked why we didn’t wear the suits, I just said they didn’t fit. She influenced my choice: when Saad arrived, armed and in uniform, I met with Umm Kul’s approval:  white shirt and jeans.

I joined Max and Gray in the back of a Mercury, no doubt also thanks to Ali Baba. Saad sat next to the driver, a stranger, riding shotgun, quite literally. The driver, like many other maniacs on the road, darted around and between the army trucks.

Gray pointed out Basra University as we passed: new public buildings, each one like the others and surrounded by hundreds of people walking on the sidewalks that cut across sand. Near a billboard of Saddam dressed as a Bedouin on a white horse, we passed a flea market, which Saad identified as the place to buy used VCRs and TVs, used in Kuwait, no doubt.  A little farther, we drove up to a large fenced complex. Gray said it was the South Oil Club.  The fencing obscured the correct entrance.

“No, you can’t enter here,” said Gray to the driver. “Back up. Go around that corner, and go in that gate,” he explained, pointing out a counter-intuitive route in. I could see no surprise on the face of the driver or Saad about Gray telling them how to get to the location they had apparently received orders to take us to. Gray pointed to a modernistic four-story cylindrical tower. “There.  We used to hold meetings among drillers and Iraqi government officials over there,” he said. Other cars and military vehicles were parked every which way in front of the building. Guards stood around at the entrance.

We followed Saad and the driver inside. In a lobby area stood about twenty other people I guessed were Americans, the youngest Caucasian and about twenty, long blond hair held down by a baseball hat, brim turned to the back. Besides a tall bearded black man in his fifties and two Latino or Arab men, most looked middle aged, white, gaunt.  Most had beards, longer than my unevenly cut stubble. More than an equal number of uniformed guards mingled, some sitting drinking tea like Saad.  A few others recorded the event:  three teams moved around with cameras, lights, and audio booms.

I walked over to see my old friend Hendrik. “Hey, you still at the LNG?” I asked, shaking his hand.

“No, the bastards moved me to a pumping station in the Rumailah oilfield. It’s flat and empty there for miles around,” he said. He looked weak but more defiant even than before. “I think the SS at the LNG wanted to get rid of me. And I wanted to get out of there with those tanks of liquid nitrogen right above us. So I kept hammering away at them. How you doing?”

I told him about fighting to be allowed to swim to stay in shape. “I took your advice and got a weapon and know where holes in the fence could allow escape.”

“Good, Good,” he said without smiling. His new location sounded bleak.  Missile batteries stood near his residence.  Russians and Yugoslavs working at his installation had revolted, sabotaging equipment in hopes of being deported, but instead they were handcuffed and taken away by military trucks.

After a half hour, the guards told us to move into the center of the round banquet hall where tables were arranged in the shape of a “U”. I sat with Hendrik. We didn’t talk much besides to comment on the show:  immaculate tablecloth, bouquets of plastic flowers and real peacock feathers, elegant silverware. Drinks of many hues were arranged between us and the cameras; I checked the labels: Russian wine, Jordanian beer, Hungarian brandy, Iraqi arak, Kuwaiti Pepsi, pre-August 2, 1990, of course. The sound system assaulted us with Michael Jackson’s ditty “I’m bad, I’m bad.” A few of the guards moved their heads in time with the music.  Two video teams moved in close as we drank. I wondered if they expected us to be jolly, get drunk, and fall on our faces, maybe get up and moondance. I sipped a beer slowly, alternating it with lots of water. The guards sat outside the view of the cameras, watching us.  Most of them drank Cokes.

After a few beers I went to the toilet.  A guard directed me to the room marked “Ladies.” Umm Kul was the only woman I’d talked with in months, longer it seemed. Servers there bringing drinks were nervous-looking young men dressed impeccably, white shirts, no ties, sharply pressed black pants, oiled hair slicked back like Abu Alaa’s.  After an hour or so, Colonel Syphr appeared.

“Gentlemen. We are so happy to let you celebrate your holiday of thanks. Please move to the dining room.”

