I was most stunned by how magnificent the palaces (formerly owned by Saddam and still standing) are there. One of them is used as the American Embassy in Baghdad, and we stayed there. It was amazing. I just stood there gawking at the immensity of the rooms. Even the bathrooms that we used were gorgeous, oversized and crafted from what looked to be marble and gold. But it was also difficult to think that a lot of the grandeur we saw was probably built with Oil-For-Food money while the average families of Iraq starved and were mistreated and kept under Saddam's evil thumb.
We even saw some of the torture devices at Abu Ghraib, and it was impossible to imagine such cruelty. It felt as eerie as when I visited the former Dachau concentration camp in Germany when I was stationed there years before. The camp is now a solemn memorial to remind people why certain eras of history should never be repeated. Hopefully enough people get the message.
During this morning’s conversation, one of our team members made an astute observation. It may seem easy to figure out for those who are not in the middle of this, but to us it was just a day on the job until we stood back and thought about it. Our cohort caused us to stop and realize what a rare chance we'd actually had. We stood on the rooftop of one of Saddam’s palaces (Al Faw) with four U.S. governors! No one does that every day. He said that this will stay with us for the rest of our lives, and we all agreed. We will be telling our friends and families stories of this week and these few months for a long time to come. He’s right. I never looked at it from that angle until he brought it to our attention.
I am not a particularly religious person, but I felt a calling to my heart and soul when I first heard of this mission over e-mail during a day behind my desk at work in January. I haven’t yet determined where (if anywhere) this is leading me. But what I do know is that I was supposed to be here. None of this was unplanned or is a mistake, in my opinion – not the fact that we have the particular wonderful people we have on our team or any of the experiences we endure and partake in together. We are all following our own paths somewhere, and I’m glad we are able to do so as “one team, one fight!”
When you call Abu Ghraib eerie and compare it with Dachau, are you talking about tortures by Saddams followers or by US soldiers?
Posted by: Peter | May 28, 2007 at 11:21 AM