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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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

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October 9-15, 1990

<<Writer’s note: One of the bizarre details of my experience is that our bags were never searched. One of my fellow hostages had a camera, quite large.  He managed to take some clandestine photos inside the refinery, and get them out with him.  He sent me a few prints back in 1991.   One of his photos is included here.  >>

On a warm Sunday afternoon in October 1991, Diana and I walked through a New Hampshire woods along an abandoned railroad track.  “So what do you see for us in five years?”

I recognized her question as a variation on Henry’s of a few days before. Henry was a psychologist Diana and I had gone to see.  Just then I saw a swamp maple, gloriously red.  The only living tree in a stand of gray gnarled oaks had died as the lowland flooded, maybe because of a clogged culvert under the rail bed.  The hue of the maple leaves was fantastic.  I stopped walking.

“Diana, come back here.” Already fifteen or so steps ahead, she stopped.

“What?” she said, her forehead furrowed.

“Look at the colors of that maple tree over there in the water.”

“That really pisses me off!” she yelled.  In response to her new voice, hurt but tough, I smiled and tried to hug her.

“Get away!  I ask you a really important question, like about planning a future, and you change the subject and talk about some leaves on a tree.

“No, I didn’t change the subject.  I . . .”

She cut me off.  “”And when I get mad, you just laugh. ” she continued.

“I’m sorry.  The tree was pretty.”

“I think I really don’t matter any more.  I can say anything to you.  I can yell at you, and you’re just not there.  I just can’t stand it anymore.”  And she walked away.

I stood there for a few minutes before I ran and caught up with her.  She hadn’t waited.  She didn’t say anything when I said again that I was sorry.  Her eyes were wet.  She let me put my arm around her.  We walked on in silence.

“So what do you want in your life?” Henry had asked.  “Let’s say you can have three wishes, what do you want?”

My thoughts slowed down.  “Anything?  Now?  Or do you mean in the future?”  I resented Henry’s question.  Wasn’t it obvious that I wanted Diana, to be with Diana forever?  To be in love with her.  It seemed like a trick question.

“Just three wishes.”

I hesitated.  They looked at me; I felt accused of not knowing what I wanted.  I had wanted us to be unchanged.  But we’d lost the selves we were when we had fallen in love, the mutual excitement I knew we both felt when our eyes met.  Upon my return, the spontaneity was missing.  What used to ignite our passion just burnt itself out.

“Well, I want you, Diana,” I said, looking at her.  She was seated on the opposite end of the same white couch Henry sat on.  “I want Diana, of course,” I repeated, this time looking at Henry and at the tribal masks he had on his wall.

“OK, that’s one.  What else?”  said Henry.

My brain was going even slower, like a machine about to stall.  What else was there?

“Where are you right now?  What are you thinking of?  I can’t read anything at all in your face.”  said Diana.  She’d said that before since I’d been back.  But now it hit, hard.  Like a missile.  She brought up “reading me,” but what I had written for her on paper to read—the minutiae of my ordeal in my diary—I found she hadn’t read.  Maybe she would have if I had not survived.

“I don’t know,” I managed.  I suddenly had no energy.  I looked at her for many seconds.

“Say something.  Say anything.  Don’t just look at me.  I hate it when you look at me and say nothing.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Just say what you think, what you want.”

“That’s so facile,” I thought.  “I don’t always know exactly what I think,” I said.  “I wish you wouldn’t get so upset.”

“Will, I have no choice but to get upset. This is how I feel.  How do you feel?”

“I’m not sure I know how I feel.”

“Don’t you see where that leaves me?  I don’t know whether you care or not.”

It seemed that Diana and Henry were ganging up on me.  “Of course I care.”

“But I don’t know that.”

“But I’ve told you.  We’ve talked about this.”

“Will, about this, really?  When we talk, it’s about work or other people.  It’s never about us, our future.”

“It’s hard to talk about us.”  I whispered.

“No one ever said it’d be easy.  But it’s each person’s task in life to find the way to do this.  Just like it’s each our job to find out what we’re good at.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I wondered if my answer sounded like a question.

“So when do you do it, when do you work on figuring out how to do this?”

“Can we stop talking about this now?”

“Is that what you want?”

I just nodded my head, heavily, looking at the floor.

“So when do you want to pick this up again?”

“Whenever.”  I wasn’t even sure she’d hear me say this:  it was just louder than a thought.

“Whenever?  ‘Whenever’ is a way to do nothing.”

I was not laughing now.  I could barely keep my eyes open.  Henry and Diana looked at me, and I stared at the carpet.

“What do you see?”  Henry asked.

“Water.” I managed, after maybe fifteen seconds. I don’t know where the words came from.  “Water.  Smooth water.”

They both said something.  Or had a conversation.  I really couldn’t follow.

What stuns me about those recollections above is how poorly I communicated.  Water had helped me survive Iraq by channeling hope.  It could have been anything, I suppose, but water did it for me.  For several months in Iraq, I had grown accustomed to the idea that I would soon die, accepted that, , and water coaxed my imagination, helping me germinate a vision of returning, irrigated it like the Tigris and Euphrates did to create a fertile crescent of an otherwise arid landscape.  In my diary notebook I’d written again and again about missing Diana and preparing to face death.  I inhabited a zone—I wrote—that lacked a future, offering only a series of nows, rising and falling waves, not a current.  “Swimming is a sacrament that nourishes,” I wrote, “an exercise in recalling past swims, pleasure in the moment and a means to stay fit for a future.”

Maybe I adapted to the “zone” too well, and it took years to adapt to new conditions.  Like my grandfather, my mother lived through a war.  Although never a prisoner, she fled from her city, where as a teenager she faced danger, to live in the Dutch countryside in a stable.  For nine months she hid there until the German occupier were expelled.  Years later in the United States, when a military plane flew low over the house where she lived, she got up and closed the curtain.  When a relative asked why she had done that, incredulity crept over her face before she could explain that during the war, the sound of a warplane triggered an immediate “blacking-out” of any light coming from houses.

Kamal liked to throw his weight around, however much he had. Obviously more than Ali: he had countermanded Ali’s idea of taking photos to send to our loved ones in the first days we were there. Sometimes he’d make disparaging comments about the food of Abu Mahmoud and Abed al Khaliq. And then there was this mystery person—deegee—whom he’d mention when I suggested a change. I recalled Kamal had said, “I need to talk with my deegee to see if we can get some meat for the barbecue.”.  One night as we finished supper, Kamal told us that everyone needed to meet in control room #1 at nine-thirty. “Everyone must be there because deegee will come to talk to us.” He said “us,” not “you.” A few guys asked who this person was and why he was coming, but he ignored the questions.

I was sitting on the landing when a Chevy Blazer drove up. Three men got out:  Kamal, Colonel Syphr, and another man I’d seen from time to time in the plant. He had fair hair and no mustache, more Nordic or Slavic than Arab. They came up the stairs and sat at the head of the big table. John the guest guest and everyone from control room #2 were there;  it was rare that the Japanese or French from the other control room came to ours.  Some stood.  Kamal introduced “Colonel Syphr” as Abed al Huq, or something like this. The other man Kamal simply called “ deegee.” Much later I learned this meant he was Director General of the State Enterprise for Fertilizer, supervising this refinery as well as a similar one in northern Iraq.

He spoke English very well, American English. “Gentleman. I’m here tonight to see what we can do to make your stay a little more comfortable. Let’s talk frankly.” He looked around the room. “I can do nothing about the politics, but maybe we can make some changes.”

Max spoke first. “Many of us are sick, diarrhea. Can we get better food?”

The D. G. said nothing, writing something on the yellow legal pad he carried.

Kamal spoke, “You eat what we eat.”

“This place is noisy and has strong chemical smells,” said one of the Japanese. “Can’t we move back to the camp by the swimming pool?”

The D.G. wrote nothing, but looked over at Kamal, who intervened aggressively. “My government says you need to stay in strategic locations until your government agrees not to bomb. Your governments are keeping you here. Not Iraqi government.”

One of the French stood up. “We’ve received no mail yet and—”

“Iraq has no control over mail being stopped by your coalition governments,” Kamal said angrily.  “Your letters are getting to your families, but your governments are stopping your families’ letters from leaving your countries. Stop bringing up things deegee can do nothing about.”

There was silence.

“There are too many flies in the lunch room. Could you do something about that?” asked Edgar. Just that lunch I’d seen him leave the door open as he left to go back to the control room.

There was more silence.

The D.G. looked up. “Thank you, gentlemen. I think I can do something about the smelly dining room.” He looked at Kamal.

Abed al Huq stood up. He spoke slowly, shifting eye contact from one person to another constantly, touching everyone, as though he knew he had a lot of authority. He was clearly Kamal’s boss, maybe chief of the secret police for the Basra area. “Thanks for being here to meet us tonight. There is another thing I wanted to talk with you about.” He paused and looked all around the room. “As an Iraqi who has experienced the joy of reuniting with its long-lost nineteenth province of Kathima, I have decided to invite all of you to a party at PC1 in honor of the reunification of West and East Germany. This party will be a few days from now.”

And that was it. Less than fifteen minutes after driving up, the three left.

Monday afternoon at three o’clock the bus arrived outside Control Room #1, the French and Japanese already aboard. I carried some books to exchange for others and sat behind Sabah.  I studied movement and details along the road: soldiers in the desert, the billboards of Saddam, the ruins of the caravansary, horse-drawn carts carrying propane cylinders somewhere. At the intersection of our road from Umm Qasr and the main road between Basra and Kuwait where we turned south for PC1, I noticed a change: an unidentifiable large truck lay upside-down and not forty feet from the pavement, scorched as was the very sand around it and two cars nearby. Everything flammable had been burnt off. When I asked, Sabah said this had been an ammunition truck and there’d been an accident.