In another part of the building, four large conference tables had been pushed together. When we had all taken a seat, waiters brought in four platters: each held a large turkey cooked with its head still attached. For a while, no one moved. “Eat,” said an officer moving behind a camera team. I picked up a large knife and began to carve the turkey nearest me. The camera moved in. Hendrik gathered the slices onto a plate and passed them around; the camera followed the platter. One hostage, wearing around his neck a large cross he seemed to have made, proposed that he begin a prayer. “I’ll start. I’ll stop when I’m finished, then whoever wants to add something, just speak as you feel moved to.”

Then we ate. Two Iraqis sat at the table with us; one was the jolly director of PC 1.  He laughed at one point. “Sorry, gentlemen. We couldn’t able to get zee cranberry. In your country I always had cranberry wheez turkey on Thanksgiving.”

After a while, the officer with the camera team came forward with a microphone and loops of cord. “Does anyone wants to make a message to send to his family in Unite State?”

A lanky man off to my right stood. With a gentle voice and a Texan accent, he introduced himself as Tom. The video camera team scrambled to get him in, I suppose, the most sumptuous frame. He took the microphone. “I would like to say hello to my wife.” Pause for swallowing tears. “I am well but I wish this came to an end, peacefully. We hope that our two governments sit down and resolve this.” Pause. Lots of swallowing. “And not make mountains out of molehills. We . . . .”  He choked and could say no more. He sat down and passed the microphone to the man with the cross. He started . . . but didn’t finish. Several others tried, with the same result. I just passed the microphone to Hendrik, who passed it quickly to his neighbor.

At dusk I returned to Asmida with a six-pack of Jordanian Petra beer for my housemates. I’d gathered the bottles from a case beside our table. If there were other bottles available, I would have taken them. Everything had become free as we lived without money or keys. I offered a bottle each to Reiner and Jurgen.

“Keep the beer,” Reiner said. “Abu Alaa told us to pack today.” His voice was tired.

Jurgen, on the other hand, popped open the bottle and guzzled it, dancing around the room.  It pained me to hear that they were going.  I felt abandoned, depressed to be left behind.

“I’m really glad for you. Don’t misunderstand me, my face,” I said, imagining my expression showed pain of loss more than happiness for them, but I felt mostly overwhelmed by a diminishing chance now to reach the opposite shore.

“Listen, Will, don’t say anything, I know how you feel,” he said.

“Look Reiner, you know me well enough. Get my diary pages to Diana.” He had agreed to take another installment of the diary out. “Call her collect and explain who you are and how we’ve spent the past few months together.”

Just after nightfall, Abu Alaa came by to pick them up.  I stood on the landing as they disappeared.

November 8-14, 1990

“Her letter showed so much respect for el raees Saddam Hussein,” Abu Alaa said one morning, as he began talking about the el raees releasing me soon in gratitude for her gesture—her wonderful letter printed in the Baghdad newspapers and read on the radio.

“What letter? Whose letter?” I really thought he was joking or had gone insane.

“Your wife, from Africa. You never told me your wife was from Africa,” he said.

“She’s not my wife now. We’re divorced, or should be,” I protested, wondering if I sounded shrill.

“Maalesh (no problem),” Abu Alaa responded. “It doesn’t matter if she is your wife or your ex-wife. It was a great letter. El raees likes it.”

“B-but what exactly did it say?”

“I’m not sure. I just heard by phone from Baghdad that your wife wrote a very respectful letter to el raees. But we can listen to it on the radio news.”

I went with him and the other guard, Saad, who also thanked me for my wife’s letter.

“She’s not my wife,” I said, watching Abu Alaa smirk.  “To me it does matter a lot that you know she’s not my wife. She’s not. We stopped being husband and wife maybe five years ago. She is not my wife,” I insisted.

Abu Alaa changed the subject. “You teach me English,” he asked. “You every night teach me English.” I could understand him, but he spoke not nearly so well as Kamal.

“Sure,” I said. “I agree to do this if you teach me Arabic in exchange.”

“Good. We start now.”

