Eat-Sleep-Need-Take-Kill-Die-Live
We slept in the Jumhuriyah intersection again. I had a spot on the roof of the first sergeant’s M113 this time. In the morning, sitting on top of Ortiz’s 113, I began to see non-embedded press filtering through. I called out to some of them.
“Where you from?”
“New York Times”
“Oh yeah? Boston Herald.”
“You’re a reporter? You look like one of the GIs.”
I felt like one of the GIs at this point, though I was already unbeknownst to myself beginning the process of detachment. Biggest difference between them and me. I was never in anyone’s army. I didn’t have to stay here.
Some GIs were talking to a carload of American press at the barricade on Jaffa Street. One of them was Thannasis Cambanis of the Boston Globe.
“Jules Crittenden? There’s a car rental lady in Kuwait City who’s looking for you. She wants to know where your Pajero is!”
“What? I told that lady I was leaving it at the Hilton!”
It took me a while to realize that this was an old message, dating from the end of February, when I had been in Kuwait a month and had neglected to renew my rental deal. The Filipina rental lady had been buttonholing every reporter she could find in an effort to locate me. In that shot-up intersection in Baghdad, I actually spent about half an hour wondering whether I had a car rental problem back in Kuwait to deal with, and rummaged around in my gear to locate the crumpled return receipt the desk clerk at the Hilton had given me. This is how the world starts to reassert itself, when you’ve been away for a while, off in eat-sleep-need-take-kill-die-live.
Topics: everything
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:01 am on Saturday, April 11, 2009
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