But now, through Captain Sumner, I finally had the ear of the administration. Not that this was any guarantee we would get our wayâthe zoo was still drastically low on the priority listâbut at least we could aim requests at the right targets.
Sumner had previously been assigned to the Baghdad Museum when the furor of the apparent looting of priceless artifacts erupted. At first it had been thought the museum, which exhibited exquisite Mesopotamian antiquities, had been ransacked during the frenzied first days of Saddam's defeat. Sumner had been part of the investigating team that discovered, to their utter relief, almost all the irreplaceable items had been stored for safekeeping by museum staff instead of being stolen.
I found his job description as “military curator” for both the museum and zoo amusing. Only the army could give a guy two such diverse tasks, from sourcing ancient tablets in the cradle of civilization on one day to scrounging food for tigers the next.
Captain Sumner was a military man moonlighting as a youthful professor. He came from Germantown, Maryland, and had degrees in political science and archaeology and planned to “get a bunch more” once he returned to civilian life. But in times of war he's a dedicated soldier. In other words, he's a contrasting mix of deskbound academic and man of action. Tigers or tablets, it's all in a day's work.
His family has a staunch military tradition, with ancestors fighting gallantly in America's conflicts as far back as they could remember. A reservist for the past decade, he was scheduled for duty when war flared in Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to surrender Osama bin Laden. But as Captain Sumner 's daughter was
“inconveniently” on the verge of being born, his file was moved to the bottom of the pile.
When war broke out in Iraq, his daughter was a happily, gurgling one-year-old and so Sumner was back at the top of the call-up pileâas was only right, in his estimation. Barely had Baghdad fallen when he was attached to the military government, and being an archaeology graduate, he was the obvious choice to investigate the museum debacle.
At the same time his colonel called him over and said, “By the way, I've got a zoo thing for you as well.”
The “zoo thing” was a less obvious choice for an archaeologist. And little did Sumner know what it would escalate to.
His first job was to find out what, if any, administration was in place at the zoo, and while he was doing so Lieutenant Szydlik's soldiers, still camped at Al Zawra Park, told him about the “loco lion man.”
At our first meeting, Captain Sumner and I soon found we were speaking the same language, even though neither of us harbored illusions that the zoo was of much consequence in the military's overall scheme of things. At the time just delivering basic services such as lights, water, and sewerage to a beleaguered city of 6 million souls was a sorely sobering challenge. Nurturing a handful of barely living wild animals was not something that would automatically leap to the top of any administration's things-to-do-list.
But in Sumner, Baghdad Zoo at least had an officially appointed champion for its cause.
He assessed the root problem rapidly. Looting. We could buy or wrangle as much food for the animals as we liked, but if it was stolen each night, the project would collapse. The zoo's creatures would die. Simple as that.
The risk of confronting armed looters who were quite prepared to settle arguments with bullets was obvious, but we took them on knowing what was at stake.
However, did anyone in the administration have the cojones to do the same?
Sumner had, as we found out almost immediately.
It happened one morning when two looters snuck into the zoo by rowing paddleboats across the sewage-riddled lake. We spotted them and Sumner grabbed his M-16, fired a warning shot, and ran screaming at them. This is military technique: you yell like hell at someone at the top of your voice to disorient them.
The chase was on, with Sumner and his soldiers sprinting over mounds of bombed rubble, vaulting fences and hurtling through animal pens, while animals roared in alarm as buckets and pipes went flying.
Sumner could have fired at the fleeing thugs, as he was always in range, but he wasn't going to hurt anyone unless he had to.
Despite the wild melee, they managed to cut the looters off from both the exit gate and their paddleboat. Eventually the looters were cornered and forced to lie spread-eagled on the ground, whimpering in fear, with Sumner still screaming at them.
By now everyone at the zoo had gathered around to witness the thieves' humiliation. Some of the staff laughed derisively. It was the most effectively degrading punishment we could have imagined.
Except Sumner had a better idea. Instead of showing the looters into our makeshift “Baghdad Zoo Jail,” he instructed his men to lock them in one of the largest cages and give each one a scrubbing brush. For the rest of the day, the looters scrubbed. And scrubbed, until the cage was as clean as it was going to get.
Husham's broken English resulted in him referring to these thugs as “lootiman,” and as the information boards outside the zoo cages gave English, Arabic, and Latin names for each occupant, I suggested we pin up: “Lootiman/Ali Baba:
Humanus horribilis
.”
Eventually Sumner let them go. They never returned. And with these “work as punishment” tactics, looting began to decrease.