The how’s of teaching he left to me, so I decided to introduce him to seven or eight words of English he wanted to know in exchange for seven or eight words of Arabic I wanted, nightly. When we started, he picked up an Iraqi military magazine that had pictures of tanks, missiles, and rifles—words he wanted to know immediately. When we got to what I told him was a “rifle,” he told me the Arabic term was bandokhiya. This stunned me: it sounded not coincidentally like bandoki, the word with the same meaning in Lingala, a language of Congo. I knew that Swahili, another official language of Congo, borrowed words from Arabic, but here was the first one I’d come across in Lingala. This also scared me: was it possible my life had come full circle now? A word in the first non-European language I studied was the same as that word in this latest language. And the word was what might just kill me. Did coming full circle mean that my end was near, that I’d soon be shot like the people in Kolwezi? Or was I just off-balance, interpreting a coincidence as if it were an omen that it wasn’t, expecting symmetry where there would be none?

In truth, the fact of her letter wasn’t so strange.  I’d written to the powers-that-be myself:  To el raees Saddam I wrote respectfully that holding us could not help his cause. To Bush I wrote that sitting down to talk with Saddam would improve his status. After all, American presidents spoke with Soviet presidents at the height of the Cold War.  How could this be different?

I’d written to my children, repeating over and over that I missed them.  But most of my writing went to Diana, weekly letters as well as the journals. I hoped she already had the first part, from Olivier. Iraq was getting colder: this might be my winter journal.  When this ordeal had started, it’d been summer by her, and I imagined Lost Pond, mosquitoes, lady’s slippers, and Diana’s flower garden. Now snow might cover the frozen ground. I wrote the first journal page at my window sill:

“I’m losing the sensual pleasure of the warm sun on my skin. I hope you’ve found solace in something while you’re enduring being hostage of this situation.

It pains me to write that for a week or so I’ve had dreams that you’ve fallen out of love. In one, you’ve built a large piano in the cabin.  It’s so large that there’s no room there for me anymore. If these are dreams prompted by months of being out of touch with you, then it’s just another torture, insidious sowing of doubts that may bear cruel fruit later. I shudder to write this but do so as a way of staying faithful to the idea of being frank.

The moon is getting full again; I imagine this means I’m safe for a while once more, the most fruitful time for an attack coming on the new moon. I’m doodling a lot those days, drawing dozens of variations on a same cartoon face: a surprised look on the full moon. I don’t know why I draw this or why the face on the moon is surprised.”

Umm Kul came to talk the first thing the morning after Abu Alaa told me about the letter. She too wanted to thank me for the good letter, but she seemed confused about who was who in my life: she knew that the woman in the picture by my bed was not African, as news reports about the letter described her. I explained again that the letter was written by a zawaj talaq, one of the words I’d learned from Abu Alaa. She seemed not to understand; maybe my Arabic was too limited to explain complex issues like ex-wives.

She changed the subject and pulled out four postcards I guessed she’d bought from a market in Basra. She pointed to one that showed the shrine of the tomb of the Shi’ite prophet Ali;  the other three cards depicted boats:  boys poling bellams, a Gulf dhow under sail, and small tugboats with barges under a date palm grove. She’d picked up on my not-so-subtle interest in boats, though she didn’t know that talking about ships and boats—like watching clouds—was about fantasy, about escape and survival.  Two powerful vehicles—boats and postcards—if only the cards could travel and bring response and if only those hulls could bear me away, I thought. Or maybe she did know, and she did understand my predicament because it was her own too: she needed escape from the facts of her life as an Iraqi.

Messages came in other forms.  One night someone shook me out of sleep. I opened my eyes.  My watch said 1:30. Colonel Syphr stood beside my bed.  I sat up. He was smiling. Is this the execution? was my first thought, but I didn’t reach for the pipe.  Someone about to kill me wouldn’t have that expression and might not even want to awaken me before the dispatch to a final sleep.

