Baghdad Journal

The devil's palace, part I

It's early morning. A soft grainy light hits the buidling tops but it's still cool and breezy on the street below. We're in line to enter the grounds of the Republican Palace, the nerve center of the Coalition Provisional Authority. There are five of us crammed into a small orange Honda taxi suffering from a cracked windsheild and a bad tank of gasoline. Meanwhile, Adam and I are trying our best to look like engineers. That's the ruse our buddy Zeke (see previous entry "Three days of images") has cooked up for us to fool the MPs at the gate. But beyond sitting up straight, adjusting our glasses, and trying to act serious we have no idea what engineers, who are new to the palace and have no ID badges, are supposed to look like. I have put lots of pens in my shirt pocket for good measure, but I suddenly realize I haven't shaved for days. As we roll towards the cement blockade, the barbed wire, the grim-faced GIs in full gear in front of the white sign with red lettering saying: "No unauthorized personnel," we think maybe this wasn't such a brilliant idea.

"Ahh, shit man," said Zeke, "mostly we get Latino guys at the gate. Forty percent of the military are Latinos, they don't give a shit, they're bored out of their minds. When they see me, a Latino brother who is saying, 'Que pasol, amigo?', they laugh and wave me through! No problem."
That was five minutes ago. Zeke is now looking among the grim faces for his Latino brothers, but they are all white, and all of them are checking IDs. "I don't know any of these guys," he says. "We may be in trouble."
But when the taxi finally sputters up to the gate, the guards seem more suspicious of Abu Yusif, Zeke's Iraqi driver, who is still getting his paperwork processed through the military. Zeke flashes the all-important "no escort" badge in his "Iraqi Freedom" badge holder and promises he'll have Abu Yusif's credentials straightened out by the next visit. Nodding robotically, they let us go.

The grounds of the Republican Palace is actually a small town, two square miles of tree lined boulevards and parks, triumphal arches and monuments to the megalomania of Saddam Hussein. The palace itself seems to be a mile long, marked by four huge iron busts of Saddam dressed like a medieval Arab warlord in a chainmailed helmet. We park behind the palace. At the palace gate itself there is another checkpoint. Zeke has to call one of his friends at Kellog, Brown and Root, to come out and escort us back inside.

The palace is laid out in gray and white marble, but in the KBR wing, they have grafted their own sense of reality on top of that, building bare wooden walls and doors over the marble to give it an office feel. But the KBR walls only go up 7 feet or so -- nowhere close to reaching the high vaulted ceilings. So one is left with the impression that the little people of Munchkin City have taken over the palace. Tyson, the services manager who Zeke wants to talk to, is in a meeting. We wait in a makeshift lobby with a sign -- really just a plain piece of paper on the wall --listing the instructions for using the KBR employee "moral phone:" You can only use the moral phone with your own credit or calling card. You can only use the moral phone for 10 minutes. You must exercise noise discipline. Soon a man sits down and picks up the cradle of the phone on a nearby desk in the lobby. He is wearing a fishing cap that reads "St. Lucia." He speaks with a heavy accent when we ask him about the meaning of a moral phone. He has no idea what that is and what's more, he says, he can't get through to anyone on this damn phone.

Tyson is still busy. Zeke decides to take us on a tour of the rest of the palace. We walk by rows and rows of mobile homes. KBR, USAID, the CPA all get free rent at the palace, he says. We are questioned by a guard at the main entrance, a Nepalese in shades and with an Australian army wide-brimmed hat. Zeke says he's an ex-Gurkha. The Gurkhas fought in Iraq for the British during the World Wars and the Gulf War, but their regiments were downsized after the Brits left Hong Kong in 1997. Now many Gurkhas are back here working as security guards. This Gurkha seems satisfied when we flash our blue passports and in we go, into the sanctum sanctorum.

Inside, it's like the Emerald City of Oz, we walk down marble halls, past US AID offices, cafeterias, a KBR barber and beauty shop, until we feel tired out. Zeke says we've only seen perhaps 3 percent so far. I have the sense that even though no one seems to notice these four civies, two of them without Iraqi Freedom (tm) badge holders, we are being watched step by echoing step down the marble corridor. Zeke stops us in front of an ornate glass door which has gold leaf inlays of Koranic writing encased in it. He tells us this is Saddam's chapel. We furtively peek inside and see a huge mural, 15 feet high at least, depicting missiles emblazoned with Iraqi flags blasting towards heaven. This was Saddam's idea of god. His god was a SCUD.

Back at KBR, we meet Tyson, a young, large headed, puppy-eyed guy who looks like my resident director back in college. He needs a back-hoe desperately. The one he ordered came with its back end in a shambles. Can't trust these damn suppliers, man. Zeke says not to worry -- he just happens to have one back-hoe coming from Nassariya tomorrow. He'll hook him up, he says. Tyson looks eternally grateful. On our way out we are almost run down by a musclar giant with a tatoo that reads "death" on it. Definitely not one of the munchkins. He marches by and disappears through one of the makeshift wooden doors. Who are these guys, we wonder, as we leave the palace and its millions of eyes.

Posted by Brandon Sprague at August 13, 2003 08:50 AM | TrackBack