At PC1, Reiner and I went straight to the library. One of the guards came to find us there. He was carrying a spiral notebook. When he saw that I’d already chosen a dozen or so books, he insisted I sign each one out: title, author, date. I wondered if they’d impose fines if the books were returned late. I wanted to ask if they did interlibrary loans.

At the pub I met the guys who were my housemates until a few weeks before.

“You guys look tired,”  I said to Francis and Fred. Somerset walked up. He was growing a beard. We shook hands.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” Francis said to me. “Have you weighed yourself recently on that scale in the clubhouse, or don’t they let you get there anymore to swim?” It had become something of a ritual for some guys to weigh themselves at the scale in the clubhouse, to gauge our worsening condition in the lowering numbers.

“Yeah, we still swim,” I said. “And how’s the mutt?”

“The mutt is gone,” he said, with a rising tone.

“Gone?” I asked, expecting the worst.

“Gone back to the U.K. He went overland to Amman yesterday by a Jordanian courier. Biggles and a Great Dane named Polly, who belongs to one of the American managers of this plant, should already be in Amman after a long highway trip across the desert of southwestern Iraq in a pickup. Hooray for the little fellow and his big friend,” said Francis. “And the courier driving the pickup smuggled personal letters between PC1 and a company PO box in Amman.”

Biggles the smuggler, I was proud of him. I worried more for Francis now, as he no longer had the mutt to care for.

Supper included wine, my first in almost a year, except for Ted’s homemade vintage. Workers wearing spotless white jackets came around to each of the thirty or so diners, with a roast, asking which part and how much we wanted.

“Some of that, not too thick,” I said, as one held the platter while the other used the implements elegantly to slice me a piece of the roast. I ate a lot and drank a second glass of wine. I sat across from Francis and Reiner—Jurgen, the younger German from Asmida sat beside me—and our talking gradually became louder, more animated, and sometimes we even laughed, making the candles on the tables flicker. Jurgen talked more than he ever did at the refinery. I guessed it was not the ambiance or the recognition of German reunification, but the wine.

As each of us finished eating, waiters came around and collected our plates, returning a few minutes later with tea or coffee. Waiters carried out a large cake and placed at the head table occupied by Colonel Syphr, Kamal, some other Iraqis, Fred, and the older German banker. His name was Helmut, Fred’s boss. Helmut stood. He seemed very nervous, choosing his words so carefully the whole thing was incoherent. “Today is an important day for Germany, for all Germans, for us. We are happy to be here all together. We hope soon for everyone, all of us, to celebrate the happy day with our families. Thank you to our hosts for this very nice party.”

One of the Iraqis stood. When he started talking in English, I recognized him as the jolly man who had gotten on the bus to read names of those people to disembark there back on August 25. Francis leaned toward me.  “He’s the Iraqi Director of PC1. And his missus is a Yank, you know. He met her while he was studying in the United States.”

The director said nothing about Kathima. “For our German friends, I’d like to say this congratulations. A unified country is a strong country. Today we are happy to offer you this party. Enjoy the evening.”

The chief guard at PC1—named Riyadh—looked upset. I wondered if Riyadh considered the jolly director subversive for making his speech in English, which he seemed to have a hard time following.

After some time Francis, Reiner, and I moved to the pub.

“Have some Newcastle,” said Francis.  They came here in the evening a few times a week, he said. Free and plentiful drink and the loud music:  someone had clearly invested a lot of dinars or dollars in good speakers. A Beatles song was on, very loud.  It was hard to hear, but it was heaven to drink, talk loud and lean forward to hear what the other person was saying.  It was aerobic, and laughing was the easiest body language for acknowledging what you didn’t hear but knew didn’t matter anyhow.  This was a time to be transported out of hell.  And to celebrate the reunification of Germany?  Why not?  If they did this every evening, I might even be drunk enough to say a toast to the reunification of Iraq with its nineteenth province called Kathima. Even Kamal was drinking whiskey and laughing. Unlike Riyadh and Syphr, he wore civilian clothes.  Colonel Syphr disappeared early; I hadn’t seen him drink anything.  Besides the Iraqis, we hostages hailed from places as diverse as Japan and France, Germany and the US; and we all knew the words to these songs.

“How are you doing?” asked Kamal.

“Good beer,” I shouted.

“I like it when everyone sings,” he said. He didn’t sing, though, and neither did any of the Iraqis, except the Director of PC1.

It was almost ten when Riyadh decided to end the party. He had come over to tell me and Francis and Fred. Then he walked around and said something to other people, pointing at his watch. But nothing came of it. He didn’t share enough of the common culture in the pub to know that it was futile to try to stop the party in the middle of Lennon’s “All We Are Saying.” Max yelled back to Riyadh to wait.

Riyadh stormed over to Kamal, with dramatic hand gestures, pointing at Max, discussing something with Kamal, which no one could hear because of the singing. Kamal, with more savvy, waited until the song ended and then asked that the music be turned off. In the sudden quiet, he had everyone’s attention when he said, “Gentlemen. I am happy you enjoyed this party. It is time to go home.”

We sang “All We are Saying” as we climbed onto the bus, carrying six-packs of Newcastle Brown Ale. I also had some new books.  We continued to sing on the trip home. At one point, Sabah, who seemed to know the song but not the words, took out his pistol and fired two rounds out the window, to fuel the joviality, he may have supposed. In other times, firing weapons into the air would have been acceptable in the Gulf as festive, like lighting firecrackers. I’d been to a wedding in Saudi Arabia when I worked there, and ancient muskets were fired, deafening guests at a wedding party.

But now everyone stopped singing immediately. I stared at him with disbelief. Others did too, every person in the bus. No one spoke, but it seemed clear that the message was, “How the hell could he fire two rounds out into the night, in an area where troops are camped along the roadside! What if troops camped along the road felt they were under attack, and fired a rocket‑propelled grenade at the bus.” Embarrassed,  Sabah went up and sat in the front seat.

Back in the house, as we put away the beer, Jack and some of the others repeated, “Six beers per person in the refrigerator, honors system.”

Putting my cans in there, I suspected I’d never get to drink all six, because they’d disappear during some of the late-night card games. Over by the beds, Jack shouted at Nigel, “You’re a hoarding rat.”

“Am not. Am puttin’ my beers under my bed instead of the refrigerator.” said Nigel. “And don’t call me a bloody hoardin’ rat. Don’t call me bloody anythin.”

Jack stepped forward and punched Nigel; Nigel slapped back. Several guys stepped between and pulled them away from each other; they continued snarling, as friends of each held them back.

Later Max asked for everyone’s attention.”Look. I want to have a meeting tomorrow. I received a plan from outside.” I thought this might be true, as Max had spent five weeks at PCI prior to being moved to Asmida.  When some people asked what the plan was, he proceeded to elaborate immediately. Tall, balding, his jaw rimmed with a close-trimmed beard, Max spoke quietly. “There will probably be an attack, sooner or later. If it comes, we need to be prepared. It will probably come at night, a moonless night. We must be prepared now, since we’re headed for a new moon in about a week.  Things will begin with a massive bombing of the power station just down the road and the Umm Qasr-Zobair road just outside, cutting off the electricity and causing general confusion. We will know this is the beginning of the counteroffensive. We need to dress quickly, in the dark because the power will be out, and run to a relatively open area on the northwest corner of the factory, which will be the helicopter pickup site. Remember that an important part of the rescue is our being prepared. One thing we must be prepared for is trouble from the guards. They will very likely be looking for us by then, probably to move us or prevent us from being taken, killing us if necessary.  And we need to stop them, maybe kill them. At that point, it’s them or us. If one of us is wounded, we should help him get to the pickup site. If someone is killed, leave the body behind. Once at the site, take cover to avoid detection and falling flak. After about half an hour of bombing, helicopters, probably five of them—two transports and three gunships—will arrive to attempt to pick us up. The helicopters will take us out over the Gulf to a ship. We have only a fifty-fifty chance of getting to the ship once we’re in the air. Be ready and be discreet.”

No one said anything for a few seconds. Someone asked if there would really be five helicopters.

“Yes,” said Max. Nothing else.

In less than an hour I’d come from “Give peace a chance” to “Could I kill if necessary?” I’d never been asked to do that in so many words. “Kill the guards if necessary.” Could I do it? With what? Since I hadn’t a gun that could kill someone too far away to recognize, I’d have to kill with a homemade weapon like a knife or a club, a piece of pipe, a shard of glass. But could I do it?

I didn’t know the answer right then, but any day now a guard could be ordered to kill one or more of us. Under the patina of respect for each other,  rage lurked. The regime and its officers and footmen that had taken our freedom could as decisively take our lives. All the predictability I wanted to see could change in an instant, as it had on August 2. 1 needed to find out how I’d react soon, before I faced the moment of choice.

John the guest guest appeared in the control room with three liter bottles of arak from Basra the following evening.  Languor ruled, since supper had finished an hour before.

“Time for the real German reunification party,” he said, opening all three bottles and setting them down on the table.  He then emptied the freezer tray into the glasses that quickly found their way to the table. Poured onto ice, arak turned the clear alcohol watery white. Reiner brought his radio/tape player into the room and put on biergarten music. With encouraging remarks from the other drinkers, he and Jurgen quickly downed their drinks and started dancing around the room. We clapped and drank the arak.

The transformation of the evening amazed me.  I had been reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, one of several books I’d picked up at PC1 the night before.  Reiner, whose bed was several away from mine, had been listening to Evita with the volume turned quite low.  Max and a group of the English played cards.  Others read.  But when John came in, alcohol in hand suggesting a party, all changed in an instant.

