Baghdad
IT WAS 6:03 A.M. on my Timex Expedition watch, which I always keep four minutes fast. The phone in our room at the al Rashid Hotel rang and my roommate, James Kitfield of National Journal, thanked the person for the wake-up. Bleary-eyed, we exchanged incoherent small talk. When did you get back last night? Sleep well? Hear about the Black Hawk downed in Tikrit?
We spent a little extra time on that last one. We had both been in Tikrit the day before. I learned about the helicopter at the filing center for journalists set up near our Baghdad hotel. Jim had already gone back to the room and saw the news on CNN. The Black Hawk hadn't actually been shot down, as CNN initially reported, but had taken fire from a rocket-propelled grenade after landing. One soldier had been wounded. We joked a bit about how this wouldn't help us convince loved ones back home not to be worried as we zipped around Iraq for three days with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Because he'd gotten a couple more hours of sleep than I did, Kitfield volunteered to shower first. But I couldn't sleep. I stood in front of the picture window in Room 1136 of the al Rashid, looking at the small courtyard below and the vast public park beyond the concrete wall that enclosed the hotel grounds. In the distance on my left, I could see Saddam Hussein's old parade grounds. I've long been fascinated by the monuments that
mark the beginning and end of the parade route--identical sets of arms holding two swords that cross over the street. The blades form arches, maybe 10 stories high. Processions of soldiers used to pass underneath these arches in celebrations that were not infrequent in the late 1980s, when Iraq was a military power.
More than almost anything else in Iraq, this display--the giant arms are said to be exact replicas of the former Iraqi dictator's, down to the hair follicles--captures the egomania and megalomania of the old regime. The ground beneath the arches is paved with the helmets of dead Iranian soldiers. I hadn't yet seen it up close, and I began to think through how I might propose a brief visit to one of Wolfowitz's top aides, Kevin Kellems.
As my eyes wandered, my gaze passed over a bright blue trailer just on the other side of a wall near the al Rashid. It was parked at the end of a cul-de-sac off a newly opened road just outside of the heavily fortified "green zone," maybe 200 yards from the hotel. That it was out of place--a small patch of color in a landscape that was otherwise desert brown to the horizon--seemed curious but not threatening.
A moment later, I watched as the first rocket left the trailer and whizzed over the wall toward the hotel. Then came another, and another, and another, and another, and another--flares of orange on a straight-line trajectory into the lower floors of the hotel. I suppose I expected them to stop, figuring whoever was shooting would have to pause and reload. So for probably 15 or 20 seconds, I stood at the window and watched. I looked in vain for the people firing at us. And the rockets just kept coming.
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