Coming Home: An Iraq Correspondent Living in Two Worlds by Dahr Jamail

[chlamor]

Coming Home
An Iraq Correspondent Living in Two Worlds
By Dahr Jamail

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While bloody Iraq stories are just part of the news salad here for most Americans -- along with living and dead Popes, Michael Jackson, missing wives-to-be, and the various doings of our President -- I remained glued to the horrifying tales streaming out of Baghdad and environs. I emailed Abu Talat and other friends constantly to check on their safety in that chaotic, dangerous land I'd stopped being any part of.

Trying to live life here with some of my heart and most of my mind in Iraq, which is endlessly in flames, has felt distinctly schizophrenic. It's often seemed as if I were looking at my country through the wrong end of a telescope even as I walked down the streets of its well functioning cities, padded through a coffee shop where everyone was laughing, relaxed, or calmly computing away, or sat for hours in a room that possessed that miracle of all miracles -- uninterrupted electricity.

<snip>

This time I find, to my amazement, that I'm wiping back the tears and forcing back the crazy desire I've been unable to dodge all these months to return to Baghdad. Right now. This second. That old pull to plunge back into the fire, despite the obvious risk. To be with my close friend, in solidarity, in a place that, absurdly enough, seems more real to me now that this one somehow doesn't. To be there on the front lines of empire, able to see, without blinking, without all the trimmings, the true face my country shows the world.

<snip>

Not too long after, I get an email from a friend in Baghdad who's just spoken with a friend of his, a teacher in Fallujah. She crossed another kind of "border" there, also guarded by Americans -- a border around her own city. She had to undergo a retinal scan mandated by the Americans and had all ten fingers printed in order to obtain the necessary identification badge which, unfortunately, she then lost while shopping in a Baghdad market. When she tried to return to Fallujah without it, Iraqi National Guard soldiers wouldn't let her back in.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2619