Such desperate festivity could happen for other reasons:  we were approaching the third new moon since the invasion that had disrupted my life, and I pondered an attack, the end of our world.  It would happen on a moonless night, we all expected;  Iraqi lookouts would fall to intruders with radar and night vision gear.  Max had laid out the need for a plan only a few nights before.  Since then I’d located and picked up a steel pipe, slipped it up the sleeve of my baggy shirt.  A little less than two feet long, it had the diameter of a hammer grip and a nice balance.  I’d hid it in my backpack and taken it out a few times to feel its heft, to swing it with my arm fully extended, imagining it splattered with a guard’s blood, wondering if I could really kill before being killed. I could certainly swing it with the force of a baseball bat, but it would be different if the arc traveled full power against someone’s skull.

The noise in the room increased as the arak bottles emptied.  Refinery noise had faded.  Reiner’s music still played; voices grew loud and animated.  Jack’s voice boomed out, though, over everyone else’s, over the collective din.

“I want someone to bloody shave my head,” he said.  “Right now.”  He seemed increasingly frustrated, and childish, maybe looking for attention. “I’m tired of waiting for these damn rag heads to get us to a barber. I want my head shaved.”

I hated Jack at that point. Good company when he first arrived, he had begun to infuriate me with his naked racism and self-righteousness.  I suppose if I’d disliked him from the outset, I would not feel so intensely.

“I’ll shave your head, ” I said, hoping he wouldn’t recognize the challenge in my voice. Cutting the hair off a head might be practice for slitting a throat. I could imagine he was one of the guards, and project the idea of killing one of them with each stroke of the razor. Really I wanted him to back down, to admit to being all talk, to say he wasn’t serious about having his head shaved, to jettison his racist ranting.  I recognize now that I was more affected by the ongoing limbo, our confinement in a context where politicians debated and passed resolutions about Saddam’s illegal occupation but never seemed very concerned about us, fragile shields detained on one of the targets.  Just a few days before, a very uneven clash on Temple Mount in Jerusalem had left twenty-three Palestinians dead and hundreds—over 800—wounded.  Related or not, our existence in this room could change drastically in an instant, and a type of silence I would never hear descend.  I wanted out, but just then I only wanted Jack’s aggressive persona to revert to the more guarded one he wore upon his arrival.

“Let’s do it,” he urged.

With a scissors, Reiner clipped his hair to the scalp and then lathered him up. I finished the job with a razor.  Surprisingly, my anger diminished with each scrape of blade across his skin.  His skull was small and warm.  I picture the thin cranium bone and even thinner skin, which if breached where the blood vessels throbbed near his temple, could bleed him to death.  After no hair longer than a millimeter protruded, I rinsed off any remaining lather.  It astonished me that no blood seeped anywhere.  In spite of my emotion, I had not nicked him.  (The writer, with black watch, on the right)

Then Jurgen asked for a head shave too. Shaving his head was different from doing Jack’s. We talked. I felt none of the dark urges I had while doing Jack. I learned that he was only nineteen, young enough to be my son, that he had worked in Kuwait with Reiner before going off to do military service, scheduled for the following spring.  While I shaved Jurgen’s pate, Max, who was already bald on the top, suggested I take all the hair off his head, too, except his beard. At the end of the evening, all the arak was gone, as was the hair from three of the group.

In the morning, Jack, Jurgen, and Max walked together to breakfast. I noticed refinery workers stop and stare at their shaved headsas the three passed. In the dining room, Abed al Khaliq, Abu Mahmoud, and Sabah seemed horrified. “Laysh?” (Why?) Abu Mahmoud asked and asked again. Jack answered in his martinet’s voice that he was tired of waiting for a barber, aware that Abu Mahmoud spoke no English.

At lunch Kamal walked in, saw me, and asked me to step outside. “Are you really a teacher, or are you a barber?”

Sensing the game, I said, “A teacher. Why?”

“Listen. This is a big problem, Will. The workers here think we did this.  This don’t believe that you guests did this to yourselves. In the Iraqi army,” he said, “heads get shaved only as a punishment of men caught in homosexual acts. The workers are saying that we should allow you foreigners to live in your own ways. Please do not shave any heads again.”

I chuckled. Maybe I’d slit throats or smash heads next time.

<<News chronology:

October 3:  US charters an Iraqi Boeing 707.

October 5:  Diplomats visits various parts of the region:  Primakov, Kaifu, Mitterand.

Read Full Post »

October 2-9, 1990

October 2, Mawlid, the birthday of the prophet Mohammed.  Day 62 since the missile attack, 48 since leaving Manqaf, 38 since entering Asmida, 8 inside the refinery itself.  The moon had waxed nearly full again, reminding me of a rendezvous missed in Rome, possibly a life lost here.  Jack speculated loudly that the Iraqis would release us. Since the six guys from PC1 arrived, Jack had become increasingly shrill.  I suppose he felt more comfortable since four of them were his fellow-countrymen.  All ten of us crowded around a metal table in the common space just inside the control room door listening to the BBC’s  “Gulf Link.”  Jack said he thought we’d get the news on that show, cresting the wave of hope for some of the guys.  He and his ideas just irritated me.

“There’s no such symmetry in life, Jack,” I said. I hoped he was right, but events had really made no sense since August 2; there was no reason for that to change now. “Saddam doesn’t decide these things in a vacuum. He gets nothing from our thinking he honors the Prophet by letting us go.”

“Who bloody asked you?” he snapped.

“We were all talking together here, I thought,” I answered. I’d felt close to Jack before we’d moved here, but the noise, smell, and confinement of the refinery had started to affect everyone. Jack had become the most egregious racist in our group. During “Gulf Link,” whenever someone with an accent or with a Muslim or Asian name gave a message to a friend or family member trapped in this situation, he voiced some loud variation on “Get those bloody wogs off OUR show. First those “sand niggers” hold us prisoner, and then they use up BBC time that belongs to our families . . .”

Jack irritated me more than anyone else.  His loud sarcasm grated on me. The day before, Max had got permission to go back to PC1 to get books from the library, but no one even wanted to go with him except Reiner and me.  When I had asked each of my housemates for book requests, the most specific answer I heard was “anything.”  When we got back, Jack was the loudest in his criticism, saying, “These books are all bloody litratcha,” as he pronounced any book not a thriller.

Others joined him with “Why didn’t you get bloody something else, something good?”

A book I’d taken for myself was People of the Deer, by Farley Mowat, a memoir of his travels among the Inuit west of Hudson Bay.  Mowat writes that a great law of the Inuits is “A man’s business is sacred unto himself, and it is no part of his neighbor’s duty to interfere in any way unless the community is threatened.”  Mowat perfectly stated what Saddam violated by preventing us from moving; but my fellow hostages equally trampled it, not respecting each other. Individual preferences and schedules of ten men living in this space turned us against each other;  given only one light switch for the entire “suite” lit by fluorescent tubes,  I couldn’t understand why some guys imagined that playing cards all night was an option.  To remedy our group schedule problem, I had tried to propose the idea of a lights-out schedule, but in response I heard indignant remarks like  “I’ll bloody play my cards when I feel like. What dya think this is, a bleeding boardin’ school with group rules?”  To this day, I tense up when I hear the Welsh or Yorkshire accents I came to associate with this sarcasm and intransigence; I almost wanted Somerset to move back.

Flies in the cafeteria became another problem for which a group solution should have been easy.  The smelly room had its own indigenous population of flies and other vermin to begin with, but outdoor flies swarmed in when guys walked in or out and failed to close the door behind them. If each person closed the door behind him,  fewer flies could enter.  I spent daytime hours reading in the cafeteria to avoid the atmosphere of the control room and to make it harder for the guards to know where we all were. The flies posed less discomfort than some of the men.

While there, I witnessed Abu Mahmoud’s technique for ridding the place of flies just before meal times: he sprayed insecticide, available to him by the carton, liberally upwards toward the ceiling thick with flies, and droplets of poison and sometimes the dead flies fell onto the food, plates, and silverware and into the pitchers of drinking water already on the table. He’d dispose of the carcasses before the group would arrive. A bitter taste on a clean plate told me residue coated the plates. It was hopeless to change Abu Mahmoud’s well-intentioned chemical warfare. “Zane?” (Good?), which was his response no matter what I said. I decided to start wiping my plate off on my pants before putting food on it.

The misogyny of some of our group sickened me, too.  Increasingly they took their frustrations out on Umm Kul. I’d seen her curse the poster of Saddam in our house when she didn’t know I was looking.  Maybe I was naïve, but I imagined she might be an ally if I tried to escape. She’d told me once that, unlike Saddam and the guards, she and Mr. Ali were Shi’ite. A potential ally, yet some of the guys didn’t understand this. Their body language and volume drove her out of the house in tears one day.  Nigel, the steward who’d stayed with the women back at the first army camp after the hotel, had harangued her when she approached his bed to mop the floor one morning.  Sam and Edgar, his neighbors and fellow card players, chorused in.  “Bloody hell!  Maybe that bloody snooping bitch was trying to pinch my underwear,” said Nigel, after she had left, and they all laughed.

“Yeah, right, you asshole,” I said.  “Maybe you wish she’d want your filth. Leave her alone.” I must have made my point very clear, because he then pointed at me, looking at and talking to Sam and Edgar. “Dis’un’s stickin oop for a bloody Iragi instead o’me.”

I knew Jack and his circle suffered from diarrhea because they talked loudly about it.  But did diarrhea suddenly have associated symptoms of misogyny and racism?   I would soon find out. After breakfast one morning, I felt a cramp that intensified so acutely I hurried to the toilet.  I wondered whether it came from the flies or the spray. Breakfast had become a meal of bread, wedges of cheese from foil packets, and sweet tea.  As soon as I squatted, my insides ran out of me. It felt like blood, like a hemorrhage.  It smelled unlike anything I’d ever experienced: my guts were rotting. I sat there in tears; I experienced a sense of parts dying.

