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CE on TV

My trip to Baghdad continues to pique interest it seems. I embark upon a bit of a media blitz beginning tomorrow. I have an NPR interview tomorrow, not sure with whom, but we are recording it at WBUR’s studio, and trying to put together a feed from Baghdad with Major Pacheco. Pacheco is the singer for Groove Alliance, the band I went to Baghdad with.

On Friday, I will be featured on Live at Midday, a news program on NECN, channel 10. I will be interviewed by an NECN anchor; not sure who again, though early indicators suggest it will be Mike Nikita, their morning anchor. I just did a little web-crawling and he seems fine, not too cheesy. Too bad though, I was hoping for RD Saul to see if I could make him do a spit take, or Jim Braude because I admire him so much. The segment will be LIVE at 12:40, and then will be repeated at 1:40 and 2:40. It will also stream on www.necn.com and www.boston.com.

I’ve been writing about my Middle East adventures for a couple of weeks now, so I imagine my talking points will fall together well enough. It’s been said I have a face for radio so I’m not nervous about WBUR. I have sufficient stage experience and microphone technique that I anticipate my froggy baritone with come through just fine. The TV thing though, I’m not so sure.

Those who know me know I am rather beset with acne scars and active acne, not an ideal TV spokesperson look. I say if it’s good for Tommie Lee Jones though, it’s good for me, so screw ‘em. I am also equipped with an enormous cranium and vast tracks of pate extending up into increasingly thinner, graying hair. My nose has been broken in fistfights as a crazy young man, and in general, as my friends from Maine might say, I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet. Still, I’d rather be handsome and weathered than butt-ugly from the get-go, so I’ll work with what I have left.

Speaking of Baghdad, please read this week’s “From the Hip” essay. It’s an important Baghdad story, one that reflects the flaccid nature of the Miliki government, and the money pit that his mismanagement is creating.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 01:46 PM | Comments (1)

EFP is the new IED

You may not yet have heard of EFPs, but you will. By now, most everyone knows that IED stands for “improvised explosive device,” and that it can be anything from a crude nail bomb to a bundle of dynamite sticks, to a couple of dud artillery shells wired to blow from a cell phone ping. EFP stands for “explosively formed projectile”, and its utterance is not welcome in the barracks.

Metal tubes with curved seals are packed with explosives and a fitted with a metal charge. These EFPs explode, as do IEDs, creating a tremendous concussion, but they also throw off a superheated molten round, usually either copper or steel, and it can tear through anything..

“We have no Humvee armor that defends against an EFP,” said Petty Officer and E5 Army soldier Josh Blair in a discussion of EFPs in Baghdad last week. “I have some video of an EFP going through armor, engine block, personnel, and right out the back end of a fully up-armored Humvee.”

Major Mike Pacheco, US Army echoes the sense of chill. “Mention an IED to a soldier and he almost shakes it off. A lot of them are poorly made. A lot of them miss. Some of them, we are armored for. IEDs are potentially survivable. But EFPs,” he shook his head. “Nobody likes to hear about EFPs on the road,” Pacheco said.

They are a steel pipe, usually less than a foot long, filled with explosives and sealed at one end. A curved steel or copper round is fitted to the other end, forming an oversized bullet that melts on detonation and kills everything in its path. Again, with a few thousand dollars, the insurgency has gone a long way toward making useless an expenditure of millions of dollars in vehicle and body armor in this increasingly asymmetrical war.

EFPs have caused the deaths of 50 soldiers and Marines in the last month. It’s the new way the insurgency has to kill us and it’s working. Examination of captured ordnance suggest that they appear to have been machined elsewhere and smuggled into Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 12:00 PM | Comments (2)

The Flights Home From Baghdad Part II

The Paris to JFK leg was unpleasant, mostly because my frame of mind was poor. It had been a brave gesture the night before to take up the cudgels and hoist the party flag on the last night of tour, but it is well established that absent ideal sleeping conditions (darkness, silence, concubine), I don’t sleep well.