I took an instant liking to Captain Sumner. He was a hard worker, honest as the day is long, and totally committed to the zoo. We could have been unlucky and got some average jobsworth. Sumner was anything but that. His wry sense of humor, philosophical
outlook, and huge work ethic set him apart from some of the more regimental officers we came across.
To cap that, Sumner was a master haggler and his specialty was exotic guns. Iraq had been at war, internally or externally, low- or high-intensity, for almost thirty years. For a firearms aficionado, it was a candy store. And during the advance to Baghdad Sumner took full advantage of that, amassing an impressive assortment of unusual hardware captured from Iraqi soldiers. These he skillfully used as barter with gun buffs from other divisions for fridges or batteries or whatever other essential equipment we needed. Indeed, the industrial deep freeze still thumping away in the zoo's administration office is courtesy of a deal involving a World War II Tommy gun. This was my kind of guy.
Almost as soon as he arrived, Sumner appointed me administrator of the zoo. Our friendship also boosted morale among the zoo staff, and Sumner probably was the first American in uniform to earn the absolute trust of ordinary Iraqis. This was a profound compliment. At the time, just weeks after the city had officially fallen, there was understandably much mutual suspicion across the divide.
However, even with Sumner firmly on board another major problem loomedâone that could hamstring the project as surely as the looters. It was money. Or lack thereof. Of my original stash, fifteen hundred dollars had disappeared, either at the zoo or at the Al-Rashid, and was nowhere to be found. And we weren't going to last forever with what I had left.
I was single-handedly financing the zoo's desperate regeneration attempts, and no other help was visible on the horizon. Buying donkeys, scrounging food from pavement stalls ⦠each day or so was tantamount to widening the gaping hole in my pocket. In addition I was footing the staff's wages and paying exorbitant black-market rates for piping and any other essential equipment we needed from the shadow economy. Every emergency that cropped upâwhich happened with regular monotonyâcost me money one way or another, and there was no way to get more in.
Sumner promised to try to get some funds and place the staff on the ORHA (Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, later called the Coalition Provisional Authority) payroll, but he first had to get that passed by newly arriving administration clerks coping with a host of other issues affecting the ravaged city. Cutting red tape for the low-prioritized zoo could take forever, and time was a luxury we did not have.
In the interim, I kept paying out. This wasn't because of innate generosity. I would have been more than happy to shift the burden onto someone else with a bigger checkbook. There simply was no one else.
A
FEW DAYS AFTER the “ostrich run” I called the team together. Previously our energies had been focused on foraging food, moving animals from Uday's palace with dangerously rudimentary equipment, and lugging waterâone damn bucketful after anotherâinto the cages.
Our next task, I told them, was to completely clean the cages. These were not only foul beyond belief, crusted with slime and excrement and gore, but the festering filth was a putrid fly magnet also.
Indeed, it was impossible to walk past a cage without thousands of flies buzzing your eyes and ears. Apart from the appalling hygiene issue, the insects were driving everyone bananas, as they usually attacked when you were burdened with raw meat or water and thus couldn't swat them off. And you didn't even want to think about what those disgusting midges had been feeding on.
We'd already given the cleanup duties occasionally to looters as punishment. It was the kind of job that you wouldn't wish on an ordinary worker, but it had to be done. I knew the only way to tackle
it was to set an example and get cracking right away myself. So I stripped down to a pair of shorts, grabbed a bucket and a scrubbing brush, and got down to work. Adel, Husham, and the others joined in.
It was a horrid task. The filth had scabbed solid and wouldn't dislodge. While we scrubbed, squadrons of flies and mosquitoes blitzed us mercilessly, gorging on our sweat and biting any patch of exposed skin until we were all covered in fiery red bumps.
Dr. Adel said we were whistling against thunder unless we could find some industrial-strength detergent and insecticide. I agreed and sent some of the staff into town to see if they could buy any. But with most shops still barricaded tight against looters, it was futile. Even the loot-laden pavement stalls mushrooming all over the city didn't have any.
So I decided there would have to be another way. I would have to use my bartering skills.
“Tell everyone to take a break,” I instructed Adel. “I'll get cleaning stuff for us.”
He looked at me as if I was mad.
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DESPITE THE WAR, I soon discovered that with persistence and innovation you could scrounge the most amazing things necessary to persevere in Baghdad. As in all survival economies, trade was based almost exclusively on barter, and by now I had become an expert forager, swapping goods or services for whatever I could rustle up as exchange. Consequently I knew there had to be a “deal” where I could source industrial-strength detergent. I just had to nose around.
