This was easier said than done, as there were no functional toilets and our only latrine was the sand outside. While I am used to a “bush toilet,” in Baghdad there was no paper, nor were there any leaves in the desert, so sand was all we had. We all walked gingerly off the beaten track, and not just because of unexploded bombs.
To compound matters, almost everyone in Baghdad except the locals suffered from diarrhea. There was no respite; it was just a matter of varying degrees. Good days meant no runs; bad days, continuous dashes outside. And so it was for almost my entire stay in Baghdad.
I now know why ancient Arabic law stipulated slicing off a person's right hand if he or she had committed a crime. With only a left hand for wiping, it meant you would never be properly clean.
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I WAS UNDER STRICT MILITARY ORDERS not to remain at the zoo overnight, and when darkness fell I would grab a lift from the nearest Humvee and head back to the Al-Rashid. After long days in the sun, there was not much to do in the evenings except chill outâalthough with summer galloping toward us,
chill
was hardly the right word.
Our main meeting place at the hotel was a makeshift coffee shop at the reception desk that had been renamed the Baghdad Café and was run by Sergeant Diehl, a tough, no-nonsense tank man and highly respected character in the Third ID.
For many of us, the Baghdad Café was the highlight of those grim early days, and it happened totally by accident. In one of his
letters home soon after the Third ID had commandeered the Al-Rashid, Diehlâor Sarge, as everyone called himâwrote that there was no decent coffee to be found anywhere in Iraq and he was craving the stuff. His wife told her sister, who told a friend, who told another friend ⦠and pretty soon when the post arrived Sarge had enough caffeine to keep him wired for a decade. So he decided to stop brewing ersatz mud at his tank and set up the Baghdad Café at the reception desk. Here select customers could get the only decent cup of coffee, Colombian or Brazilian or otherwise, in Baghdad.
Under Capt. Larry Burris, the Baghdad Café soon became a gathering point for many of the officers, both commissioned and noncommissioned, and while Sarge kept brewing his great coffee I learned more about the war from those informal chats than anything I will ever read in history books.
Obviously the American tanks were far superior to the Iraqi ones, but according to these guys, their superb thermal night-vision technology and laser sights was the deciding factor. That, possibly more than anything else, was what won the war so quickly. One battle with the Republican Guard at Al Najaf started at midnight and was over in a few hours because the Iraqis couldn't see a thing while everything was clear as daylight for the Americans on their computer screens. It was tantamount to playing video games in an amusement arcade against blindfolded opponents.
I don't know what soldiers in other wars called killing. In this one the phrase was “pink misted,” which describes it exactly. The Abramses' and Bradleys' firepower was so awesome that humans were simply vaporized at huge distances. And so accurate that once the computerized cannons were locked on, day or night, they couldn't miss. Basically all that remained was pink mist.
The Baghdad Café was a shrine of sanity in otherwise crazy times, and I have many fond memories of it. I will certainly never experience such camaraderie again, and I don't think coffee for me will ever taste the same.
Those informal chats regularly went on long into the night, but when the sun rose we would all be up. After a quick MRE for breakfast,
I would catch a ride to the zooâoften with Sargeâand our perpetual quest to feed and water the animals would begin anew.
The slog was merciless, and endlessly lugging bucketfuls up from the canals was not only backbreaking but also extravagantly time-consuming. Searing summer days were approaching, and I knew we couldn't keep up with the voracious tempo at which the parched animals were drinking for much longer. This was eased slightly when Husham managed to connect a pipe into the city's main conduit that ran underneath the park. The system was obviously not pumping, but there was sufficient water lying dormant to feed a small hosepipe. We now had fresh water for the first time.
But we needed to get a pump working; that was what occupied much of my waking hours.
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LESS THAN TWO WEEKS had passed, but it seemed like an eternity since I had crossed the Iraqi border. There was a colossal amount of work to be done, but even so, I breathed a sigh of relief. We were operational, albeit barely.
It was around this period when an American officer visiting the zoo told me President Bush had just announced the “end of major hostilities.” It was the first I had heard of it, as we had no access to TV.
“All we now need,” the officer said caustically, “is for someone to tell Saddam and the Iraqis. It seems they haven't got the news yet.”
For us at the zoo, time was agonizingly measured in twelve-hour increments; who would be at work that day; would we get donkeys that day; would we manage to ferry enough water that day. And, more ominously, would anyone get hurt or shot that day.
It was impossible to look further than that.
Every morning I would hold my daily ritual of visiting each animal individually, talking to them in soothing tones and reassuring them. I repeated again and again that we would get them food and water, that they were now safe. There would be no more bombs or bullets in their home, and people who really cared for them were in
charge. The subadult palace lions were gradually starting to get some flesh on their skeletons, and the chronic mange on the two cheetahs we had rescued was slowly starting to clear upâa sure sign they were on the road to recovery. The terrified badger was now intermittently coming out of the hole he had dug in the cement-hard soil to escape the bombs. By now they recognized me, and even blind Saedia would look up when she heard my voice. This doesn't mean I was establishing some mystical bond; rather, it meant that hugely traumatized animals were getting used to routine, care, and order in their lives.
As we began our third week, Lieutenant Szydlik arrived at our officeâfor want of a better wordâin his armored troop carrier. “Good news,” he said, and for a moment I thought they had caught Saddam Hussein.
Szydlik laughed, eyes glinting. Every American soldier in the country was on the lookout for the Iraqi tyrant still on the run. But no, this time it was something a little less hostile. Another conservationist had pitched up at a roadblock on the far side of the zoo. Would I go and escort him through?
