Iraq is a controversial topic; increasingly so now with a new President making new decisions about our military. But it’s also a place that has left a large percentage of travelers asking a different set of questions, other than whether our military stay or go. Instead, they are asking: What is it like there? What are the people like? Or will it be open to travel in my lifetime? I am certainly not a professional in the matter, but there is one experience I would like to share as it made me realize how close in nature we really are to the Iraqis, and that many of them ask the same questions about us.
A deployment into Iraq begins in Kuwait, where soldiers spend about two weeks preparing for movement north. Our movement north was to Tallil Air Base, an old Iraqi airfield that was about 20 kilometers from the city of An Nasiriyah, and walking distance from the historical remains of the ancient city of Ur.
Because we were a Combat Heavy Engineer unit (in civilian words, a construction unit), we were in a constant need of materials. I was the contractor for my unit, and once a week I would travel into downtown Nasiriyah with a team to purchase a “shopping list” of immediate needs from the local Iraqi vendors.
During one of these supply runs, we were parked in a dirt lot outside of a building downtown, waiting for Yassir, our translator, to join us. While we waited in the vehicle a local woman approached me on the passenger side, wearing a traditional cloak (an “abaya”) covering her from head to foot. I was used to being approached as a female soldier; I can only imagine that I was an abnormality to their culture. Crowds would flock to our vehicle on a regular basis, trying to get a glimpse, but this was the first time I had ever seen woman approach us. It was a rarity to even see an Iraqi woman in public, and if we did, she would be hiding in the background, avoiding eye contact and attempting to be out of sight.
Now here she was, one foot away from me, staring straight into my eyes without fear or hesitation. For the first time during the deployment I felt stripped of my uniform; it was as if for a moment we were somewhere else, forgetting the unfortunate circumstances surrounding us. She wanted to understand my world and my culture just as much as I wanted to understand hers. We could have been in the middle of a combat zone, as we were, or in a coffee shop in Washington D.C.
She carried a book under her arm, and as she smiled and nodded her head in a gesture, she opened it to a page and pushed it towards me. I didn’t understand what she wanted, but as I closed the book to read the cover, it became more than clear. It was a translation dictionary.
There hasn’t been a time in my life that I’ve cursed the barrier of language (and myself for not knowing them all) more than I did that day. Our brief encounter was interrupted only seconds later by Yassir’s return and the vehicle instantly cranking. I quickly placed the book in her hands and met her eyes to farewell, and in that moment I knew there was an understanding between us; an acceptance of our circumstances, and that our interaction would end where it began.
It’s been almost six years now, and I still think about what could have been said and shared between two people, two women for that matter, whose realities are so intensely different. But at the same time, right there, in that dirt parking lot in the middle of a combat zone in Iraq, we were exactly the same.