I can socialize and function without sleep, but not after cigars and wine with no sleep, so I couldn’t read the challenging book I’m into right now effectively on the plane (Marisha Pessl—real deal genius), and I felt I probably wouldn’t be writing anything of much value if I were to have broken out the journal (though that’s never stopped me before).

After an hour or so of general blabbing, most of the band was finding sleep. Some opted for the head tilted straight back look, mouths agape and slack-jawed, others curled up and nestled their noses in feculent Air France blankets. Out of sorts, stupefied but not a candidate for sleep, I was reduced to trifling video amusements like playing chess on the computer screen in the seat back in front of me. I played it a couple of what I thought were tough games and lost, but apparently it recalibrated itself to my dullness as I trounced it the next three games, it making moves a chimpanzee wouldn’t. condone.

Next I switched to Who Wants to be a Millionaire, only it was predicated on English common knowledge. I would burn all my lifelines on low-dollar questions having something to do with English school songs or mascots, and then I'd get up to $64,000 and it would start asking me about William of Orange’s lineage or the rules of cricket. It pissed me off, which is how I know that I was insane while on that flight. Getting honestly pissed off at the Who Wants to be a Millionaire game because it’s full of UK-oriented questions is the mark of a madman. After ten rounds of watching myself lose thousands of dollars, I really hit bottom: the Miami Vice movie. Hot chicks, explosions, machine guns, and ten thousand pounds of coke, it was Shakespeare.

It was a long dreary flight, again, though with relatively good food and wonderful flight attendants. That I was unable to make the most of it was entirely my fault. What happened at JFK, however, was not my fault. It was Delta’s fault.

We staggered off the plane in New York City to find that our flight to Manchester, NH had been canceled. Lovely. Delta is facing possible strikes soon, and is also in negotiations for a merger with US Air. When both of those two airlines combine their respective poor service into a single, huge, sucking transportation giant, it could be quite a travel experience.

In the middle of a conversation with a Delta desk clerk about other flights and accommodations, he walked away, went through a door and disappeared. He and a co-worker came out a different door wearing their coats and carrying daypacks. They left and that was it. There was no one else left to talk to at Delta. Three of us left the terminal to go to the ticket counter to try and get some information, and we attempted to get through security again.

There was a little hang-up since we had already been through, and over the course of working it out, we got into a conversation with the security personnel. There was a nice, black Irish-looking young woman who said, “I wouldn’t take a Delta ticket for free. Every night, there’s someone here from Delta, locked out, crying, old people. It’s ridiculous.”

We ended up renting a car and driving about four hours from the city to my city. I think I slept a little in the car, and again, wasn’t much fun company for the unflappable Adriana Giancoli, who drove her sick husband, and two beat up old men all the way from New York to Portsmouth. So the moral of the story is get plenty of rest before you travel and don’t fly Delta.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 11:30 AM | Comments (1)

The Flights Home From Baghdad, Part One

On the last night of the Groove Alliance Deadly Force Tour, Baghdad 2007, we had just been treated to a French seven course meal at the Hotel Royal in Amman, and the four subs and the female vocalist thought it a fine idea to prowl the hotel and huff Cuban cigars, drink some complimentary wine that had been given each of us at the front desk, and make a dull racket laughing and talking in cavernous, empty marble lobbies until 3 AM. The wakeup call was at 4:30 and so began 30 hours of traveling.

I have skipped a lot in relaying these observations from Iraq, but one cannot write all the live long day as can friends of Dinah work on the railroad apparently. Baghdad to Amman had a new security feature, the bomb and dope dog. All of our luggage was lined up and Rin Tin Tin gave it the once over twice. I was glad there were no wink and a nod “special” tobacco purchases made at the hajji shop in my luggage.

Amman to Paris was nice enough, but we were scheduled for three hours in layover in Paris, so we were all preparing iPod, airport novel reading, or in my case, writing all of this. To reveal truly what I was thinking, the great event of the past hour was the arrival of second shift at the duty free Parfums et Cosmetiques section of that Parisian shopping center known the world over for its cutting edge haute couture, Gate E-74. Included in this ebb and flow of beautiful French girls was one above all others, truly a terrifying beauty. Epic.