I was surprised. I knew news of the zoo's plight had leaked out via journalists who were swarming into the Palestine Hotel a few miles away, but there had been negligible contact from any of the international animal welfare bodies. I had presumed at the time that I was on my own because Baghdad's wild animals weren't actually in the wild and thus weren't as sexy as globally warmed polar bears.
I walked through the western sector of Al Zawra, and on the road outside a bomb-shattered gate that had been plugged with a burnt-out truck was parked a gaudy orange-and-white Chevy sedan.
It was a taxi. The door opened and an elegantly handsome man dressed as if he had just come from the sidewalks of Paris emerged languidly from the car.
His name was Stephan Bognar and he was from WildAid. He shook my hand with warmth. I got into the car to escort them through the roadblock and into the zoo.
A volley of gunshots rat-tatted high above the roof of the taxi as we approached the entrance. Nothing too serious; this was Baghdad, after all.
Stephan and I ducked, and he looked around wildly, trying to see where the shots came from.
“No one told me this was a war zone,” he said, alarmed.
I laughed nervously. Gunshots, explosives, and the
crump-crump
of mortar fire were Baghdad's musicâthe songbirds of war.
“Most of it is farther away. You'll get used to it.”
Stephan then told me he had supplies in the taxi's trunk and he had brought a wallet full of much-needed dollars.
Manna had arrived in the nick of time.
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STEPHAN BOGNAR, I quickly learned, was not afraid of hard work, and he was soon paying his way, mucking out the cages with the rest of us, although we marveled at how even in the sweltering heat he always looked immaculately groomed. He checked into the Al Hamra Hotel, part of the fortified Palestine Hotel complex that housed the international media, and I introduced him to the checkpoints so they would know he was one of us.
The look of astonishment when I first walked him around the zoo was a picture.
“There is a lot to do,” he said.
“We have already come a long way,” I replied, “but there is still a long way to go. This place was an almighty mess, and I am really glad you are here to help.”
A Canadian, he had been in Israel recruiting agricultural specialists for a project in Cambodia when he received an SOS message from WildAid headquarters in San Francisco instructing him to hotfoot it to Baghdad.
But he told us he had been delayed by a “minor” security problem after he asked his Palestinian taxi driver to transfer his luggage from one Tel Aviv boardinghouse to another.
The owner of the establishment watched as an Arab took out
some suitcases not belonging to him from a room rented by a foreigner and put them into a taxi. He reported the matter as “suspicious” to the Israeli security police, and within minutes Bognar and his driver found themselves being grilled by steel-eyed cops. This was in a land where suicide bombers queued up, and Stephan was hard-pressed to talk his way free. It didn't help when he said his next destination was Iraq.
But Stephan was used to flying by his fingernails and had been in scores of scrapes during his years as a WildAid undercover investigator into the shameful black-market exotic species trade.
However, Stephan's scant regard for authority sometimes posed problems in a military zone. Once, when stopped at a roadblock by a soldier who said Stephan would have to wait while they radioed ahead for entry permission, Bognar told the young GI to “stick your radio up your arse.”
The soldier was livid and reported it to his commander, none other than Capt. Larry Burris, who was in charge at the Al-Rashid Hotel.
Burris came storming into the zoo with another lieutenant, and they weren't messing around.
“Where's the fancy Canadian guy?” Burris asked me abruptly.
“What's up?” I asked.
“We're gonna teach him some manners,” said Burris, his voice cold with menace. “He told one of my men to stick his radio up his arse, and nobody speaks to my men like that. Where is he?”
I told Burris I didn't know, then asked, “What are you going to do?”
“We've got plans for him,” said a grim-faced Burris. “And when we're finished we are going to lock him up in the Al-Rashid tennis court in the sun.”
I promised to find Stephan and bring him to Burris's tank. But I decided to make a last-ditch plea on the Canadian's behalf.
“Larry, I know what he did was not right and I'll get him to apologize. But I really need him right now. I need every hand we've got,
so please don't lock him up. It will just make things more difficult, not only for me, but for them.” I gestured at the animal cages.
Burris was a fine guy and, despite his blazing anger, relented. He knew my predicament. “Okay. But tell him not to come anywhere near me. And if he arrives at one of my checkpoints again he is going to be strip-searched and made to wait all day. That's if they don't beat the crap out of him first.”
When I later saw Stephan I told him Burris and the Third ID were on the warpath. “From now on you go through checkpoints at you own risk. You don't mess with these guys, and I strongly suggest you go back to the checkpoint where you gave them lip and apologize.”
To his credit he did, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Without the goodwill of Burris and his men, we couldn't survive in Baghdad. They gave us accommodation, food, water, and security and took a genuine interest in what we were doing. Aggravating them could have seriously jeopardizedâif not abortedâour entire mission.
On another occasion, against all local advice, Stephan ordered a hamburger from one of Baghdad's more dubious street vendors. Eating this food takes guts, literally, and within an hour he was comatose in his hotel room with chronic food poisoning. Luckily for him, his taxi driver, Mohammed Ali, was nearby and brought him to a military hospital where he was put on an emergency drip.
Ali, a tough former Iraqi commando who had seen frontline action during the First Gulf War, then returned to Stephan's room at the Al Hamra Hotel and guarded the Canadian conservationist's money and sophisticated photographic gear until Stephan was well enough to be discharged. Ali's exceptional loyalty was noted and he later became an integral part of the zoo team. A burly man who knew Baghdad like his own backyard, Ali had initially been a taxi driver plying his trade between the city and the Jordanian border. His spiderweb network of contacts, on both sides of the law, would later prove immensely beneficial to us, and he managed to source food and supplies that we believed were unattainable anywhere in
the city. We later discovered that if Ali couldn't get us something, it meant no one in Iraq could.