Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2008 or, as most of us over here look at it, the year we get to go home. For those of you reading this blog from the US, my 2008 will be between eleven and eight hours longer than yours. I’m just lucky that way.

New Year’s Eve went by without much fanfare and, since New Year’s Day isn’t a holiday the military observes, I elected not to stay up. My co-worker, Adam, an army captain, elected to smoke cigars with a group of like minded individuals in the stone cabana near the Embassy Pool. This structure features a well-designed stone fireplace that provides an excellent source of warmth during the winter months. Aside from dedicated mortar and rocket attacks (thankfully, less frequent than they used to be) we worry about Iraqi Celebratory Fire, that is, Iraqis taking their legally allowed household AK-47 and firing it up into the sky. What most people around the world fail to recognize about point a rifle or pistol towards the sky and pulling the trigger is that bullets eventually fall to the ground at a good percentage of the speed they left the barrel. Iraqis love to fire their weapons on Thursday nights, a common day for Islamic weddings, or on days when their accomplished national soccer team wins a match. Since very few people here now were around last year, no one was quite sure if the Iraqis would ring in the Gregorian year.

As Adam described it, he was sitting around the fireplace close to midnight, which is nominally protected by a corrugated roof structure, when an air force officer calmly reached into his pack and pulled out his Kevlar helmet. This greatly disturbed one of our cigar smoking Lebanese translators. “Is it supposed to be dangerous out here?”

Midnight came and Baghdad denizens chose to ring in 2008 Gregorian with a twenty minute bang of sustained fire. Over at the intersection of Al Kindi and 17th of July Streets, inside the Int’l Zone, two FBI friends of mine were near their office at the base of the 17th of July bridge. They observed Iraqis in cars racing around the traffic circle firing AKs from the windows.

Somehow I slept through all this.