It was three hours of seats designed to be unsleepable, separated at two foot intervals by crooked, steel armrests, and of such rise and run as to frustrate the slouch, the curl, or even the snuggy lean with rolled up fleecie as pillow. Cramped seats, airline quality prefab food in the terminal, dismissive agents, I can imagine an Air France announcement, “We have tried to feed you poorly, delay you, and subject you to searches of such duration and thoroughness that we should probably be giving you flowers and candy, but if there is anything else we can do to make your flight less comfortable, please let us know.

Right on cue. Our flight is delayed for another two hours. Balls!

Posted by Chris Elliott at 04:27 PM | Comments (1)

Hussein's Culture of Death

Journal entry 1/17/07. Today we visited Sadaam’s old parade site. You’ve seen pictures of it, two huge statues of a hand holding a sword on either side of a wide paved road with the swords’ tips meeting in the center about 50 feet high. There is an identical pair of crossed swords at the opposite end of the concourse, and a reviewing stand in the center where Sadaam would stand and wave, and discharge rounds from a rifle or sidearm.

What you may not know is that a bronzed tassel is attached to each of the four swords which in turn attaches to a bronzed woven basket about the size of two minivans; each of these baskets is filled with the helmets of Iranian soldiers killed in the Iran/Iraq War. Many of them have bullet holes in them the size of silver dollars. Sunk into a strip of cement connecting the bases of the two hands holding the swords are more helmets, so that when the armies marched across the parade grounds, they would trample upon them.

It is exemplary of Sadaam Hussein’s sociopathic ghoulishness. Nobility is possible in warfare, and it is possible to be the reluctant warrior, as the United States has traditionally been. World War II began in 1937, and we weren’t in until 1941, and Vietnam was well in play when we stepped into that hornet’s nest. Ours is also not to gloat. The heads on pikes and Mi Lai were out of control soldiers, not presidential policy, as in the case of “The Hands of Power”.

The top “Sadaam’s a bad guy” anecdote came from a Captain who had taken us on a tour of many of Sadaam’s palaces. One was reserved for his mistresses and his rape victims. When Sadaam saw a woman he found attractive, he had her kidnapped and brought to him along with her mother. If she didn’t agree to the sex, her mother would be tortured until she relented. The mother would sometimes then be killed, sometimes released. Once having served her purpose, one or multiple times, the woman was placed in a cage and thrown into the huge manmade lake outside the palace near Camp Liberty.

The Captain had participated in a recovery effort that pulled up the cages containing skeletons and half decomposed female bodies. They stopped the mission after 120 were pulled up. There is now no boating or bathing permitted in the lake. It lies dormant as a shrine to these tortured women.

Just across the lake from that palace is a jaunty, fun, sandstone castle, with crawl spaces all throughout, and irregularly shaped rooms inside, some with low ceilings, others with rough finishes and odd angles. It was a playhouse for Sadaam’s bastard children, born of regular mistresses whom he did not kill. When they would have his children, they would live with them in their own homes, in parts of the palace and at what the soldiers have come to call Camp Flintstone.

There was a group of about a dozen soldiers in up-armored Humvees resting before going out on a mission in the red zone. The entire band, ten out of ten of us had gone out to see the parade grounds, and we were greeted warmly by them. We befriended them quickly, taking pictures and asking where they lived and racking our brains for common interest or experience that would make for good smalltalk. Some were musicians, and all of them were young, men and women, Asian, African American, Hispanic, Caucasian. They looked like America.

We goofed around with them for about fifteen minutes, and then they drove into Baghdad, the most dangerous city in the world.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)

The Ride Out of the IZ in Baghdad

Journal entry, 11:00, 1/19/07. It’s Friday, about to become Saturday and our work here is done. We are manifest to deploy back to Camp Striker. Our last journey in Iraq will be a twelve-mile trek in a Rhino down Route Irish, formerly the most dangerous road in Baghdad. The road has since been brought under firm control.

