fantasy about my job.
I picked out a pair of gray convertible pants. âYou guys donât wear that color over there.â
âYou got any special deals for my son?â he asked the high school girl working the register. âHeâs off to Iraq next week! Here, Kirk, let me pay for your gear.â Embarrassed, I dumped my âgearâ onto the conveyor. Spotting a pair of green Carhartt jeans, he jabbed a finger into them and said, âArmy issue!â
He found an old army rucksack in the basement for me to use, but I told him the canvas was too worn out.
Although I can scarcely remember him rushing to answer the phone when I was younger, now he seemed to want to talk with everyone who called. âYeah, well, you know our son Kirk is off to Baghdad next week, so weâre all trying to spend as much time with him as possible. Whatâs that? No, itâs a ten-month tour.â
I was stuffing my Arabic dictionary into a suitcase when he wandered in and asked, âWhere do you think youâll take your R&R? I did mine in Hong Kong. That was right after the Tet Offensive.â
He ignored my attempts to correct his terminology. âAre you going to deploy with anyone else in your same unit?â
âAid workers donât deploy, and we donât have units,â I told him. âIâm flying over alone. They bumped me to first-class sleeper the whole way; should be nice.â
Later that night, he walked into my bedroom with a legal pad, closed the door behind him, and said that he needed to ask a few questions for my living will. I was twenty-four, and hadnât given any thought to how Iâd want my vegetative body handled. An hour later, he came back up with a typed version for my signature.
----
âSit on the left side of the plane if you want a good view coming in. Only if you donât get airsick, though,â an attractive young woman working for USAID volunteered encouragingly. Below us swirled pillars of dust, ten stories high and dancing across the desert expanse. The props felt as though they might choke as the tiny Embraer EMB Brasilia twin turboprop plane chartered by the agency to shuttle incoming AID workers climbed through the clouds. I fidgeted with my MP3 player and settled on Radioheadâs âI Will.â The pitch of the turbines settled, and the plane nosed onward.
It was hot on the plane. There was no door to the pilotâs deck. The sun glared, and the glass faceplates of the instrumentation systems flashed light like watch faces. A small pink Energizer bunny twirled on a string tied to an unused switch. As Thom Yorkeâs voice cooed about lying down in an underground bunker, I realized I had picked a lousy song for the moment. The copilot turned around and announced we were one hundred kilometers from Baghdad International Airport.
The clouds broke, and the Euphrates ribboned darkly below. Weary-looking farms unfurled from its banks, and sand piled over the edges of the fields. We hurtled toward the dusty pall of Baghdad, and the song looped. The plane banked left abruptly and jammed its nose downward. In a frantic approach, the turboprop corkscrewed its way down as though swirling toward a drain, hoping to avoid rocket-propelled grenades. The emergency system began to blare, but the pilots ignored it as the engines clamored and the Energizer bunny circled furiously. At the last possible moment, they straightened the wings and the plane smacked into the runway, bouncing a few times as the copilot welcomed us to Iraq.
Inside the customs hall, I smiled at the bored-looking Iraqi official inspecting my official passport, but he didnât bother looking up as he thudded my entry stamp. A stocky man in his late twenties wearing a faded Metallica T-shirt hurried over once I cleared passport control. He was the first Iraqi employee of USAID I would meet, and he introduced himself to me as Kirk. I stared in blank
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