My trump card in most bartering situations was my satellite phone. I found this out by chance. I was pilfering food and utensils in Saddam's abandoned Al Salam Palace kitchens when a soldier confronted me. “No access here,” he said. “It's all off-limits now.”
Damn, I thought. They're starting to get a bit organized. Previously security at the palaces' kitchens had not been too intense, and
so once or twice I'd been able to keep the zoo fed courtesy of Saddam's stockpiles.
Despite my pleading with him he was adamantâno entry!
While we were talking I saw his gaze switch to the satellite phone hooked on to my belt. After a pause he said, “Does that phone work?”
“Yes. I can ring anywhere in the world.” I suddenly grasped the significance of what I had just said. “When last did you speak to home?” I asked the soldier.
“Months ago.”
I felt terrible but knew what I had to do. I asked if his family would like to know he was safe. “And what about a girlfriend? Do you have one?”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I could let you use the phone, but it doesn't work right here. To get a signal you have to go around the corner, about fifty paces away.”
He knew exactly what I was getting at. “How do I dial?”
I showed him and as he walked off with the phone, I bolted through the kitchen door in a flash, grabbing desperately needed food and supplies, which I stacked in the back of a Humvee belonging to one of Captain Burris's men, knowing that he would drive them to the zoo for me.
Half an hour later I retrieved my phone from the palace guard. He smiled knowingly as he handed it back.
My sat phone was probably one of the only civilian communications systems working in the city. Once it was known that I was happy to let homesick soldiers use it, my popularity at the Al-Rashid Hotel and the Al Salam Palace, earmarked as the future coalition administration center, soared.
My ability to keep essential supplies flowing to the zoo also increased exponentially. I now passed through roadblocks in record time, got regular supplies of bottled water and MREs, and was allowed into off-limits areas and soldiers even gave me lifts wherever I wanted to go.
The downside was my phone bill. During those first six turbulent weeks it rocketed to seven thousand dollars as battle-begrimed GIs whispered endearments across the stratosphere to families and sweethearts. But the goodwill it generated had no price.
Thus I wasted no time in getting the word out to anyone within earshot that I urgently needed pesticides and detergentâadding that, by the way, my sat phone was working just fine.
I didn't have to wait long. And on this occasion I didn't even need to lend out my phone. Instead, it was thanks to my old friends the photographers.
It happened the evening after our abortive first attempt to clean the cages. I was describing the Herculean task we faced in restoring basic hygiene to the DOD photographers when they suddenly looked askance at one another. Then they nodded. They had made some silent decision.
Alistair McLarty stood up first. He said there was another secret storeroom in one of the hotel's bunkers, even bigger than the one we raided when I first arrived in the war zone. That was merely a pantry; this, said Alistair, was a veritable supermarket. Perhaps I would find what I needed there.
The photographers had discovered the storeroom some days back while exploring the building's underground innards and had kept it quiet so they could sneak out some of the goodies for themselves. But now ⦠well, I hoped they reckoned that I was a worthy cause. I was one of them. I wondered if I hung around long enough what other unknown treasure troves would be revealed.
Alistair led the way down the stairs into the maze of cellars, passing through various vaults that had been specifically designed as bombproof command centers. He knew his way around, and we arrived at a thick steel door that he creaked open.
It was indeed a storeroomâmassive, half the size of a sports field, stocked for a siege with crates of food ranging from canned sardines and baked beans to rice and maize meal sacks. There was also enough booze to float a battleship, with top-name brands like Moët & Chandon champagne and Johnnie Walker Black Label.
But as far as I was concerned, the biggest bonanza was finding large barrels of high-potency industrial detergent and disinfectant, as well as stiff-bristle brooms, mops, and scrubbing brushes. It was better than stumbling upon diamonds.
I took what we needed as well as extra food supplies for the hungry zoo staff. Both the hotel and the zoo were government institutions, which meant they had belonged to the Hussein family, so I regarded this as just an “interdepartmental transfer.”
It was indeed a heady form of wealth distribution. And when I arrived at the zoo the next day, courtesy as usual of Sergeant Diehl and his Humvee, the stunned Iraqis were silent for a long moment. Then they said I was a magician. Where had I conjured up all this stuff?
I shrugged. “I found it on the side of the road,” I said, which sparked delighted guffaws. The food was divided equally and then we got back to work.