Instead, he drew a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I have a message for you,” he said grinning, with his usual disgusting sophistication. I saw the Japanese in the other room behind him, as they hadn’t gone to sleep yet.  I understood any curiosity they’d have about his going into my “cell,” as I called it.

The paper was a telegram from Circelia, a cryptic note of less than twenty-five words dated almost four full weeks earlier: “Will Jr rushed hospital 10/21. Think can save right eye. Surgery tomorrow. I’m losing mind. Circelia.”

The rest of the night I couldn’t sleep. Questions swirled through my head. Why was he rushed to the hospital? Why was the right eye in danger? Did this imply that the left eye was gone? What had surgery accomplished? Why was Circelia losing her mind? Was this real, or was the whole thing an exercise in misinformation she had generated to try to get me released on humanitarian grounds?  Was this a bizarre Iraqi ploy?  What could I do with this disturbing information except be tortured by my impotence?

A few days later, Saad entered the mangeriyah for a routine breakfast: the hostages crowded at one end of the long table, and the guards at the other end. The open space in the middle of the table got larger and larger after the French and Jack left. I again sucked in my cheeks whenever I wasn’t talking to Reiner in order to appear more gaunt than I was in case the guards would notice. But Saad had a box and an unusual smile.  Then he pulled out a letter and called Reiner’s name.  Then another for Nigel. When he was done, I had seven, seven! fantastic bundles of paper, from Diana, my children, parents, friends.  All said the same things in a variety of ways:  we pray for your safe release soon.  For some minutes, I felt free already.

On Diana’s, the one I opened first, I had noticed a faint #4 to the left of the return address on her letter.  Inside the date read October 7, six weeks earlier. . . . She was dejected, she said, because the US State Department wouldn’t talk with her because—they said—she had no legal claim to information about me. It troubled her that Circelia was telling all who’d listen about our happy marriage, and that she would do all to get me—her beloved—out.

The photograph of Diana, unmistakable and standing near the edge of a horse pasture, puzzled as well as comforted me:  she wore a helmet and boots and carried a switch; a dozen or so paces behind her were two horses, brown. The trees beyond the horses had red leaves colored by the bright sun of a glorious fall day, but in a place I didn’t recognize, as if the year had brought changes as profound in her world as in mine. While we were together, she’d  always wanted a horse. Her face was tight. I wondered what she’d say if we spoke face-to-face in that horse pasture sitting on that rail fence.

She’d included a note from a mutual friend, which I left beside her photo—“Will, Just grin, and don’t stop grinning. Grin until you believe it, and one day soon, they will put you on a plane. I promise. Love–Warren.”  Good advice, I thought, better than swinging a pipe or flinging excrement or otherwise acting like a madman.

The next afternoon, Kamal brought a telephone to our house and plugged it into the wall. At supper the night before he’d announced that we’d get to call a family member, but the catch was we needed to invite that person to spend Christmas with us, here in Asmida.

As he made the first call—with Joe, a new guest—the calling system turned out more convoluted than the proposition was ludicrous.  First, he called the Asmida switchboard, asked the operator to call Baghdad, and then hung up. When the switchboard operator got through to Baghdad, he called Kamal.  Then he told Baghdad the overseas number and then hung up again. When the Baghdad operator got through to the overseas number, he called Kamal, and Kamal passed the phone to us. The eerie thing about the arrangement, as he described it, was that he—the guard, the “enemy”—would hear our loved one’s voice and converse before we actually did.

Joe was a Londoner who’d been moved in recently from a power plant near Ur. I knew little about him and I decided it’d be better to ignore him than to dislike him. The steps and waiting involved in making a call this way epitomized inefficiency, but I learned more about Joe that evening than I had in the two weeks he’d been a housemate. He’d been on Somerset’s flight, traveling to Calcutta to see his fiancée, whom he was to have married at the end of November.

Several times, Kamal warned us, “I will be listening, as will people in Baghdad. If you say something military, my hand will be on the receiver to cut the line immediately.”

I tried to anticipate problems with the call: there’d be an echo on the line and without forewarning, Diana would be speechless—half asleep or teased into thinking I was calling from an airport on my way home.