The Rhino is a 13-ton military personnel transport vehicle with heavy armor on the top, bottom and sides, designed to withstand RPG and IED fire. In the past two weeks, there has been some insurgency activity on Route Irish. The tension in the holding tank for our transport is palpable, even among the officers who have done this dozens of times before. Dead and injured civilians are a bad PR move, and they are heavily invested in our security.

We are told that sometimes the Rhino doesn’t roll until 3 or 4 AM, even given an 11 PM manifest. They sweep the road with an electronic IED locator, take aerial photographs of the area, and also “mix it up” according to previous Rhino deployments as far as departure times. According to one officer I spoke with about the strategy, “The one thing you don’t want to do is develop a pattern of behavior.”

Once at Camp Striker, we will sleep (or not) in a tent city, and then catch a 7 AM flight to Amman, Jordan out of Baghdad International. It is a one and a half hour flight whose departure is also not without the possibility of trouble Elements of the insurgency have been known to interrupt planes taking off from and flying into Baghdad.

One real knockout for me was the surprise arrival of a soldier from Exeter, New Hampshire named Suzanne Tetrault, a sunny, wonderful woman who came out to the Rhino holding area at this late hour to wish us well and to thank us for our humble contribution to our troops’ morale. I cannot believe she took the time to do this, but she did.

At 12:30, an officer barked that we were ready to deploy, and to put on flak jackets and helmets. There is a sign at the holding area which invokes the stateside restaurant sign that reads “No shirt, no shoes, service,” only in this case it reads, “No flak jacket, no helmet, no Rhino.”

Our convoy is as follows: two up-armored Humvees, Rhino #1, two up-armored Humvees, Rhino #2, two up-armored Humvees, Rhino #3, two up-armored Humvees, Rhino #4, and two up-armored Humvees bringing up the rear. Eleven vehicles on the ground along with a Blackhawk helicopter escort in the air. Our detail leader told us that if we run into any enemy fire that stops the Rhino, that the chopper can land in three to five minutes to evacuate any injured.

He also said that the Rhino can survive most IED explosions, and that he had seen been aboard one that detonated an IED during a previous convoy. The front end popped up, slammed back down and kept rolling. His speech went something like this: “The Rhino rolls until it can’t roll anymore. If it becomes disabled, another Rhino will come to pick you up. You’ll know it’s us. There are three escape hatches; on the side, in the rear and on the roof. The levers on the roof hatch go to the side, and the hatch opens to the front of the vehicle. It is not a gun turret, it is not an observation post. I don’t need any hyper motivated individuals popping the hatch to act as a spotter or to return fire. The safest place to be is in the Rhino.”

The most surprising thing about the Rhino ride from the International Zone along Route Irish was the traffic. It was thick as a morning commute. There were dozens of military vehicles, eighteen-wheelers, and other heavy machinery coming from the other direction as our convoy zigzagged through a series of Jersey barriers that made Route Irish into a slalom course.

At times we were flying down the road, and then there were moments when the convoy stopped altogether. We were so buried in the middle of it we couldn’t see what the holdup was.

Each Humvee is equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun and men who know how to operate them. Facing seven of them along with highly trained and mobile small arms fire would require a tremendous organizational effort on the part of the enemy. The intimidation and readiness our teams display are the reason these personnel transports aren’t attacked as often as they might be.

I believe the US Army saved our lives that night, because if they didn’t display that unerring professionalism on every Rhino run, then every Rhino run would be at greater risk. Heroism isn’t always about a single dramatic event. Though it’s harder to see than a nail-biter rescue, daily commitment to excellence as displayed by the Rhino team operating out of Camp Striker is as great an act of heroism as any.

After the half-hour ride we were hurried off the Rhino to be processed for a tent assignment. It was done without fanfare or farewell, or even a chance to thank the soldiers who as part of their bargain with Uncle Sam had defacto pledged to risk their lives bringing ten civilian musicians out of the International Zone.

We were processed at Camp Striker’s front office building, a cozy wooden structure, austere, but heated nicely against the forty degree chill of Iraq’s winter nights. We were given a blanket and a tent assignment. K3.