In the afternoon I forced myself to go to the mesbah, partly to keep up the routine and partly hoping that I’d feel clean, although I’d showered several times that morning. I couldn’t swim even half a mile, and that at a fraction of my usual speed. Every part of me felt tender, disintegrating.  My tongue chafed inside my mouth, my head swam in a fever, and after getting out of the water and showering, my skin and hands still smelled like the rancid food in the cafeteria. My excrement, my sweat, all had the same rotten odor I tasted on the bread.

In the evening I missed a meal for the first time, lying on my bed like so many bones, unable to read or write.  But in the absence of human noise, I could make the roar and hiss of the factory pleasant by imagining that sound came from a mighty waterfall beside my campsite. I stared at my calendar page, and the ship, a lone black tanker on a gray calm sea. In the background lay the bluish silhouette of a mountainous coast dimmed by haze. Squinting, I could transform the vessel into the front half of a dark kayak; the bluish coastal ridge—I told myself—was the fast part of a wave reaching up, just before it turns to breaking white water.

The next day, the cramps lessened. I ate only bread, rice without the fatty soup, and drank tea without sugar. The stench of rot, however, stayed on my skin, hands, and sweat. In the afternoon, I didn’t swim: instead I just sunned myself, running the shower from time to time to wash away the sweat. As I sat there, I watched a large graceful hawk swoop low over the pool, in pursuit of some unseen prey, then collide with a guy wire holding up the water tower.  The prospect of dying was becoming clearer and more acceptable.  Not that I wanted to die, but I tired of waiting. If I couldn’t think of a way to make this time interesting, I’d rather just get the last scene over with, no matter what it was.  And if I survived, I wondered if people would suspect long-term negative effects in me if I got back. If I did anything weird, would Diana or others conceal their doubts about my balance? The separation, the politically imposed blackout, created a personal vacuum unique in that part of the twentieth century with our instant global telecommunications.  I’d received no news from Diana, my family, or anyone. I feared she and I would be unable to salvage our relationship.  I wondered whether she’d gotten the seven letters I’d sent so far, at least half of them.  I wondered if this experience strengthened her somehow.  Or was the wound getting deeper, my departure a year ago interpreted as my valuing her less than she’d thought or less than money?  Would she believe how greatly I had missed her companionship?

When I saw Sabah come to get us, I dove in and pretended to swim, hoping to extend the time we could be outside the factory. But he refused to negotiate our time although he did concede on one thing:  Reiner, Jurgen, and I were allowed to walk back to the refinery in front of the Land Cruiser.  Though weak, I much preferred using my feet  to being transported.  My spirits lifted with each step.  I savored an illusion of moving on foot outside the fences.

Kamal returned at supper. I applauded, spontaneously, when he appeared;  some others did too.  I believed that he—unlike the other guards—had power even though he—as were all in Iraq—was beholden to Saddam.

He smiled broadly. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I was on leave with my family, and my wife made a dessert for you, an Iraqi pudding called—“ and I didn’t catch the name. I was embarrassed when most of the hostages made derogatory remarks like “I don’t want that shit.” And refused to eat it. Reiner took some, and so did I.  But Kamal quickly lost the smile. Yet I did understand the reaction of Max and the others that went, “Tough. If he wants to be respected or even liked, he should do the gentlemanly thing and release us. This pudding is as much a ‘gift’ as we are ‘guests’.”

Kamal had as little freedom as we did; his sense of allegiance to Saddam necessitated that he follow orders. I hoped he was getting confused about his role. Maybe my early attempts to get him to see us as his fellow humans made his job here difficult. If the order came to kill us, as my periodic nightmares showed, I believed he would have had a hard time because a measure of mutual respect existed. Of course, if that order came, he could always ask some soldier camped in the desert outside the refinery to pull the trigger. I had no illusions about that.  Kamal and his crew here acted as administrators and had lost the taste for blood; executioners would rush in without an instant’s hesitation

My next crisis appeared when I awoke: I reached under the bed to get my glasses; they balanced differently in my hand, bent, and then snapped at the nose bridge.  They broke at a spot where I’d long seen a greenish trace of corrosion: no surprise, because I was near-sighted and always swam with glasses.  Even when I went snorkeling, I had prescription lenses in the mask.

This was worse than diarrhea. Not being able to see what time the clock said only fifteen feet away, I felt cut off, handicapped without my dominant sense. I wouldn’t even be able to watch all the details of an approaching death: the gait, the eyes, the weapon.

I walked to breakfast with Reiner, slowly. A new guard was there. I told him I needed to talk to Kamal or Sabah.

“Where is he? I must talk with him.” I didn’t care that my tone sounded like a demand, not a request.

“Sleeping, in our house,” he said.

“I need to see him this morning,” I said, walking away to sit and dip some bread in my unsweetened tea.

“Fine. I will take you there after breakfast,” he said.

We walked to the clinic by the gate and into a dark room. “Please sit,” he said.  He went into an inner room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out chairs, a coffee table, a TV and VCR, a telephone, a disorderly room. After a few minutes, Kamal walked in, wearing white pajamas. “Will, good morning.”

“Morning, Kamal,” I said. I think the combination of diarrhea and broken glasses, along with my realization that I was vulnerable –and unable to run—came through in my voice.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My glasses are broken, and I can’t see without them.”

“Can you fix them?” he asked.

“I hope so,” I said. “Otherwise, I do have another pair in my house in Kuwait.” I was not trying to needle him. In my condition, I imagined retrieving them might be an option although naturally it could never be.

“Let me think about this,” he said, not clear what the “this” was.

“Thanks,” I said, getting up.

“Do you want some tea?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He picked up the telephone and ordered. Five minutes later Abu Mahmoud walked in with a tray bearing a brass teapot, some tea glasses and lots of sugar cubes. He looked at me and said nothing. A life I’d not imagined before at this refinery came clear:  telephone contact—I’d not had access to phones for two months now. And room service—the cafeteria was only three hundred feet away.

In mid afternoon as I lay on my bed, I heard the metal door slam like a hatch cover on a ship. Two guards rounded the corner and approached wearing green uniforms,  pistols in real holsters, nothing like Sabah’s elastic waistband.

“Kamal say go Basra. Glasses,” the heavier guard said.  I wondered why he imagined no one at the refinery could fix them, but I got up and followed them.  We got into a new Mercury Marquis. Pieces of sticker left on the right side window said, “Shuwaikh,” Kuwait’s port.

I sat in the enormous backseat, looking out the windows as we drove out of the factory, but I couldn’t see much.

“You have money?” asked one guard, turning to look at me. I’d been paying no attention to their conversation. I lied—I constantly wore the money belt —and said that all my money was in Kuwait. I felt uncomfortable lying but couldn’t disclose the money. They looked at each other, and said something I didn’t understand. They spoke as little English as I did Arabic, but we struggled on with a conversation. They gave their names as Abu Alaa and Abu Seif. Abu Alaa drove, and Abu Seif was the heavier one who talked most.

He asked if I knew Brooke Shields and Michael Jackson. When I said, “No,” they seemed confused.   After some seconds I changed my answer, figuring they really wanted to let me know they knew these names.  Then they laughed. Next,  they asked me if I liked el raees Saddam Hussein. I guessed el raees meant president. I was scared, and I told them I did not know their president. I just couldn’t bring myself to say that I shared their opinion about el raess. They seemed puzzled, then angry, discussing with each other something I couldn’t understand. I hoped my fear didn’t show. A few minutes later, they seemed friendly again, whatever they decided about my answer.

Entering Basra, we passed a grotesque monument I’d noticed once weeks before from the bus as we returned from Baghdad: a monumental bronze shark, tail at the base and twisted up into a C, about fifty feet high. Seated astride its neck, a soldier with a sword in his right hand about to sever the shark’s spine.

Farther along we passed the old Basra buildings with their wooden screens and roof patios, a solution from “pre-oil” times to the heat that meant siestas and precluded air conditioning, buildings of a design long since razed in Kuwait. Even with glasses I couldn’t have seen the city as they did: where I saw exotic, quaint charm and squalor, I’m sure they saw friends’ houses, teahouses, police stations and offices they knew from work. I wondered if they saw the street reputed among young Kuwaiti men I knew for its prostitutes. “Sure,” they’d say.  “Sometimes we drive for an afternoon up to Basra to drink alcohol and buy women. One woman, maybe five or ten dinar. (One Kuwaiti dinar was three dollars seventy.) Maybe we were on that street, but I saw nothing.

We turned off the main street and entered a modest residential street lined with tall date palms: walled one-story houses, metal gates leading to carports inside the wall, some bougainvillea and oleander. We parked in front of one house. It must have been Abu Seif’s, because he tried unsuccessfully to start a Toyota parked there.  I concluded it had been stolen from Kuwait, given the license plate. Abu Alaa asked me to help push the Toyota.  We struggled up and down the side street, to no avail. Some neighbors standing there walked over and helped push too. They asked no questions about me, didn’t even appear to give me a second look. Finally, we stopped it beside the Mercury. Abu Alaa opened the trunk to get the jumper cables and I noticed the other item in the trunk,  a Kalashnikov rifle. He asked me to hold the accelerator down in the Mercury as he manipulated the cables; on the seat next to me was Abu Alaa’s holstered pistol. I looked at it as I held the gas pedal down.  I had no experience with firearms and never wanted to, but here lay one, mere inches from my hand.  While the two occupied themselves under the hood, I could have studied it, checked if it was loaded.  But then what?  Even if I were skilled with guns and killed the two guards, to pick up this pistol was nothing short of suicide.  I felt grateful in those seconds for my ignorance of such a weapon.