Joe’s timing was right for him to catch his family and fiancée—she’d come to wait for him at his parents’ home—at Sunday dinner. At first I thought he must have felt self-conscious to have us all listening in on his call. But I focused more on rehearsing what I’d say to Diana, not on listening to others.

Then Kamal handed me the receiver, and despite the labyrinthine system, my call connected, all the people in the room disappearing and the misery of several months falling away when I heard Diana, the voice associated with better times.  But the connection was poor and scratchy.

“Diana, it’s Will.  I’m in Iraq.”

“Will, oh my.”  She said nothing for a few second, and I supposed she might be crying.  The line hissed and echoed ghostly sounds.  “Will, We’re trying to get you out.  Nabil has offered to take your place.”  She said nothing again for some time.  Who’s Nabil, I wondered.

“How are you doing, love?” I asked.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear that.” She said.

I repeated my question.

“It’s hard,” she said.  “And the State Department won’t tell me anything,  They talk only with Circelia.”   She was crying, and so was I.

I said nothing about her coming here for Christmas; unable to hear well, what I did perceive raised many questions.  We lacked time or clarity to pursue something about a Palestinian friend volunteering to take my place as a hostage, but I didn’t know any Palestinians in common with her. She said the divorce wasn’t final and that Circelia had told people—including a newspaper reporter—that I’d indicated an interest in reconciliation. Why wouldn’t the divorce be final? Why the hell is Circelia talking to the newspaper about these things? What form of insanity would lead her to think I would reconcile? Didn’t everyone know that through this ordeal, “getting back to Diana” had been my mantra? She said nothing about my son’s hospitalization. Was she withholding bad news?

The line suddenly went dead.  It couldn’t have been ten minutes.  I felt overwhelmed by a sense of the horrors when private people get caught up in the trawl net of international politics.

Subdued, I said, “Thanks, Kamal. Thanks.”  I’d just talked at her. I didn’t catch much of what she said.

“Maybe you can call in two weeks again,” he said.

The call helped me believe I’d get out. Escaping across the desert or through the water might not be necessary anymore. Diana existed again; immediacy returned. She was the audience for my diary. In the following days I saw her more clearly again. I swam harder, farther underwater without coming up for air. I resumed doing exercises. I walked longer and faster around the refinery, especially at night. I worked even harder on seeing and writing down all the sights within the refinery. More than ever, I drank in through all my senses, but I had to see all I could.  Looking at everything in this refinery seemed to give me power.  Maybe I distracted myself by scrutinizing the details and writing them into my notebook.  Distraction freed me from thinking about my son and other kids, our future, my life.

Jack learned from his phone call that his wife was coming to Iraq not at Christmas but in a few days, “This is not just for a visit,” she had stated.

One evening a few days after the telephone call and Diana’s familiar voice, the sun set colorfully as we walked the dusty road back from the mesbah. It was Thursday, the eve of the Sabbath, and something about the backlit small blue clouds floating in a pink and yellow sky made it feel like an American Saturday night. In spite of a waning moon and all the threats we faced, I almost felt comfortable.  Saad had walked us to the mesbah that afternoon even though his Volkswagen stood by their house. Walking had become an important ritual for me; besides providing exercise, going out the gate hinted at freedom, a reminder of a normal life I once had, one that might never return.

Walking to the mesbah, we met friendly faces and ones that became so.  Umm Kul on the road with her daughter—about the same age as mine—pushing a cart carrying large gray plastic water jugs, RO water for their home up beyond the camp. Her daughter wore a long frilly white dress and had her hair in braids halfway to her waist. Sometimes the people in the Evinrude truck passed slowly by us, reminding me of the small motors on fishing boats on a New England pond. An old Iraqi man named Nasser occasionally greeted us: lean and grizzled, he wore a white cheffafi on his head. His gray shirt had a red pocket patch that read Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; his accent and mannerisms—bowing and touching his nose with his index finger whenever referring to himself—reflected  the Japanese who must have taught him English while he helped build the refinery.