The soldier handling the paperwork was a smart, efficient, and serious young man, I’d guess to be about thirty years old. His left hand was missing, and I can pretty fairly guess how it happened, and how he came back to where it happened when he could easily have gotten out. He wanted to continue to help, and brave warrior that he is, he had the guts to take the desk job.

Each tent held about twenty cots, some with a two-inch thick mattress, some without. The cots were okay, but I was disappointed and a bit angry for our soldiers that they weren’t being issued good wool blankets. The blankets were very thin and very poor quality. This time of year it gets cold and uncomfortable in Iraq, and it’s really troubling that military hardware is so high a priority relative to the basic creature comforts for the people doing the fighting.

We were driven to Baghdad International Airport the next morning, having played soldier for a day. We had trudged in the weird, silvery gray metallic mud that forms in a desert after a rain, we had tossed and turned in a bony cot under a thin blanket, and we had risen before the sun. Big deal. Our fighting men and women do that every day.

I’m back home in Portsmouth now. I’ve spent the evening with a dear friend, and I’ve debriefed a bit. I’ve seen so much, and I understand so little. I know that war is hell, and I also know that Iraq is not a lost cause. Would that we had respectfully enlisted support in our effort, but perhaps it’s not too late even for that. I am hopeful for Iraq. I have to be. I love her people.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 06:57 AM | Comments (0)

Mortars in the Morning and the Last Gig in Baghdad

I didn’t need to have set my alarm yesterday morning. I was awakened by a loud announcement pealing from a series of speaker towers located all across the International Zone; “Incoming! Incoming!”

I rolled out of bed and crawled under it, as was instructed in the survival sheet I was given at orientation. I was not sure what to expect next. A few minutes passed, and the same metallic voice again rang out across the IZ. “All Clear!! All Clear!!”

The early warning system in the International Zone is called “Big Voice,” and it identifies itself as such during testing; “This is a test of the emergency alert system. This is Big Voice. This is only a test.”

The early warning system can provide between five and eight seconds in which to duck and cover before a rocket or mortar strikes, and I wondered if Big Voice had been falsely triggered. After the “All Clear” message, I crawled back into bed for another hour of sleep before my day was to begin. It was 6:15 AM.

A half hour later, there was a thunderous explosion that rocked my windows. Perhaps Big Voice had missed one. “Lockdown!! Lockdown!!” Big Voice bellowed. Again I rolled under the bed for a few minutes until Big Voice said, “All Clear!! All Clear!!”

I later found out that the first warning had been triggered by a mortar round that had been fired into the IZ. It was a dud. The second round of course wasn’t a dud, and the early warning system had failed to pick it up. It landed in a field near a checkpoint at a place called Assassin’s Gate, and there were no casualties.

The gig that day was for me at least the most rewarding of all of our performances in Iraq. It was held at 1 PM outside the Gulf Regional Division offices. It was a cool, sunny afternoon, and our audience was Embassy workers from Baghdad. These men and women provide custodial, construction, and other essential services in the IZ.

These are brave, even heroic people who risk their lives on a daily basis working for the US military. They lead double lives to work here, as if they are found out by radical elements living in their own neighborhoods, they and their families would be subject to harassment, even murder.

As our singer Major Mike Pacheco predicted, the front rows were populated by men, the women for the most part feeling that it was not appropriate for them to be there. By the end of the gig there were a dozen of them on stage, dancing and clapping with us. It was a fantastic, surreal gig, perhaps epitomized by two Blackhawk helicopters streaking by 100 feet in the air directly overhead in the middle of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music White Boy.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 04:43 AM | Comments (1)

The First Gig

After the travails of flying from Manchester, New Hampshire, to Paris, to Amman, Jordan, followed by two consecutive cancelled flights from Amman to Baghdad, it was a joy to finally do what we came here to do.

It wasn’t until the next day that we found out what a terrible day in Baghdad it had been. We knew something was going on because of the massive increase in helicopter traffic overhead, but even having been there only for a second day, loud explosions followed by small arms fire were so constant a part of the auditory landscape, that as new to Baghdad as we were, we were already almost jaded.

