I live in a world of information overload. My brain is short circuiting. I direct a daily dance; my job is to choreograph the lives of electrons. The electrons are manipulated to form zeros and ones. The zeros and ones are strung together to form words and images. The words and images are pasted into software that magically transforms them into neatly packaged stories. The stories are conglomerated into a web site and I am its master. My fingers travel rapidly across a keyboard or click a mouse and by doing these things I tell the story of Iraq.
I absorb the day’s events — good and bad. I regurgitate them. I swim in tales of men with guns, men with bombs, men with souls and men who have abandoned their humanity and become walking demons. I taste acrid evil in the air as the cordite stench of explosions waft across the river into my home behind a secured perimeter which isn’t really secure at all. Security is a state of mind.
Physically I have been touched little by this war. No shrapnel has found its home in my body. The mortars and rockets have come close on several occasions but never close enough to do more than speed up my heart. Nothing has seriously threatened to stop its beating. I hear guns fired every day, but the trajectory of the bullets represents no threat to me. I am physically much stronger than I was when I arrived. Mentally, I am frayed around the edges.
Toiling late into the night I smell the stink of Baghdad’s many fires. Soot burns my eyes and irritates my body’s various breathing passages. My throat is always raw here but so is everything else and I find the rawness fitting. People I pass wear their emotions on their sleeves except for the ones who have died inside. Those are just waiting for something to take them away from this place and into another world. Some of them have various plans to accelerate their departure.
Sometimes the scars of this war are plain to see on people’s bodies – a missing limb here or an eye patch there. Sometimes the scars are hidden behind the eyes and you have to look twice to see them. I am whole and fit compared to most, but I will have my own scars when I walk away from here. You will not see them unless you look deep. Those who had some knowledge of my soul before I came here will know my scars.
The dead dance inside my head. They are electrons that spark and play and live on for as long as I will continue breathing. The memories of what has passed here in front of my eyes are intimately linked to the hopes and dreams of those who surround me. We work to try and extinguish the darkness that lives in some men’s souls before it can spread like a plague of locusts that eats everything in its path.
The story of Iraq is a part of me now, and I am a part of it, for better or for worse.