Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [28]
“We have a plan,” he told me confidently, and handed me two large pieces of wood. “Use these to barricade your door at night.”
“Two-by-fours?” I asked. “Wooden two-by-fours? Don’t you have something a little bit more hi-tech?”
He just shrugged and looked at me as if he thought me a wimp. Which of course, I was.
The attack never came, though the morning I left, insurgents fired on the hotel with rockets. They parked a bus loaded with mortars a few hundred yards from the Palestine. One hit the Sheraton, next door. Another, the nearby Baghdad Hotel. The weight of the rockets tipped the bus over, however, and most of the arsenal exploded. Two Iraqi guards were injured.
I’d worried about getting my morning wake-up call, and though a rocket slamming into the building next to me wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, it definitely got me out of bed in a hurry.
A few hours later, while I was on the tarmac boarding the plane, a mortar landed several hundred meters away. The impact was loud, the plume of smoke clearly visible.
“It’s all right…it’s all right,” a teenage baggage handler said, laughing. I’m still waiting to see if he was right.
ON ELECTION DAY in January 2005, Baghdad is all but shut down. No cars, no traffic, roadblocks everywhere. In a small polling station, a local school, a line of men wait patiently to vote. American troops are on the roof of a nearby building; no sign of them though on the streets. The block is cordoned off. Iraqi National Guard soldiers man one checkpoint, Iraqi police another.
As I pass the barbed-wire barricade, a member of the Iraqi National Guard asks me to take his picture, proudly holding his American-made rifle. He is young, cocky, clearly proud of his service, the kind of soldier armies are made of.
“This weapon,” he says to me, slapping his rifle, “has made men, who think they are big men with RPGs, run like women on Haifa street. I swear by God, I shall fight forever.”
I smile and move on. A half-dozen cell phones sit on a cement block, confiscated from people going to vote. Cell phones are used by insurgents to detonate bombs, and therefore aren’t allowed near voting booths.
It’s quiet in the line of Iraqis waiting to vote. At the entrance to the school, a poster on the wall reads DO NOT LIVE IN FEAR. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT TERRORISTS, YOU MIGHT BE QUALIFIED TO GET A REWARD.
When people have finished voting, they dip their index finger in a jar of ink, a sign that they have done their duty. As they emerge from the school, many hold up their fingers, smiling at my camera.
“It’s worth all the bloodshed,” a man says looking at his finger. “This is going to determine the future of a nation and the people. Voting is a very good feeling.”
A woman dressed in black, her legs swollen with disease, is pushed in a wheelchair by her son. Her name is Badria Flayih and she is ninety years old. As I approach, she holds up her ink-stained finger.
“I wasn’t scared at all,” she announces, practically shouting. “I couldn’t sleep last night, I was so excited to come here and vote. May God save all Iraqis: Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds. We are all Iraqis—one nation.”
The line of men behind her breaks into applause.
REWIND. SOWETO. May 1994. A crowd of women broke into applause when the polling station opened its doors. The line of voters wound through the sprawling South African slum, and from above I imagined a thick black snake, coiled amid the shanties and mud alleys. Elsewhere in Soweto I’d seen young boys and girls chanting slogans, dancing in small groups, but on the line there was patience. The women and men, the old and young, had waited so long already; a few hours more didn’t seem to matter very much.
There were so many theories back then, about what would happen when black South Africans finally took power—rumors of a guerrilla war fought by white Afrikaners, fears of what black rule would