Happy 4th Of July - Welcome Back To Fallujah

It was a cold, wintry, dark February day with the ground well covered in snow that I sat in what I then called “cattle rooms” smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading the newspaper in the Cincinnati Airport. The news always seemed to go from grim to desperate… the promising Lebanese politician Rafik Harari was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, North Korea and Iran screamed that they had nuclear weapons, another suicide bomb detonated in Baghdad, gay groups were considering adopting intervention tactics to track men with HIV who engage in risky behavior (read that one again! Talk about Orwellian life), ETA detonated a bomb in Spain, Bush and his military advisors had no exit plan for Fallujah, on and freaking on…

Fallujah was one of Arab histories pearls for many years. It was quiet, peaceful, scholarly, hosted numerous Jewish academies through the centuries, and fared better than many other urban areas through the advent of Islam from the Abbasid and Umayyad dynasties to the modern day “re-conquesting inquisition” led by the neo-cons in Washington and their lavender bitches in London.

I looked up from the paper and in walked this beautiful Marine with my defacto standard: small, baby faced, smooth skin, and a hollow gaze. I would be lying if I denied any immediate carnal ideations but those were quickly quelled when the young Marine sat down next to me and asked if he could “bomb a smoke”. I told him gladly and we introduced ourselves.

Fallujah for years linked the trade route from the Nejd Province in modern day Sa’udi Arabia to the areas of Mosul and Aleppo and was known as the desert highway between Amman and Baghdad; it rested at a crossroads then and is once again at a crossroads as both Sunni and Shia Muslims have joined together to rebuild the 70-90% destruction that the city incurred from the US Military beginning in 03’.

“Names Adam, thanks for the smoke.” Adam was a 19 year old fresh faced kid raised in Chicago, was 100% mid-west, and was on his way home for a few days from Fallujah due to the graces of the US Department of Defense granting him a seven day hardship leave due to “stress and unnatural acts of violence perpetrated against a member of the United States Military” to see his mom and girlfriend. He said he couldn’t wait to put his eyes on Wrigley Field and hoped he somehow could get inside for a brief reprieve…said it would make everything “good to go.”

We talked about why he was in the Corps, my time in, his love-life, mine, our families, baseball, hockey, his plans after the Marine Corps… told him I was gay and thought he was gorgeous; he laughed and said he had a girlfriend back home he would be seeing and appreciated the compliment. He hated the snow and ice and thought the desert was cool but didn’t understand the problems in Fallujah.

The city always had an air of independence: the Imams refused to eulogize Saddam Hussein during his reign and suffered horrible persecution, the British saw it as a “hotbed” of instability in the early 20th Century and suffered through a battle because of it that left several thousand Iraqis and a couple thousand Brits dead, the Wahhibi Sect of Islam practiced in Sa’udi Arabia took root in Fallujah years ago and is still practiced to this day, a couple hundred citizens died in the city in the first Gulf War when a crowded market was “accidentally” bombed, a couple hundred citizens died in 03’ when they were protesting the US Military setting up an operating unit in an old Baath Party Office building across the street from a school and troops opened fire on the people. Still the city of almost 500,000 remained peaceful, quiet and cooperative until…

“…we don’t know what the fuck we are shooting at most of the time dude. The other day we took fire from a corner store and we unloaded on those mother fuckers. When we got to the store there was this little boy lying in the doorway and a lady behind him on the floor. It was weird, they both had multiple gunshot holes and there was some busted milk spreading out on the floor around her and the kid…looked kind of like a piece of peppermint candy because the blood had kind of swirled in to the milk. We never knew who fired on us.”

This was the city where those four renegade Blackwater gaurds were drug from their vehicles, beaten, burned, and then hanged from the girders’ of a bridge crossing the Euphrates. The assault on Fallujah began in earnest in November 2004 primarily as an attempt to regain control of it from the estimated 600-6,000 insurgents in preparation of the January 2005 national elections. The only person at the time who was viewed as a serious candidate for the office of presidency was Nouri Al-Maliki, a Shia Muslim who had for the past 20 years slept with Hezbollah, Iranian politicians, and various Shiite thugs while living in Syria and travelling back and forth to Iran… FALLUJAH IS SUNNI AND WAHHABI and many of the citizens had fled by this time. Did the US Government wish to ensure a sweeping victory in the city for al-Maliki? The insurgents weren’t even 1% of the population. Nation-state building is too nice; this was coup de tat orchestrating.

Adam said he wasn’t sure what to say to his mom…or his girlfriend. I asked him what he meant and he said “I don’t know what to fucking say man…how can I talk to them.” Adam obviously was a perfect example of how the DOD takes care of many PTSD combat troops – ship them home for a while and hope that it all goes away. The Marine said he might not make it to see his mom and girl and may instead take a quick flight from Chicago to Detroit to see a friend and just stay drunk for five days. By this time he was teary-eyed, shaken, and all I could think was that our land of the free and home of the brave were bringing home an entire generation of KIDS that were going to be perfectly fucked up.

My flight number was called and I stood up, threw my smokes to my new friend, told him to keep his head down and said “Semper Fi”; he stood up hugged me and responded with the same. As I walked back into the airport I couldn’t help but wonder if he would make it back home another time because his movement orders (paperwork a soldier will carry validating their dress or leave of absence) returned him directly to Fallujah in seven days.

The fighting in Fallujah ended for the most part in June of 2007 but today the citizens are being practically starved and living off of handouts from Marine units close by and the citizens blame that Iranian kisich Maliki, the Shi’ite Hezbollah-loving bitch. Prior to the cessation of conflict in the city US forces had given out Christian coins to the children at many of the cities crossroads.

Happy 4th of July Amerika.