Dozens of Blackhawk helicopters roared low altitude over our heads, and for the first time we saw a pair of Apache helicopters. Apaches are a breed apart from Blackhawks. They are sleek and fast, and their approach is heralded by a lower, throatier report than a Blackhawk. Men leaned out the doors and the guns waved menacingly across the city as we set up the PA system.

The method of death’s dispatch that killed the 65 people at Baghdad University was typical according to a soldier I spoke with today. The insurgents detonate a car bomb, and then wait for a crowd to gather in its aftermath. Then they send in another car bomb or a suicide bomber.

There were audible explosions all across the city yesterday, but one was followed by a sustained cacophonous symphony of multiple sirens. It was the sound of maimed and murdered innocents being brought to morgues and hospitals across Baghdad, systems so stressed by the incessant fighting and killing that they are sometimes barely able to deliver services.

I had previously heard the dull thud of car bombs followed by the bright, clattering report of small arms fire, but never before with so many ensuing sirens. You hear the explosions in the morning typically. First, the call to prayer emanates from the mosque minarets, and then the attacks begin. They ebb and flow throughout the day, and then accelerate in the early evening as the cover of night emboldens the murderers.

We played up-tempo Rhythm and Blues music, dressed in tuxedos and playing outside in chilly weather as the helicopters flew. The show was a benefit for the Starfish Network, an organization that funds and facilitates surgeries and other therapies for sick and injured Iraqi children in Iraq. Ticket sales totaled $20,000, and in addition there were corporate contributions of more than $50,000.

Life-saving monies were gathered and life-ending horrors were perpetrated. Most days in Iraq, sum zero is as good as it ever seems to get

Posted by Chris Elliott at 10:53 AM | Comments (3)

Getting There; Not as Easy as You Might Think, Part I

Thursday, 1/19: I am sitting in JFK International in New York, having successfully completed the first leg of the journey, a forty minute flight aboard a prop plane that flew on time out of Manchester Airport. It was a smooth, turbulence-free flight whose propellors I swear were assisted in their duties of human elevation by the spirits and anticipation of their human cargo, a ten-piece show band bound for a week of dates in Baghdad, Iraq.

Next up, a six-hour flight to Paris. One of our faithful is already playing doctor, offering spare Ambien tablets to anyone preferring not to spend the next six hours alone in their own head. Naturally, I decline.

We’re in the air now, and the Air France flight attendants, male and female, are way too good looking. Their English is about as good as mine, and their personal comportment considerably better. The meal is a choice of chicken fricasse or pike perch with bell pepper cream sauce. There were fresh miniature baguettes with brie or butter, Evian water and miniature bottles of Merlot or Chardonnay. It was still airline food, but done about as well as it could be.

We were also outfitted with headsets and blackout eye shades. I’m going to try them eventually, but I’m a tough sleeper, and I doubt it will work. I require darkness, silence, and stillness, but the fusillage carries a deep, subsonic rumble and there is some tail wind turbulence that is making it hard to write, let alone sleep.

Most of the plane is in some state of suspended animation, but sleep and I have lately had a tenuous dalliance. Scribbling these words high above the mighty Atlantic surrounded by people with baby blue blinders on in varying states of consciousness while hurtling through space at a ground speed of 700 miles per hour has pitched me into a meditation on the value of my own intellectual output.

The fact of the existing technology to pull this off is awe-inspiring; the combined imagination of so many thousands of fine minds leaves me, a pretty bright guy, monumentally stupified. It makes me second-guess the application of half a lifetime of my own unique imagination. I’ve never made metal fly, though in one way of thinking, playing a good trumpet solo does precisely that.

*****************

We are leaving Paris now and that's fine with me. The rudeness to efficiency quotient equals a perfect ten, that is rudeness = 10, efficiency = 1. Compare to JFK and I love my country. After an hour and a half of being snapped at by security personnel and counter hel;p, being shoved in line, and issued disdainful body language, I am eager to be done with the most beautiful city in the world. I'm sure a more detailed tour of Paris's art and culture would leave me gushing, but as far as getting in and out quickly with only a cursory look, Paris blows.