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IF WE HAD THOUGHT lugging water in searing heat from sewage-ripe canals was backbreaking, we hadn't bargained on cage cleaning. It made water duties look like a walk on the beach.
We started with the lions' cages, herding the animals out of the pens into the open-air enclosure. We then flooded the cement floors with liquid detergent, got down on our knees, and started scrubbing.
The first wash made no discernible difference whatsoever. The grime was so deeply epoxied, no elbow grease could make a dent.
So we sloshed the floors with more buckets of water and industrial-strength soap and began once again. This time we also drenched everything with insecticide, which Husham had quite amazingly sourced from a street stall. The effect was immediate and the flies dropped like ⦠well, flies. They covered the floor in a disgusting carpet of tiny corpses, millions upon millions of them. There wasn't a square inch of cement visible. There were too many to sweep out, so we sluiced them out the cages down the stairs and
into the drains in solid black jets. When too many thick-matted rafts clogged the pipes, broom handles were used to free the gunk. Husham dubbed it “the river of flies.”
The next day we began again and slowly the glue of filth began to loosen its steel grip and grudgingly wash free. By the end of the following day the cages were almost clean.
Once the lions' cages were at least what I considered to be hygienic, we started on the tigers' cages ⦠then the bears' ⦠and so on, until each inhabited den was reasonably clean. With an uncompromising hygiene program now in force, I knew the weeping wounds and mangy sores that had been festering on most of the animals would slowly begin to heal.
I also used this period of muscle-sapping manual labor to instruct staff on the importance of completing cycles of action. The buzz phrase was “put order into confusion.” For some of them it might have been the first English sentence they heard, and they heard it often. If they started something, they knew they had to finish it before beginning something else. They had to focus solely on the job at hand.
This was imperative for the zoo's survival. For if any of us, including myself, stood back and looked at the bigger picture we would despair. It was simply too mind-blowing to envisageâtoo impossible to contemplate headway. But no one dared say that.
Thus I stressed again and again the merits of completing cycles of action, completing a single job at a time, no matter how minor. On one occasion, while squirting flies with insecticide, we came across a gang of young looters and I instructed Husham and his team to finish what they were doing. They could chase the looters off later, which they did.
Gradually this policy began to pay off. By completing one task at a time the zoo staff was starting to see progress, albeit in minuscule fractions. We were sourcing enough food to keep the animals alive, although we still could not buy donkeys in advance, as looters without fail stole them. Sometimes we couldn't get a donkey and
the carnivores went without food for a day, but never two days. And somehow, no matter what, we kept that critical trickle of water flowing into drinking troughs.
However, the war was always with us. Most of the Iraqi zoo staff who walked to and from work braved a daily gauntlet of bullets, looters, and murderous fedayeen keen to slit the throats of anyone associating with foreigners. Despite being senior-ranking veterinarians, Dr. Adel and Dr. Husham also trekked the hazardous miles from their homes, taking the same chances as the humblest laborer.
We never knew who would pitch up each morning, and we never blamed those who deemed it too dangerous to make it that day. If there was a firefight on the street by your house, it was better to stay at home.
Understandably, our nerves were raw from the terror of the daily grind. And when one morning a massive
ka-boom
thunderclapped close by, I led the way in diving for the floor, shouting for everyone to do likewise. Outside the window we could see rubble and grit spew up in a lethal fifty-yard cloud.
For several minutes we lay on the cement, waiting for a second blast or retaliatory gunfire. None came. When all was quiet apart from a ringing in our ears, we warily got up and went outside. The mortar blast had been on the far perimeter of the zoo, with the wall taking the full brunt. Fortunately, nothing inside the grounds was damaged. I pried a piece of shrapnel out of a tree as a souvenir.
On another occasion while at the hotel we heard an explosion in the park. The DOD photographers rushed out to investigate.
It turned out that the explosion was near the zoo and through the murky film of dust they noticed a group of children huddled about one hundred yards away. Some were sobbing; others looked dazed, as if drugged, staring at the smoldering heap of rubble rendered by the blast. Most were bleeding. The photographers called out to them, asking if they were okay.
The children looked at them fretfully and then ran off.
It later became clear that the kids had been playing with unexploded
ordnance and something had detonated. It seemed one child may have been killed, but if so, the body was dragged off before the soldiers arrived. Few questions were asked at Baghdad's sardine-can mortuaries in those turbulent times.
However, it was a somber reminder of the dangers we encountered every moment of our lives. The next day Adel and I called the staff together to warn them again not to stray off the paved sidewalks.