The Toyota started. I got out, and stood on the sidewalk with them, both a little giddy that the Toyota was running.

A young girl—maybe six years old—came out of the gate with a glass of water. She handed it to me and said, “Hello, Meester.”

Abu Seif laughed, “This Kamal’s daughter. Her name Shetha. Kamal he Abu-Shetha.” I thought of my son, about the same age and how, were we neighbors, they’d probably just play and fight and play like any two neighbor kids that age.  Maybe Shetha was in kindergarten like him.

I shook her hand. “Shukhran, (thank you) Shetha,” I said, giving her back the glass, and she ran giggling back through the gate.

Abu Alaa and I left Abu Seif and headed into the old city. He seemed unfamiliar with Basra. Pedestrians too numerous for the sidewalks lined the streets: everybody—civilian and military—was shopping, maybe for merchandise normally not available in Iraq. I saw T-shirts with “Kuwait” printed on them. Abu Alaa, armed and in uniform, and I—an odd couple, I thought—seemed to attract no stares. The market faces, in addition to Arabs, included Indians, Turkmen, Caucasians, and East Africans who’d once come here on ocean-going trading dhows, date ships. The architecture suggested a simpler time, when wealthy traders of dates and pearls built houses with unique carved wooden screens on the upper floors for their women to stand behind to watch the bustle without being seen, or so the books I’d read had caused me to imagine.

We entered an optical shop. The optometrist looked Caucasian. He said immediately he could sell me new glasses but not repair mine.  The next optometrist said the same, and I considered getting a new pair because I would be handicapped without something, but I didn’t want Abu-Alaa or anyone else to know I had any money.

I suggested we try the goldsmiths. I’d once had a goldsmith repair my glasses in Congo. But they too declined. I couldn’t give up, and Abu Alaa seemed eager to please. I had to fix the glasses. We tried the electrical repairs area of the market, but the electricians also said no. It was getting dark. When I saw a soldering gun on a shipping crate that served as a merchant’s display and repair area, I asked if I could use it. He handed it to me. In the fading light, Abu Alaa held the pieces together and I soldered them. When he asked how much, the electrician said he wanted no money. I imagined he spoke with disdain for both of us, as if to say, “Just get out the fuck out of here.”

Back in the car returning to the refinery with my repaired glasses,  I concluded Abu Alaa posed a hazard, scanning the crowded sidewalks for women, rather than driving safely in the crowded streets. At one intersection, pedestrians scattered as he zoomed through;  miraculously, he hit no one. Minutes later, in a busy traffic circle, after driving past his exit, he stopped and backed up!

At one point, we drove along a river I guessed to be the Shatt al Arab. I saw a half dozen small navy boats, several large rusty freighters, and a pontoon bridge to the other side. Since cars were crossing and there were no checkpoints, I assumed the other bank was not Iranian.

His driving and the road terrified me as much as anything that’d happened since August 2.  In the darkness we passed many army trucks; insanely, their lights were off. I wondered if they were driving without them because they had no none or because they thought they were avoiding detection by satellites or aircraft. Passing one truck, we almost collided with another coming toward us.

My glasses fixed and thereby lost sight restored, I realized I needed to plan my options, one of which was escape. I needed to ask Reiner to be my accomplice. My contribution to our flight, other than resolve, would be language. I vowed to spend time learning as much Arabic as possible. We might blend in for a while in Basra. Ish hatha? (What’s this?) and other such questions would have to be my learning tools, questions that worked to find out what to call things. Umm Kul would be my teacher.   And Reiner could provide know-how as an engineer:  he could rig solutions I’d never implement.

Until the getaway, we both had to maintain my physical condition: I had to continue swimming. I would stay under longer and longer. Maybe I could lose my need to breathe. Staying submerged was the concern. Maybe I could go under and walk the bottom of the Gulf or whatever seabed I found, a delightful and crazy idea to amuse and distract me.

<<News chronology:

October 3:  A profile of irregular Iraqi militia members

October 4:  Background report on Iraq-Saudi interactions

Not really news, but one of the links above is to an illustrated book published in the UK in 1921.  It has great art depicting the early 20th century Iraq as seen through, of course, a colonial lens.  Click here.

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September 28-October 1, 1990

The next morning Umm Kul brought some human contact: when she came to clean, she pulled a piece of bubble gum from the pocket of her blue housecoat and gave it to me. I smiled and thanked her and decided to save it for some special occasion. She pointed the tanker calendar over my new bed and laughed: I supposed she noticed I’d brought it from the other house and had written on it.  I told her I was traveling soon, by this ship and wanted to have a picture of it near me wherever I lived.

“Bukra,” (Tomorrow) I said.

“Inshallah,” (God willing) she said, and repeated as she walked out the metal door.

Lunch was subdued, little talk and no laughs. Kamal was not around, only Private Eedayn. Drinking cup after cup of tea, Reiner and I stayed behind in the lunch room as the others had left. We planned this to be the time to talk about the pool. When there were only the three of us left, I looked up at Eedayn. “What is your name?” I had never really wanted to know his name before.

“Sabah,” he said.

“Sabah! That’s like al-Sabah, the emir of Kuwait?” I hoped he’d hear this as a joke.

“Kathima! Not Kuwait,” he said, laughing.

I laughed too.  And I waited, hoping he’d take the conversation somewhere, but he didn’t.

“What time is swimming today?” I asked.

“No, no mesbah.” (pool)  he said.

“Why not?” I asked, suddenly very serious.

“No mesbah.” He explained nothing, shifting the pistol in his pants.

“Kamal promised it,” I said, trying to look impatient. “Where is Kamal?”

He looked around the room. “Kamal come back. Maybe tomorrow, maybe after tomorrow. Now, no mesbah.”

“This is very bad,” I said. “Swimming is necessary. We have to get away from this place once a day.”

He smiled.

“Listen,” I said, maintaining my impatience. “No mesbah, I get sick. Reiner get sick. If we get sick, we might die. If we die, that’s a big problem for you.” I stopped but continued to glower.

He looked at me. I couldn’t read his response at all, but he was no longer smiling. “Time to go back to house,” he said.  He turned toward the gate after Reiner and I headed back to our house, control room #1.

At four, Sabah walked into the house. “Mesbah. We go.” He seemed pleased, as if our approval was important to him.   Maybe our shock that he arrived at all provided him amusement, but I didn’t care why he came: I just wanted to get out of the refinery and to the mesbah as quickly as possible. Reiner, two Brits, and I followed him down the stairs to one of the factory Land Cruisers that had transported us here the other day. On the way out of the refinery, we stopped at a clinic beside the gatehouse. Several large red crescents covered the front and roof of the building. Sabah went in.

The old man driving took out a brass pipe and crumbled some tobacco and then lit.

“Where your cigarettes?” I asked in Arabic.

“Meester Boosh,” he said, lighting the pipe.

“Cigarettes bad,” I said. He said nothing. He didn’t even look at me.

“No cigarettes?” I continued, You need opium,” having found the word the day before in the English-Arabic dictionary I’d taken into the refinery. At that, the old man pierced me with his eyes, and started yelling. I’m sure he cursed me thoroughly. He still scolded when Sabah and a new guard came back out. Sabah, of course, had the pistol tucked in his pants.   The driver talked energetically to Sabah, reporting my evil idea, I supposed.  Kamal would hear about it next, and then he’d lecture me on morality, as he had once weeks before when Francis and I were watching Emmanuelle. Kamal had come in, ejected it from the VCR, and left the clubhouse with it, mumbling about the immorality and decadence of Western Zionist civilization.   I just supposed he wanted it for their house.

“You think this is where they live?” I mumbled to Reiner.

“It figures they’d live in a clinic,” he said.  If the factory were bombed, they might die from stray bombs, but they wouldn’t burn as we would, I thought.

“One hour, only,” Sabah said as we exited the truck. The driver left through the gate, the two Brits and two Iraqis went into the clubhouse, I supposed, to play billiards or watch videos, and Reiner and I headed for the pool.

He asked what I had said in the car coming here that made the driver so angry. “Opium.  I suggested he smoke opium,” I said.

He laughed.  Determined, I went underwater and did a lap and almost another half before coming up for air, and then we each did laps until we could do no more.

We could hear the refinery turbines, but faintly enough that the twittering of small birds, swallows chasing something, were also audible.  The sun burnt less, having lost some of the intensity of a month before.  I asked Reiner if the noise made him worried about damage to his ears.

“No,” he said. “I served on a mine sweeper in the German navy, in the engine room.

How did that compare?” I asked.

“If anything, it was louder. But after a while, you don’t even hear it anymore,” he said.

This seemed accurate and reassuring.  We went on to compare our personal lives:  he had three children; I was raising five.  Reiner was telling about his eight-year-old daughter when Sabah walked up. “Time to go,” he said, switching the pistol from his left hand to his right.

“Sabah, let’s stay here for a while. Why don’t you swim?” I said.

“I can’t.  I am afraid of water,” he said.

“I can teach you.”

“You teach me?” He didn’t seem to believe me.  Then in a shift, he said, “Swimming in Basra is dangerous. Big fish, bite, eat.”

“Swimming in Basra?” I asked.

“Yes, and there.”  He pointed beyond the fence toward the bay and the Gulf, laughing. “But next time you teach me.  Here.”

I wondered if it just sounded like he discouraged any idea of escape, or if he read minds.  But I still hadn’t talked with Reiner about a plan.

<< News chronology:

October 1:  NYTimes reports 9 out of 10 Americans not ready for the US to go to war.

October 1:  Saddam Hussein wants to cut separate deal with Mitterand.

October 1:  The seige is 8 weeks old.

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September 20-27, 1990

Abed al Khaliq asked, “Everyone?”