So it's off to Amman, Jordan, another fascinating city. My primary motivation in embarking on this trip is to see parts of the world I never have or probably ever would, as well as firsthand US operations in Baghdad, rather than count on filtered versions of the truth presented by the US media from left and right biased news agencies.

I am certain I'll mine numerous sources for stories, and I've always believed that the best way to work on your art is to work on your life. If you know more, if you've experienced more, then you have a deeper reservoir of source material to interpret through your chosen medium of expression.

*******

I write now from the lobby of the Hotel Royale in Amman, Jordan, a gorgeous hotel in a beautiful city. Stone mansions line the streets, errily dark now, perhaps owned by mega-rich who only occupy them a few weeks out of the year, or perhaps by devout Muslims, early risers for the first call to prayer. We were shuttled to the Royale from the hospital by a superb tour company called Amana Tours, reccommended as your conduit to a fast-moving world most Americans don't understand.

The nest morning we were Baghdad bound, and Amana led the way back to the Amman Airport. In the light of day, Amman is dry and arid, very flat, and populated with low brush, short and squat palm trees, and hearty pines, though short and thin, with fierce bunches of long needles. There are also spruce trees, likewise stunted but vigorous. There are no tall trees, and as a result of course, there are no wooden houses.

We passed through a checkpoint along the way, manned by a phalanx of uniformed guards, a gauntlet whose exclamation point was a Jeep equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun turrent, in case any passing motorist passing through had any objection to the scrutiny.

After they dropped us off at the airport, we were led through a screening process by airport personnel who handled us as a group. I struck up a conversation with a fellow who eventually asked me where we were headed. When I answered, "Baghdad," he said two words: "Very dangerous."

It was becoming clear that the closer we got to the epicenter of the unrest, the more intense the security screening. Shoes, belts and coats came off, and my fold-up music stand became a topic of uneasy conversation among the baggage screeners. They eventually let me through after I set it up and played air guitar in front of it. On the plane, a smily, rotund Jordanian that sat next to me pointed out the lands below. As we flew over a succession of gathered points of light, he identified first Iraq, then Palestine.

Safely and from ten thousand feet above, I became moved and saddened for mankind as we swept across this most embattled and unstable part of the world. We flew over all of the oppression, over all of the persecution, the war, the death, the racism, the religious intolerance, and left it behind us, as we did clouds of burned jet fuel forgotten and disregarded, to dissipate as it would, as it may. Next stop, Baghdad. (I am behind, but I'll try to catch up to the present by end of day tomorrow).

***************

Posted by Chris Elliott at 05:52 PM | Comments (7)

Baghdad or Bust!

I had hoped to get away this winter, perhaps to someplace with a lot of sand and sun.

I was thinking more along the lines of Bimini than I was Baghdad, but sometimes the trajectory of time and fate bends in ways you don't expect. I will soon be leaving for Baghdad, Iraq to play trumpet on a series of dates in the Green Zone with a 10-piece dance band based in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Here’s an aerial photograph of Baghdad with the Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport highlighted in red.

So how did all of this come to pass?

I worked with a fine cover band called Groove Alliance from 2001 to 2004. They play a mix of contemporary funk and soul, and horn-driven rhythm and blues from the 1970s. Typical set list would include Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, Stevie Wonder, Sam and Dave, and various other popular music. The band has a fine female vocalist as well, and serves up everything from Aretha Franklin to Alicia Keyes. Check them out at www.groove-alliance.com.

The star of this show is a fantastic male vocalist named Mike Pacheco. Pacheco uses the stage name Mike Green just so audience members have something a bit more convivial than Pacheco to try to remember as they shake their heads in amazement on the ride home saying, “That Mike Green sings his ASS off!”

Still, I'll call him Mike Pacheco rather than Mike Green throughout the life of this blog, because that's the moniker I invoke in my mind's eye when I think of him, and also because I enjoy busting Mike's chops any time I can, so if only to muddy the waters of his branding efforts, Pacheco it is.

