A platoon sergeant wrote that on my helmet band when I was with his unit in Baghdad in 2006.
It stuck.
He wrote it most affectionately, of course, but it correctly represents the underlying tension between the media and the military. Soldiers laugh when they see it. And it has even helped me get a story or two.
This photo of me in Tal Afar that you see next to this post — well, a young lieutenant in the Florida National Guard saw my helmet band and asked if I wanted to go see the nine city blocks razed in a horrific bombing last year. He would have never thought to ask had he not seen the helmet band.
I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my chicken biryani to finish cooking. The smells remind me of the Mughlai take-out place near my house in Calcutta. I used to walk down the street just to get a whiff of the intense smells of cardomom and cumin mingling with onions fried in pans of ghee.
I had a craving for all that was my childhood tonight, mostly because I know I will be far removed from every inkling of comfort soon. Next week, I head back to Iraq on assignment for my newspaper: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
I have been travelling to Iraq since 2002. On my first trip, I knew war was imminent.
I was scared of being under Saddam Hussein’s grip. I felt I was being watched the entire time I was there. I was tired when I hit the bed at the al-Rasheed hotel, and yet could never get to sleep.
Subsequent trips opened my eyes, unceremoniously, to war.
In a few days, I will get on a plane that will carry me back to the Land Between the Rivers.
I have lost friends in that land. And met so many people whose lives are timelines of sorrow.
This time, I will be an embedded reporter again. It’s impossible these days to move about freely as a journalist in Iraq. Since 2005, I have been going there as an embed and writing stories about the soldiers. My focus for the paper has been on Georgians who have left families and homes to fight in a land that remains strange to them.
