Baghdad Journal

Expectations and Assumptions, Oakland-NYC-Frankfurt

We left Oakland airport yesterday, early morning. I met Feiwen at Kennedy Airport in New York, where we caught our flight to Frankfurt. She waited for Brandon and I as we checked in at the Lufthansa counter where we encountered a ticket agent who wasn't very happy that we were given 'e-tickets' through United Airlines. Jordan doesn't accept e-tickets and neither would her computer. She was pissed off. She yelled at us a little without meaning to, then directed her frustration at the computer screen below her. 'Schisse United,' she said. Shit United! She kept jumping on and off her stool. It didn't look very good for Brandon and I for a second there. Feiwen was happy though, thinking we might have to spend the night in New York. Our disgruntled ticket agent ran off to fix things. She came back with our tickets, and asked us where we wanted to sit. I told her in an exit row. 'Are you prepared to save the world?' Brandon asked. 'Sure,' I said, anything for the leg-room. The blonde agent muttered something about it being unlikely I'd save the world from the exit row. Afterwards we ate tasteless, oil-heavy Chinese food. Then difficult saying good-bye to Feiwen.

Slept heavy on the plane. When I wasn't sleeping I thought a lot about what Brandon and I were going to.

And so here I am in Frankfurt in a smokey internet cafe, just a few hours from Amman, Jordon, our entry point into Iraq. And I'm battling my assumptions. What am I going to? What will it look like? I'm imagining the incredible heat. I'm imagining a country in chaos, Iraqis tired, weary of war. American soldiers feeling like aliens, tired of the heat, tired of fighting, guarding, securing, tired of the fear of attack. And I'm imagining the burned car and tank chassis' along the roads and highways. I'm imaging a country ruined, but strong people trying to sew it back together. I'm wondering who I will trust. I'm wondering how I will be able to photograph and report, stay open, when so many of my defenses will working to keep me closed, protected.

To be honest I didn't imagine I'd be going to Iraq in war. It wasn't my initial plan when I first began talking to Brandon about going. I visualized traveling to Iraq after the U.S. invasion had toppled Saddam, had occupied and secured the country. I had imagined going to a more secure place. It was a naive assumption, perhaps formed partly by the pre-war confidence of the U.S. administration. I now I am thinking of what Abbas Kadhim--an Arabic studies professor at Berkeley--said in the Iraqi dialect class I sat in on in June: You may love your neighbor, and may invite him into your house for a little while, but you do not want your neighbor living in YOUR house. If the Americans could tell the Iraqi people how long they will be there, then they would accept this. But they keep changing their story: one month, three months, one year, five years. How long? They want to know.