“All of them,” shouted Kamal, a third time.  ”No food!”

To us, in English, he said, “We have meeting right after lunch. I have news. Make sure ‘Captain’ is here too.”  For once, Kamal’s pronunciation of that word bore sarcasm.

After an unusually silent lunch, Francis went to bring Somerset back.  Kamal stood, his face emotionless, but his tense body exuding anger. “This evening we will all move into the interior of the fertilizer plant. When your people bomb, we will die there together. When your government bombs, you will die with innocent Iraqis.”

In my mind, I saw it, the end, the flaming finish; some weekly newsmagazine would run color photos of our remains: rather like the mutilated naked ones of Kolwezi, except we’d be charred, like some fossils in the desert, black like petroleum rather than white. Fear came over me like a wave, a rogue wave: one minute I was judging Somerset for his imprudent confrontation with Kamal, feeling in control and superior; a few minutes later, I was quaking, inert, seeing the details of my end depicted in millions of copies of a news magazine and in deathly but rich color.

Most of our group walked in silence out of the clubhouse after Kamal’s short announcement. I remained in my seat. My knees refused to support me. Jack, a new guy who’d arrived at the camp just days before, stayed too.  He had hidden in his Kuwait apartment until being arrested; his wife went home to the United Kingdom and Iraqi guards drove him straight here from Kuwait.

I began talking to Kamal out of fear, imagining immolation in this refinery. I didn’t beg: I just followed a thought like that of the bankers back at the Kuwait International Hotel: this situation didn’t concern us, we shouldn’t suffer for it, our governments didn’t always speak for us, we had responsibilities and families that needed consideration.  What I said sounded circular and repetitive to myself, but rephrasing slightly reiterated my desire to survive.

Amazingly, after half an hour, my anger had transformed this fear.  It was as if at the last second before a large wave crashed over me, I’d dunked myself completely beneath it, and now I stood in bubbles rising where the wave had broken, in bubbles of energy, new power, fury even although I didn’t direct it at him, and he lost no face from hearing me articulate these thoughts.

“Kamal, this situation is wrong. No country puts civilians in potential military targets!” I said, feeling a livid strength.

His eyes narrowed. “America is wrong for hating Arabs, for letting Zionists control everything. Only the Zionist perspective is allowed in your newspapers.” he said.

“Oh, Kamal, what do you bloody know about America or Great Britain. Have you ever visited those places? Have you ever been outside Iraq?” asked Jack, who masterfully mirrored the tone I’d used. Actually, I knew Kamal had lived outside of Iraq: a week or so earlier he had told about fighting next door inside Iran, or “Arabistan,” as he called it.

“Yeah,” I added to Jack’s idea.  “You should have the chance to travel and see other ways of living. I invite you to be my ‘guest’ in America. You can buy any type of newspaper in a large American city: Zionist, Islamist, Communist, racist, pornographic!”         Skipping an opportunity for satire, I went on, “I’ll even lend you my car so you can come and be my guest and go freely to see what you want.  Traveling would educate you.”

After some time, Kamal stood up. “Gentlemen, we should not discuss these things anymore because our countries are about to go to war,” he closed the discussion. “Anyhow the move into the refinery was ordered by Baghdad and had nothing to do with the Captain’s being so disrespectful.”  Clearly Somerset’s outburst still occupied some of his attention.

The sunset glowed a beautiful red and purple when the Kamal and Private Eeyah arrived with a pickup and two beat-up Land Cruisers to move us into the plant. After twenty-nine days in that camp under the salt trees, I packed up my stuff, including the calendar. I rode with Jack in the one Abed al Khaliq drove.  Luggage overfilled the back, and we were packed in the cab.  I was wedged between Jack and the door. It felt tight but comfortable sitting there and admiring the stunning beauty of the sunset in the side mirror as we drove out the gate.  When we hit a bump in the road, I noticed my backpack fell off. Abed al Khaliq stopped, and I picked it up. As I pushed myself back into the cab, it hit me, the horror that this might be my last ride;  the beautiful sky and the warm contact in a crowded cab had blinded me, temporarily, to this portentous ride.

We traveled past the trailer park that bordered the west side of the factory. John the guest guest lived there, or used to live there; we hadn’t seen him or Ali in a while. John’s story seemed strange, yes, but I still refused to believe Somerset’s suspicions of him. We traveled under the pylons holding high-tension lines that dwarfed the trailers. On the other side of the road a scrap pile of rusting metal separated the factory from the camp where we’d lived. To the north and east, three antiaircraft gun stations blended into the scrap-metal-littered desert, black pipes almost straight up surrounded by sand bags and ripped tarps. At the mosque, we turned right for the first time into the chain link gates of the refinery. Hundreds of greenish mercury vapor lamps illuminated the complex, turning the huge grid of crisscrossed service roads underneath girders at twilight into a lethal and gargantuan machine.  Giant stainless steel vessels stood beside skyscaper-sized concrete silos.  Horizontal piping and catwalks above the roads connected parts of the maze.  But more daunting than the view was the noise.  The roar we had heard from the camp now could be felt; the combined roar and hiss hurt my ears, pressured my entire being.

Abed al Khaliq turned into one dead-end service road.  To the right was a fifty-foot stainless steel vessel, a monolithic vertical cylinder about fifteen feet in diameter with steam spraying from valves at different levels. Ahead of us loomed a large metal oven, five stories high by at least a hundred feet long and thirty wide; I could see the flames inside, hear the roar like many jets running at a fast idle and feel its heat radiate outward from burning natural gas.  To the left a two-story green cement block building was marked “Control Room #2.”  And with each breath, I drew in the stench of ammonia, like from overripe urine diapers soaking in a squalid bathroom.

The Japanese and French got out of the Land Cruisers and walked to Mr. Ali, who waited on a second-floor landing. As they walked up the metal stairs, Abed al Khaliq backed out of this dead end and drove us farther into the refinery. It was a forest of piping, with hissing steam escaping in many places. We turned onto another dead-end service road. Next to a building identical to the one where the Japanese and French had been dropped off, we stopped. It was marked “Control Room  #1.” Carrying our bags and –in the case of Francis—Biggles’s carrying case—we all followed Kamal up metal steps to the second floor landing. Through windows beside the stairs I saw large panels and switches and banks of yellow and green indicator lights; workers inside waved.  I wondered if we made them feel safer.  At the end of the landing, we passed through a metal door.  It led to an office, a large area with a large metal table for meetings. Glass and aluminum dividers set off other spaces, offices with furniture and equipment pushed into corners. Camp beds were visible in some of those spaces defined by the glass dividers. In one area under a large portrait of Saddam was a phone.

Somerset asked Kamal for an emergency phone number.  Somerset seemed subdued after apologizing to Kamal.  Kamal gave what he said was the factory doctor’s number. He failed to acknowledge when I asked where he and the other guards would live. Mohammed approached me, his usual self, seeking approval. “OK,  meester Wi-lee-um? OK?” as we walked through our new home.

I cornered him. The noise of the turbines deafened already, so I had an excuse for getting close and yelling, “No OK, Mr. Mohammed. Here is very bad.” I shouted, wanting to punch him in the jaw, to beat him senseless. My aggression surprised me.  Only minutes before a beautiful sunset displaced my fear or rage, and here my shift to feelings of homicide crashed in faster than I ever imagined.

“Excuse me, meester Wi-lee-um. I am not speak the engleesh,” he said. But I had spoken my simple Arabic and he never had difficulty understanding my accent before. Pushing past me, he said something to Kamal before they both left.

Francis and I surveyed our home. Nobody said much.  Suddenly, I lacked energy to shout anyhow. Holes ripped through the concrete block walls and the door. I wondered what had pierced the quarter-inch metal door from outside, leaving jagged ends pointing inward like knife blades. Francis started filling these gashes with wads of scrap paper to keep some noise and flies out. Two of the office spaces had portraits of Saddam on the wall; we moved the beds out of these places, crowding others, but no one wanted to sleep in a room where Saddam would be the first sight each morning, and moving a photo of him–even touching it–could very well be a capital crime in a society like Iraq. I had noticed that Umm Kul would check our garbage: if we’d thrown the newspaper out, she’d take it out, rip out the photo of Saddam to put in her pocket, and return all the rest of the paper to the garbage. My guess was that she did not adore Saddam but was concerned about us and our getting into trouble for putting him in the trash.

Francis had gotten his traveler-size bottle of disinfectant from his suitcase, and he and I started scrubbing the filthy squat toilet/shower and sink in our new residence. Somerset tried out different pipes as auxiliary antennas for his radio but none appeared effective in capturing a signal audible in the refinery noise. All the others made their beds.

Before sleeping, I tacked the tanker calendar to the wall to make this place “home” and lay down to sleep. But no sleep came. Only outrage. I lay in a bunk looking upward at metal rafters supporting corrugated industrial roofing. To block the roar, I twisted the pillow around my ears, a towel binding the pillow to my head to no avail. Being here violated all sense of self-preservation. I got my diary out of the pack. I noticed the mug was shattered. It must have happened when the bag fell off the back of the pickup as we left the other camp. My usually low-key sense of superstition came to life: this mug was one of a set Diana and I used to drink morning coffee.

I started to weep, recalling my last hour with her at the Boston airport nine months before, hearing some of these same sounds, the whine, hiss, and roar of jet engines. She’d cried then and I hadn’t, as I hadn’t leaving my children some days before. I knew I cried with homecomings and reunions, not departures. This was neither of those, a new category of experience, but I cried anyhow.

Unable to sleep, I stepped outside and stood on the landing.  I had no desire to talk to anyone. Two flights of stairs led up to our “house,” quite a distance to jump.  I could easily be trapped here. Jumping down to the cement in an emergency would break hips or knees. Floodlit towers and silos dwarfed me. The reek of ammonia disgusted me.  A large steam turbine and associated ironmongery under pressure produced the noise, as if we were at the end of a runway where jets were constantly taking off. I feared permanent hearing loss, at the very least, if we survived.

