Baghdad Journal

The Man on the Tank

Something hit the back of the car, and we ducked forward and down. Maybe we drove over a land mine and the car hadn't yet come apart. We could be dead soon. Abu Abdullah slammed on the breaks and then something hit again, the sound ear-splitting. We ducked again. I looked back, but couldn't make out anything at first, the light blocked by some form I couldn't identify. We rolled forward a foot or two, then I could see there was a line of tanks and humvees, each one crowned with a man behind a gun. They must be shooting. "Oh my god, they're shooting," Abu Abdullah said, waving his hands wildly above the wheel. They must be trying to kill us. Then I saw the man atop the tank.

He had a stupid, amused look on his face, and he was pitching his arm forward, throwing rocks. Bang, another hit, rolling hard up against the glass. "They're throwing rocks," I told Abu Abdullah, who still didn't know what was happening. He pulled off the road, and the convoy sped by. "I think they were shooting," Abu Abdullah said. "I think they shot my car." Even when I told him again what happened he didn't believe me until we got out the car to see the damage. There were two small dents and two long scratches on his trunk. He ran his finger over them, clearing a small path to see better the marks the man on the tank made.

He didn't speak. Back in the car, he sat and fumed, and the anger was a growing fire in his eyes, in his clenched jaws. He gripped the steering wheel as if he wanted to rip it off. He pulled back into the road, into the traffic, went slowly at first, letting other cars race by us.

We could see the convoy down the road ahead of us. "Oh my good, if I had a gun right now I would shoot," he said. "I would shoot, and he would be dead. Believe me." As we drove, he picked up speed, and asked me if I would excuse him, he just needed five minutes to do something he said. The convoy had turned and was out of sight, but he raced after them. He knew their patterns. Every day he had seen them for the past four months. "There are two days," he said. "One of them is, Their day. One of them is, Our day. Today may be Their day. But Our day is coming." When we approach a trafficlight-less intersection full of chaos, he pushes the gas peddle to the floorboard and we weave through cars coming from all directions. At the next intersection, there is a rare traffic cop, holding his hand up for us to stop. Abu Abdullah slows the car, then swerves around him almost hitting him not caring before he has to swerve again around a gaping pot hole. "I didn't see him, this one throwing rocks," he said. "If I had my gun."

We drive fast over the Tigres. "They are not here," he said. "If they were you could see the tracks of the tanks." We turned around in the intersection near the football (soccer) stadium and raced back over the bridge, threading the needle through more intersections until we saw them, the four tanks sitting in the shade of trees outside a hospital. They are parked in pairs. And there is a space between the tank pairs, the concrete there broken and charred. There is some debris, but not much. Soldiers are gathered around the black place, looking into it as if it were a campfire they wanted something from. "There was an attack," Abu Abdullah said. "They were angry, so they were taking it out on the people." He stopped at the next intersection, rolls his window down and lights a cigarette, letting the smoke burn his eyes. He winces: "I'm not angry now. I got my revenge. The Iraqi resistance." His face is still hard, murderous. "Now you see the two faces of Iraqis," he said to me, as he drove slowly in the direction we came from. We passed the tanks again, but he doesn't look at them. "When you treat someone kind, he will be more kind than you," he said. "When you treat someone unkind, he will be just like an animal." He took a deep drag on his cigarette. He needed to talk now, to release the anger, though he held onto the humiliation so as not to feel even more of it. "I don't care about my car. My car is nothing," he said. "But they are humiliating people. We are a generous, welcoming people, we have thousands of years of civilization, we have a history, all things that We have that They don't have."

We were close to the Al Hamra Hotel, where I was meeting some one for an interview. It was late in the day, and the streets were settling, though the black market gas vendors were still out whirling their syphons at people and the soft-drink boys stood behind their styrofoam coolers and palettes of Pepsi the way they had been all day. "Most of the resistance will come, not because they don't like Americans, but because American troops love to be hated by Iraqis," Abu Abdullah said. He said he believed the troops were baiting Iraqis the same way Bush did in his speech in May, where he said, "Bring 'em on," talking about the resistance attacking U.S. troops. He doesn't understand this, why they would want to taunt the people into a fight. "Most of Iraqis hugged the U.S. troops when they first came here," he said. "When they would go from one place to another, they give them a thumbs up and wave. It is not like this now."

Posted by Adam Shemper at August 18, 2003 12:30 PM | TrackBack