Saad never seemed like a guard:  a guide to the culture maybe, but not a member of the “secret police,” a term often now used with the adjective dreaded; informal and bored, he slouched as we walked and smiled most of the time.  I considered him the one to bribe for a ride to the border. He never talked about Saddam. One day when I asked if he was in the army, he shook his head. “No, I’m an economics student at the University of Basra, but as I told you, there are no classes now.” I had suggested to him once that I was bored and could spend some time teaching English at the university, and he  responded that it was closed that semester, as if, were it not closed, naturally he’d get me a job application.  He reported he liked English, that he had read The Merchant of Venice the previous year.

Walking with Saad and Reiner admiring this sunset made me very restless. And then in the twilight I spotted an old bus parked beside the market; I’d never seen it before, a 1957 Chevrolet cab, like a pickup, to which a wooden bus coach had been added. The wood, a rich but dry color, looked old and dry enough to spontaneously combust.

“Saad, let’s go look at the bus?” I asked, hoping he caught the eagerness in my voice.

“Why?” he asked.

“I just want to. It’s a great bus, don’t you think so, Reiner?”

“Why?” Saad repeated. He seemed concerned I was teasing him. “It’s an old bus.”  Reiner said nothing.

“Yes, but it’s a fifty-seven Chevy,” I said.

He laughed. “What?”

“It’s a Chevrolet built in 1957,” slowing the sentence down.

“We call this ‘fifty-seven’ also,” he said, but it sounded more like fuffety-seben.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, leading us toward the bus.

“Why do you call it a fifty-seven?” asked Reiner, looking at me.

“Because that’s the year it was made. That’s what it is,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “maybe that’s why Iraqis call it a fifty-seven too.”

“But it’s English,” I said.

The metal parts of the bus had been painted over so many times that they had texture; orange was the top color although a few pitted spots revealed a green underneath, maybe a new layer of color for each new owner. The wood had once been varnished but now bore the color of the desert.  The Iraqi desert already preserved American technology and trucks.

Kamal had disappeared again after all the telephone calls.  Whatever other missions he was assigned to turned him sour.  He would talk little and lost his temper quickly.  Once he appeared with a notepad.  “I need to get everyone’s size and color preferences for coats, sweater, boots, and so on,” he said, sitting down at the table near the metal door. I imagined it was going to snow soon, or maybe we were moving to a place in the northern mountains where there would be snow.

I sat across from him. “Kamal, I appreciate your giving me clothes, but I would rather go to Kuwait and get my own clothes—and other things—papers and books.”

“Just give me your size,” he snapped. “None of this is my idea, Will. I have orders to follow.” I gave him some numbers, caring little whether they were correct or not. I reiterated wanting shoes just like Ali’s.  My tennis shoes were worn out and the sandals were not right for cold weather or running across the desert. Ali wore steel-toed work boots that no desert thorn could rip.

A few days later as Abu Alaa and I studied Arabic and English, he asked if I wanted to call the United States. I told him I wanted to talk with zawaj talaq, of whom he had become a fan. Unlike Kamal, he just dialed the number I gave, and Circelia answered.

“Hallo?” she said, her voice was clear but far away. This was the voice of conflict and incessant fighting. Once it had been a different voice, a beloved one: it still had the same accent, but the associations had changed since we first met. I switched immediately to French; Abu Alaa didn’t even show that he noticed or cared.

“Yes, all is well with our son. But I can tell you more about that when I visit.” she said, conveying no trace of hesitation.

“What’s wrong with Junior?” I pressed.

“I’ll tell you when I’m there,” she repeated.

Do not even think about coming here,” I told her. To my astonishment Abu Alaa didn’t question my talking another language. He didn’t even appear to be listening.  I repeated the sentence: “Ne viens pas!” (Do not come here)

“Oh, yeah. OK. Uh—huh,” she said, the manner of her agreeing making me nervous, since it seemed clear she’d already decided to come.

News chronology:

November 7:  Iraq releases some hostages

November 19:  Iraq offers to release all hostages by spring