When Kamal came to escort all of us at eight, I’d already had a walk.  Francis, Biggles, and I had already get exercise.  We had headed toward the back fence, but nobody challenged us; workers inside the plant only pointed at the white terrier and laughed.

“Follow me to the restaurant for breakfast?” Kamal said. “You must walk only on this road.”  Following him, we traversed the front half of the refinery.  Safety signs calling for use of earplugs. Tow motors and trucks trafficked the service roads. Beside the roads, gutters channeled liquids of various temperatures and colors; some steamed, some were green, others blue.

In other places the gutters held stagnant water, a scummy breeding medium for ubiquitous mosquitoes and flies. Girders the color of red primer paint supported huge stainless steel vessels connected by what must have been miles of horizontal piping and some vertical piping linked pressure vessels and silos going some eight or ten stories up.

Kamal said to stay in the shade; quietly Somerset said to walk down the middle of the road and stay in the sun and look up at the spy satellite. “Let it photograph your face.” I decided to wave at the satellite each day.  I started to look around for a helicopter landing zone and places where I could leave signs.  Somerset was consistent in his head-on confrontations with this situation; I hoped I was equally consistent in my indirect challenges. Workers we met waved and laughed and greeted us with salaams. I wondered what they knew about us and what they knew about their own situation. If we were human shields, then they too were in the rings of a target, the lens of a satellite, and the sights of a missile.

When we’d eaten breakfast, Kamal stood, “Everyone except Jack, Reiner, Jurgen, three Japanese, and Will must pack.” He seemed to be choosing as he glanced around the table. “You will see where you’re going when you get there.”

I sat on Francis’ bed as he packed.  I wondered whether those leaving or staying were more fortunate.  I knew I’d miss him, and Biggles too.

Kamal came in and told the guys to hurry up. “Gentlemen, listen. The bus is waiting outside.”

When Francis was ready, I carried one of his bags. At the door to the bus Kamal opened the bag and fingered through it.

“No Asmida property leaves,” he said. This was the first time I’d seen anyone searching bags.  I wondered if he still sought Mustapha’s pistol.

As the bus left, I stood on the cement, waving at Francis and the others, and wept.  I was devastated, losing not only a space that had become familiar over a month’s time but also the familiarity of house mates, especially Francis, master of Biggles, friends who shared my early mornings. I feared dying alone or with strangers, yet wondered where I’d get energy for new friendships.

I stood alone on the landing after the bus left, scanning the refinery–this maze of pipes, girders, catwalks, towers, and valves, feeling like the last living thing drowning in a blend of hisses and roars punctuated by percussion of someone invisible striking metal.  I wondered how long I could survive this.  I had to escape but knew of no sane way to do so.  Only insane options offered themselves.

I could strip naked right then on the landing and throw sandals, pants, underwear, shirt onto the service road below.  Then wearing only a lunatic smile, I could stroll back and forth through the refiner, maybe head toward the gate.  If anyone approached, I could laugh out loud.  If workers would intervene, try to stop me, put their hands on me–I could piss on them, or at least in their direction.  If they persisted, I could shit right then and there; and he he put hands on me again, I’d pick the shit up and throw it at him, at anyone in range.  Sooner or later, they’d think I’d gone so mad they either shoot me or send me home, where I’d just switch back to my balanced self.

Another option–possibly more dangerous–was to sabotage this equipment.  Below and around me valves and switches easily tampered with invited havoc-mongering.  If valve settings changed and switches deactivated safety equipment or increased pressure and heat, these refining vessels and pipelines might burst like bombs, create a distraction as I left under the back fence.

Or, I could beat Kamal with any of the pipe strewn about.  Or slice him with a broken bottle when next he arrived.  After all, he never had us locked in or tied up and guards would sometimes visit alone.

Yet I couldn’t do any of this.  Instead, I respected an etiquette.  I imposed a normalcy on my behavior.  I said good morning and thank you.  I stood on this landing rationally considering the idea of lunatic, saboteur, and murderer.  Being trapped here in this infernal turbine noise and choking air terrified me, but I had no inkling what to do except be my civil person.  Routines and manners are what we impose on chaos daily.  Only, most of the time the chaos is not as visible as it was in that refinery, on that landing so much like a scaffold.  If a condemned man stumbles on the stairs up to the gallows, someone will offer a hand so that he who is about to die might not be injured until . . . well . . . on schedule.  The helping hand might be the same one who delivered the last meal complete with a favorite dessert–or who set the noose in place—or who unlatches the trapdoor into the neck-breaking tumble.

I left the landing for the office that housed us, where my friends listened for news, , but a moment later    when a radio announcer on Voice of America said . . .”Europe is having a glorious fall day…” I had to hurry back to the landing.  I couldn’t care less about fall in Europe or leaf colors in New England.  Here, nothing had any trace of glory;  this place oppressed with noise and stink and threat.  No seasonal changes appeared in this industrialized desert landscape and none were anticipated except for unstoppable alternation between a sun-bleached and a mercury-vapor lit forest of refinery piping and other structure.  Steam constantly escaped from release valves and cracked or punctured hoses.  In spite of the heat, ice caked other leaky valves and pipe junctures.  Dozens of silos and tanks stored–and in many cases–oozed mystery fluids–oleaginous and iridescent.  The longer I looked, the more I suspected the patches and pimples in metal tanks as relics of the recently-ended war with Iran.  Hadn’t we seen the wreckage of the Iranian fighter jet in the desert along the road here?  Concrete patches in the siloes–jagged rips in the metal door of our “house” reaching into our space–weren’t these reminders of the the damage inflicted by Iranians aircraft strafing our site, maybe harbingers of jets to come.

A range of workers occupied the refinery with us.  Some like Ali wore yellow helmets and blue fireproof suits; others wore white shirts and helmets.  Still others on their knees cut–actually ripped–grass that grew around drippy water pipes, stuffing the grass into burlap bags, maybe for the emaciated cows that wandered outside the fence.  Women in overalls drove forklift trucks here, unlike in neighboring Saudi Arabia where laws prohibited women from even driving cars.  A dwarf covered in black like Umm Majed walked around carrying her full size bucket and mop.  A retarded-looking man wearing an orange jumpsuit rode the back of a garbage truck that seemed oversize for the small bags of trash.  Further, surrounding me worked the racial spectrum from Caucasian to African to Asian, the ethnic complexity of the Fertile Crescent as well as the United States.

A Land Cruiser drove up after lunch, and Private Eedayn got out of the passenger door.  “Go swim?” he asked.  Jack and I had convinced Kamal that in order to maintain our health, we had to get back to the pool, the clubhouse, for at least an hour daily.  After all, we had argued, if we sickened and died, we’d have no value as human shields.  Reiner, Jurgen, and Jack were quickly ready to go.

Reiner and I walked to the pool in silence.  As he changed, I stood waist-deep at one end of the pool, hesitating before plunging under. My clothes and skin smelled of ammonia, like stale urine. My ears still rang from the turbines’ roar.  And loss throbbed in my throat and chest,  linked with rage; furious, I pushed off from the edge of the pool, determined to swim to the other side, underwater, and I made it to the other side, kicking and stroking.  I felt good, counting laps up to one mile and imagining the distance in the context of crossing the Shatt-el-Arab, the Gulf, the Atlantic, getting me closer to Diana.  Reiner swam several lanes away.

When I stopped and looked up, I saw twenty or more hawks or vultures circle the desert just south of the pool.  I wondered what carrion they eyed, something dead or about to die. How gracefully they flew, riding thermals up and down without effort.  Sky sharks or cloud crocodiles, I thought, and laughed.  What frightened me were the crows: each time a group glided low over the pool entering my peripheral vision, my heart stopped: I imagined them a squadron of stealth fighters beginning the attack. Would we then be rushed back to the refinery for immolation?  Might the guards leave us as they fled to save themselves or attend to other duties?  Would those duties include executing us?

When Reiner stopped swimming, he came and sat on the edge near me. I told him about the reporter raving about the glorious fall day in Europe.

“Yeah, it would be if I were home,” he said quietly.

“Where are you from in Germany?” I asked.

“Worms.”

“I know where that is, on the Rhine,” I said, partly to myself.

“And next week is my birthday. It would be a glorious day if I were there.”

“Sorry. How old will you be?”

“Thirty-eight.”

I told him I was the same age.  He had two children and claimed to be happily married.  I said I was divorced and living with a new love.  Then Private Eedayn walked up with Jack and Jurgen, and told us we had to return to the refinery.

To my astonishment, about a dozen new hostages had moved into our space. Refinery workers moved in more beds.  Four people and a dog had left, replaced by twice as many people, and no dog.  Max was among the new hostages, as well as the effeminate crewman who had stayed with the British Air stewardesses at the first army camp we’d been taken to from the hotel. The others I possibly had seen at PC1. Another American, wearing overalls with a “South Oil Company” shoulder patch introduced himself as Gray.  He offered me a can of Newcastle Brown Ale.  I asked about his overalls.

“Oh, these are my flameproofs.  I’ve worked in the oilfields south of Basra for three years now.”  He explained that he dad his own house until the week  before when the secret police brought him to PC1.

“Why’d they send you guys here?” I said.

“Why didn’t you get moved with your group?” Max replied, emptying his can of beer. He walked over to the refrigerator and got himself another.

“I don’t know,” I said. “And until just this minute, I didn’t know they got moved to PC1 either.”

“How’s the food here?” asked Max, opening another can.

