20100108-1605 🔈
AI generated transcript:
It's 4:05 PM January 8th, 2010. I am on the 55 Freeway, heading toward Newport Beach from Mom's Place. It's my last evening at home before flights to Amman. I'll be in Amman for a couple of days before we go into Iraq, and I've really been trying to journal as extensively as I can manage.
Some things I noticed over the last several days. So what I've done, I'm actually pretty happy with, with the way I've managed my preparation. I bought two books. One was Understanding Iraq by William Polk, a teacher at Harvard and Oxford, which goes know all the way from before the Mongols to the American occupation and beyond. I'm about to read the last chapter, “Whose Iraq?”; will it become the peoples’ country? will it become, whatever, they've been occupied by foreign powers for so long. The other book I bought was by Kathy Kelly, titled Other Lands Have Dreams, something I'm gonna read on the plane and kind of continue to get, how I've been telling myself, ‘get my heart right.’
We used to have this saying in the military, before we went on-mission, “get your mind right,” get your head right. And it's supposed to… it's a demand to recenter your focus on what is important. Like, forget about whatever, just think about the mission at hand, the task at hand.
And I've been, in my own mind, subverted that to ‘look, my mind is already there.’ Like I know some of the stuff that I feel responsible for in some way, shape, or form. But I need to put myself back in the emotive state that will allow me, that will prepare me for, what I think I'm going to experience in Iraq. To go over cold like that, I think will just be this incredible culture shock.
So I've been kind of building myself up. First, I've read this one book, Understanding Iraq. I'm going to be reading Kathy Kelly on the plane and in Amman. And then I've watched several movies. The first one was Waltz with Bashir, I watched that like the night before last. That was really in interesting because it's a documentary by an Israeli, a former Israeli soldier, who was in some moral proximity to the massacre at a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Beirut. And it's animated so it makes it kind of easier to watch. But it was really, really interesting. I was a little disturbed that, for some of it, he was probably, to a healthy degree, critical of the policies in place and what they allowed the soldiers to do.
And I'm familiar with the same kind of thing on the American side. But then ultimately it probably wasn't even up to him, but the focus was on the Christian Phalanges or whatever in Lebanon. And this, this isn't to say it's not true, but that primarily these Christian groups were massacring these Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians, and firing mortar, illumination and enabled it. He was an enabler of this violence; the mechanical distance might be significant (well mortars is probably not all that far), but the emotive distance is probably not as great. He felt like he was responsible in some way because he was part of it.
So it was really, really interesting and got me thinking. After it was over they showed real pictures of these women, after they were let back into the camp, finding these piles and piles of dead bodies, of men and boys and other women and girls. And… it was just really powerful. I just kind of sat and thought on that for a while.
And then the other movie that I rented on iTunes was Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories, a movie by Mike Shiley, who basically got some kind of doctor credentials. He's not an official reporter. He doesn't have a history and I guess he's a TV producer or some kind of media producer. He just found his way into Iraq where he just recorded his stories.
And the first half of the movie, actually probably less than half of the movie, was Iraqis going through these markets. He talked about how pornography made its way into the country and it touched on some of the looting and everything else at these ad hoc assault weapons markets on the side of the road, stuff like that.
And in the end, what I think was more than half of the film, he talks to American military personnel. He gets in a tank himself, he qualifies on the [Squad Automatic Weapon] and the .50 cal (but I didn't see him fire it), and the M-1 Abrams main gun. He talks [with soldiers] and it's, you know, it's a real portrayal. These jackass National Guardsmen are shooting off at the mouth, I don't doubt any of its sincerity. This one girl was talking [with a lieutenant] about how she was looking to go screw in a mosque on-base with one of her own unit members. Hearing the stuff I [heard] in Kirkuk, I do not doubt that this is true. I think one of the American characters that were portrayed shot themselves in the foot, and he gives a little, like, blurb afterwards. The group he went out on a patrol with was ambushed the very next day. 3 [Killed In Action] and 13 WIA, Wounded In Action. So it was a really, really profound film.
And then I also listened to this podcast, this American Public Media podcast called The Story. And it was actually kind of funny cause I heard about it; I was listening to it on the radio, so like live NPR or however they do that… And so the next day, one of the things I wanted to do, which I did, I looked on iTunes U for anything that had to do with the Iraq war. I downloaded a bunch, and one of them that looked most interesting was this APM news series called The Story with Dick Gordon. And there are two of them that were about an hour long. So I figured that, you know, there's some kind of substance there.
One was called “How it All Began” and the other one was called “Leaving Baghdad”. And I left my journal up at Dad’s, so I had to race back up there and it was an hour each way. So I listened to these podcasts and this guy Ahmed was basically making these journals and just had to listen to him. Real dude refusing to kind of, you know, jump on the bandwagons of hatred between the Sunnis and Shias. Hearing him watching his hometown get decimated just really kind of broke my heart, so I emailed the producers because on the show they’re always suggesting, ‘if you have things you'd like to share with Ahmed let me know and I will forward it to him.’ And ‘if you have stories, share them.’ And I email them. You know, there was a really awesome program and I'm really am looking forward to more.
So that's what I've been doing. And then this has been over the last two days or so, three days. I noticed this morning, and a little bit last night, it's been like one long run of heartburn or something. Like my chest is kind of tight. It kind of feels like there's lemon juice all over in my chest or something. I’m eating small meals, I was really just keeping myself busy.
So I'm packed up now, I'm heading to the beach to kind of relax, but I just kind of wanted to put that out there, these things I've been [doing to] try to get my heart right. And hopefully it'll help out. I'm really looking forward to it, but I still have no real idea of what's gonna happen when I finally get out there, when I'm on the plane and everything else. So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it or as it develops, I guess.
