One Thousand Days (On Three Years in Iraq Part 3)

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I was born about nine months to the day after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords relating to Vietnam. Conceived in withdrawal, in more ways than one…

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In the heady days of January 1991, we used to cut out of our senior year of high school early and go smoke joints at R.L.’s apartment. We’d often have beer as well. From about 2 pm to 6 pm, a large group of us would chill there, maybe with CNN or MTV or cartoons on the television in the background. It was the line in the sand day, or thereabouts, and CNN was on. The war had not yet started, but we were waiting for it, full of bravado. We were sure that if the war started, it would lead to a general Mideast conflagration, and we would all be called to service. We were all 17 years old, and in good health, if often high.

I left R.L.’s at about 6, heading home to dinner. I walked back to my apartment with Sulli and Steve. We were pretty lit by this time, and the electricity in the air said it all: the war is imminent. Steve started belting out the lines as we walked down the Queens street: All we are say-ing/ Is give war a chance! I remember laughing. When I got home I found my mother standing in front of the television, her hand over her mouth. “What’s going…” but she shushed me, and I looked at the television. The eerie green light, the tracers going up over the minarets, the stentorian intonations of some spokesman or other. War. I went into the bedroom I shared with my brother, my heart filled with joy…

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Why doncha come on back to the War. – Leonard Cohen

September 10, 2001. I have dinner with an old friend at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Then we go to DBA, a bar. She tells me that her current boyfriend is sometimes impotent, but a genius at oral sex. I don’t think my wife likes my relationship with my old friend. Jay-Z’s “Hova” comes on in the bar: H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay, what else can I say, dude, I gets bizzay. We talk about how great it is. I’m drunk at this point, and I have to get back to Brooklyn. I have to be up early tomorrow to do campaign work in Lower Manhattan before I head to work at my building near the Ferry terminal. I take a cab back over the Manhattan Bridge, with a final glance at the lights flickering in the Manhattan skyline just as we hit the center of the Bridge. Goddamn is it beautiful.

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One…we are the people
Two…a little bit louder
Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now
One…

March, 2003. The first Saturday of the War. I am at a conference in New York, but I stay at my brother’s place in Brooklyn rather than in the conference hotel. I don’t live here anymore. On Friday I got food poisoning. My brother, his wife, and my wife went to a French restaurant in Fort Green, but I stayed at his place, sick as a dog, watching the lead-up to the War on television. On Saturday I go to Midtown to see a friend’s panel, but the war is on television there, too, real now, green-lit tracers over the minarets, Shock and Awe booming through the hotel lobby. I leave after the panel, and wander into the anti-war march that is just beginning. The crowds are tremendous. I walk downtown with the march, but on the sidewalk. Hard for me to be a joiner that way, I guess. Earnestness irritates me, but I’m with them. When I get down to 10th street I encounter the drummers – a group of Latinos and Latinas leading the chant: One…we are the people, Two…a little bit louder, Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now. Everyone on the march and on the sidewalks is cheering. On a third floor balcony above the march, a woman comes out with a little boy and a conch shell. She starts blowing it in beat with the drum. Everyone’s eyes seem to move from the drummers to the balcony and back. The drummers acknowledge her, and the little boy dances. There he is dancing on the first Saturday of the War.

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And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. –Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Other Dancing Song”

One Thousand Days. I should have waited another one, and led with One Thousand One Arabian Nights. Too clever by far. And no history or stories will save me, like Scheherazade. It is the one thousandth day of the War. I often wondered when I was a child how people could live normally on the home front when a war was going on. How do they face it everyday, I wondered, knowing what must be happening, knowing that everything is at stake? How do they go out to dinner, play sports, make love, gesture to each other on the street? It bothered me. I’d think of the swing clubs during World War II – everyone dressed up and dancing. A sip from a bottle of beer, or a Tom Collins. How? It is the one thousandth day of the war. No stories will save me. In March, if all goes well, my first child will be born. Perhaps on the first Saturday of the fourth year of the War. I want her to dance to something else. I want some other occasion for her joy and even for her heartbreaks, something other than what Langston Hughes once called “the same old stupid game, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” I want for her some other dancing song. But it is the one thousandth day of the war and no stories will save me.

On Three Years in Iraq Part 2

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=660825&mesg_id=660825">On Three Years in Iraq Part 1