“Bad, and getting worse if breakfast and lunch today are any indication.” Abed al Khaliq and Abu Mahmoud still served our food, but sugar for the tea had disappeared, and the bread was hard and slimy. The guards picked at the food in the same way we did: the crust, the least disgusting part; the interior of the loaf had the consistency of sawdust. John the guest guest had once said that, due to the embargo, bread flour was mixed with ground date pits.  Lunch had consisted of a bowl of rice with lukewarm tomato soup poured over it, garnished with one cube of fat. The highlight of the meal was the watermelon, rutghee.

The filthy, huge, and empty space Kamal had called “restaurant” was probably a factory “break room,” about five hundred feet square.  No one else ate there at breakfast or lunch, but it smelled of rancid food.  Spilled food decayed in corners and under tables. Other furniture stacked on end formed a wall around our table. The guards clustered at one end, eating the same food and watching us. Behind them, probably set up for our benefit, was a six-foot-square poster of a smiling Saddam: the man of a five hundred hats here wore a red and white headdress like a peasant, his mouth about as wide as that of the Statue of Liberty.

“I guess those guys and Biggles are lucky to be moved over there?” I said to Max.

“We no longer lived in trailers by the clubhouse, you know,” he replied. “Just yesterday they moved us into offices inside the refinery there, too. Right beside the PVC processing unit, a three-story tank of chlorine loomed over us.” He took another sip of his beer. “And this morning when we got up, workmen were welding bars over the windows of the offices.”

<<News chronology:

September 27:  Kuwaiti Sheikh Jaber speaks at the United Nations General Assembly

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September 12-19, 1990

The next day Private Eedayn walked into lunch with Kamal. At midmorning an antiaircraft artillery battery just outside the fence had begun firing into the sky.  I’d seen the battery days before but thought it was a pile of rubble around pipes and other refinery gear.   The flak burst almost straight overhead, the noise loud and frightening, a terrifying intrusion even if it was just practice. Umm Kul stopped mopping our floor, and talked and talked, animatedly pointing into the sky, making hand movements like attack jets.  I thought she was trying to assure me there was no danger. Mostly the whole experience told me how much I needed to improve my Arabic.

Kamal stood at the head of the table at lunch. “Everyone goes on a trip this afternoon. Everyone means everyone, including the Japanese, French and you, Captain.” Kamal signaled Private Eedayn with his eyes.

The same bus that had taken us to PC1 came. Instead of heading for the mosque and the refinery and out to the main road past the guard with the heavy machine gun, we took a different route, turning right at the gatehouse. We passed a school, another camp where I believe Umm Kul and Ali lived, and then turned onto the main road toward Umm Qasr, at least so the map showed. A camel hobbled by a rope on its front legs ate scrub bushes, nibbling what looked like thorns. Groups of soldiers lived in the desert everywhere. Other than scrub and soldiers in their crude bunkers, the only features were petrochemical: miles of horizontal pipes, metal chimneys topped with yellow flames dancing in the wind, and pumps. After ten minutes, we got to an intersection. Signs we followed were marked “Liquid Nitrogen (LNG) Storage Area.”

Beyond a sandy ridge stood four gigantic silvery globes, spherical storage tanks at least one hundred fifty feet high. A flare twenty to thirty feet long snapped at the top of a high chimney to one side, hissing and crackling as it burned off fumes. Across the road and dwarfed by the tanks lay a collection of trailers. There were no trees, and the hydrocarbon smell and absence of shade made it much bleaker than our camp. The bus parked beside a trailer, and Kamal and Private Eedayn ushered us inside. It was much smaller than our “club house” but seemed to serve the same purpose.

Two Japanese sat near the entrance, beside a small bookcase of books, all Japanese titles. It smelled hot.  Five minutes later, some haggard Europeans stumbled in, obviously just out of bed. We all shook hands and introduced ourselves, laughed a little but with obvious tension.  Among them were a Scot, two older Americans, and two young British couples;  the women had chosen to stay with their men even though the Iraqis had offered to evacuate them.  I wondered only an instant what Asmida would be like if Diana had had the chance to choose to accompany me there.  I would have begged her to leave but that hardly means she would have.  I wonder if we could have tolerated each other’s coping.  I doubt we could have.

An older American named Henk, who spoke with a Dutch accent, said he had lived in the Netherlands during the Second World War.  When I asked him about the couples, he said they created danger in their camp, adding sexual tension to an already explosive space.  “The women often sit and laugh with our guards, our Gestapo.  It seems like they believe they can get better treatment for their men.”  The women seemed to have paid more attention to their appearance—clean t-shirts and brushed hair—than the men there, than we did at Asmida, but a dull blackness of fatigue circled their eyes as it did all of ours.  And what if some smiles got this whole LNG group a less miserable detention?

Henk seemed consistently bitter. He’d spent the past few years with Bechtel building a hydro-electric dam in northern Kurdish Iraq. “We even had a plan to escape through Iran and into Turkey wearing Kurdish outfits, but one person from our company didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut and we were arrested just before we planned to leave.”

At one point he excused himself and went to the bathroom. He limped, his face tight, muscles like wires. “I broke my leg up there at the dam, and the fucking doctors set it wrong. I’ll have it re-broken and reset when I get back to the States,” he told me.

When he returned, he pushed a napkin off the table. “Don’t look down now. Wait a few seconds.” He glanced around the room. “Now pick it up. Pretend to wipe your mouth, and put it in your pocket.  Don’t look at it until you get back to where you are staying.”

“Do you guys have a plan for a rescue?” he asked. I was too surprised to answer. My focus had been on understanding who was who and overcoming my fear of these guards, this situation. This was no easy feat and took all my time. He caught my hesitation. “You need to have a plan in case war begins and a helicopter rescue is attempted. Choose a place inside the fence where there is enough room for a helicopter to land. And plan how you can neutralize the guards.”

“Yeah, I have been working on that,” I lied. I wondered why I needed this reminder that getting to know Kamal and the others made sense only for survival purposes, not because they were nice guys, employers, neighbors, or any other reason.

“Put a sign on your roof. Be careful so the guards do not see it, but remember spy satellites can read the headline on a newspaper on the ground. These satellites are sweeping over this part of the earth every day.” I wondered why was I not mustering this information on my own.

“The guards here are like Gestapo, and your Kamal and our nasty one who calls himself Imad, the SS Chiefs. As a young boy in Holland during the Second World War, I knew these types, and I hate their fucking guts.” Henk surprised me with the depth of his anger, a man almost as old as my father, and otherwise quite urbane.

“You’re lucky at Asmida.  I saw it when they drove us here.  If there’s an attack, that refinery will burn, but you should be alright at your distance,” he said.  “These globes of liquid nitrogen we live under will go up like atomic bombs.”

On the bus ride home, I looked at the napkin: it had the names and home addresses of all the people held at the LNG. “Get this safely to PC1 when someone next goes there. I know they can get the news out on their radio,” he had written at the bottom.  I wondered how he knew about the Lummus/Thyssen telex also.

Back at Asmida, two new guys had been moved into the Japanese house, Reiner and Jurgen, Germans just picked up in Kuwait. At supper, I pumped them for information. “Law and order is breaking down,” Reiner said. “The soldiers who arrested us went through our bags and took things. They took my cell phone and watch.”

I wrote a letter to Diana and then tore it up. It was too bleak: I lacked the imagination to pull myself together. A waning moon, besides suggesting a possible dark attack timed with the new moon darkness, reminded me that we hadn’t met and had no plans to do so any time soon. I imagined she, too, struggled with this. After swimming half a mile of laps and getting clarity, I wrote another with some apparent jolliness, telling her I swam seeing her image at the far end of the pool, imagining myself a fish with her address tattooed onto my belly.  I wanted a letter ready for Ali’s next mail collection, but I hadn’t seen him in more than a week. Or the guest guest.

I’d written Diana six letters since August 2 without receiving a response. Had she gotten even one? I wondered about this and the absurdity of writing letters that appeared somewhat routine, weekly and with beginnings and endings. Although we’d stayed in this place for almost a month, there was no predictability. I wondered if our families, as we did, described this as a waiting game. How were they coping? What did they fear reading between the lines of letters where I tried to impose the illusion of a routine.

I recalled a section from The Cruel Sea in which the narrator, a crewman on a World War Two British corvette named HMS Compass Rose, sums up the results of their duty to date: 98,000 miles of the North Atlantic. 490 days at sea, 30 convoys, rescue of 640 survivors of sunken ships . . .

And we’ve got one solitary U-boat, out of the whole thing,” interrupted Morell. “Are you trying to break our hearts?” He stood up and stretched: his face was pale and rather drawn, as if he had either had a very good leave or a very bad one. “And tomorrow we start another convoy and then another, and another . . . I wonder what we’ll die of in the end.” “Excitement,” said Baker. “Old age,” said Ferraby. “Food poisoning,” said Lockhart, who had over‑eaten. “None of those things,” Morell yawned again. “One day someone will ring a bell and say the war’s over and we can go home, and we’ll all die of surprise.

Somerset walked into lunch late and, in a harsh voice, asked, “Kamal, Why is the food getting worse?” He stood and stared, giving no indication that he would sit down soon.

Kamal glared back for a few seconds. “Sit down and eat, Captain.”

Somerset maintained his stare but stayed by the door. Then he said, “I would. But there is no more beer and there is no more breakfast, and there are no more potatoes. What will you say next? That there is no more food.”

Once more, Kamal ordered, “Captain, sit down and eat.  Now.”  He looked down at the rice and ground meat growing cold on the table, not at Somerset.

Somerset turned, walked out, and slammed the door. Or maybe the wind slammed it. After a few seconds of silence, Kamal stood up. To Abu Mahmoud and Abed al Khaliq in Arabic, he said, “No food for any of them tomorrow. All of them, no food!”

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