Mike has a very rare, preternaturally clear, bell-tone tenor voice. His pitch is impeccable, and he possesses all of the extras that a great lead singer needs: glibness, intelligence, inexhaustible energy, and great humor. He is without question among the top two or three vocalists I’ve ever worked with in my thirty years as a weekend warrior, part-time, semi-professional musician. If it's not obvious already, I'll state it plainly here that I love this guy. He is an inspiring and talented man, and he bites off life in big chunks.

He a conservative Libertarian and I am a liberal Democrat, and we both respect and admire one another’s grasp of the issues, and we often engage in lively and mutually respectful debate, only occasionally allowing the discussion to degrade into hurling epithets like ‘fascist’ and ‘right-wing lunatic,’ or ‘Commie’ and ‘pinko panty-waist’. He refers to me as his ‘favorite lib’, and as I’ve mentioned previously, he is one the people I most admire in this world.

If I were a soldier under his command, I would run into a firefight with no trepidation, because I know that he would have already prepared me as a soldier, assessed the situation as thoroughly as it could be assessed, and made a sober decision that this was the best course of action. I trust him implicitly, and I had no second thoughts whatsoever in accepting his invitation to come to a war zone to play music for the defenders of our flag.

But, being an incredibly talented vocalist only rarely pays the bills; Mike is a major in the US Army, and has to his great honor and credit, served this country in Bosnia and other theaters of war for the past 25 years. His final assignment before retiring with distinction is in Baghdad Iraq, serving as an administrator for the reconstruction team.

Over the course of some karaoke shows or local sing-alongs, I’m not exactly sure, I’ll find out and let you know, an executive from the Kubba Group, a large Iraqi holding company, become suitably enthralled with Mike’s tremendous talent. After discussions with Mike, and some time spent on the Groove Alliance web site, the two began scheming a way to fly the band over to the Green Zone to play a series of dates for embassy staff and brass, American soldiers, and local citizens.

I’ll flesh out the details of the process next week when I’m there, and when I can sit down with Mike and grill him on the process. Here’s a picture of Major Mike Pacheco standing in the doorway of a “rhino” as they are called, a heavily armored military transport vehicle.

I mailed my favorite trumpet out on Monday, and a suitcase full of clothes and accessories on Thursday. All of sudden, this thing feels VERY real to me. I have my passport, a form called 1172, which validates my contract orders to be in Baghdad, along with an official letter of permission. I am picking up my access ID this week, and then I will be officially under contract with ECC, one of the major contractors associated with the reconstruction effort.

I am nervous, but nor fearful in any way. I am excited, and I think I have a right to be a little bit proud of what I am doing. My contribution is of course dwarfed by every soldier putting his or her boots in some very dangerous sand, but I am taking my vacation time for the past eight months of a daily Boston commute to do this, and while it is an incredible opportunity to gain knowledge and empathy with regard to a part of the world I would otherwise never have visited, I still view this as civilian contribution to a national military effort.

Most Americans want to provide aid and comfort to our soldiers, but the way the military is organized, ordinary citizens don’t always have tangible ways to contribute. I have an opportunity to take some kid’s mind off of the terrible risks he or she face each day for a few hours, dancing to a damn good American horn band. I picture a nineteen-year old boy who had no reason to feel a guarantee that he would live through the day dancing the pogo to “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” and that’s a really good thing.

We are also playing to publicize and benefit the Starfish Foundation, an organization that sponsors surgeries and other treatment for injured Iraqi chldren. There is little in this world more compelling than a child who is sick or has been hurt. The worst thing that happened to me as a kid was a broken finger in a dodgeball game. So, I'll do what I can to help spread the word about an organization whose charge it is to help some little girl get shrapnel taken out of her leg, or in worse case, fit her with a prosthetic.

Anyway, we rehearsed on Thursday night, and the band is KILLER. What a fine sax and trombone! Two trumpets on this gig, too. My friend Steve Price is playing lead, and I am taking solos and playing support. The section is going to be first rate. War is hell, but next week at least, you can dance to it.

This is me.

One last photo here. This is where we are playing our last night in Baghdad. It is one of Sadaam Hussein’s (remember him?) reception rooms for Baathist Party officials.

Posted by Chris Elliott at 12:56 PM | Comments (10)