The forever war

Once a crowd of Iraqi children gathered around American soldiers who were handing out candy at the unveiling of a pump station in Baghdad's Yarmouk neighborhood. A suicide bomber steered his car into the crowd of children and blew them up.And then came a second car, also filled with explosives, just to be sure. There were lots of dead children. [...]
They started to come in waves. Four a day. Ten a day. Twelve a day. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Sometimes, all of them before breakfast. One morning, my colleague Ian Fisher was driving to Abu Ghraib to interview some Iraqi prisoners who were being released from the American custody, when he came upon the scene of a suicide bombing just seconds after it had occurred. The victim had been Ezzedine Salim, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council. Ian stopped, stepped amid the bodies, did some reporting and climbed back in his car. A few more miles down the road, he came across another suicide bombing, the bomber's body in pieces on the roadside. He never made it to Abu Ghraib. "This place is crazy" he said, walking in the door.

Man, they [the Taliban] were scary. You'd see them rolling up in one of the Hi-Luxes, all jacked up, white turbans gleaming; they were the baddest asses in town and they knew it, too. One of them would be sitting across from you in a restaurant, maybe picking at a kebab, looking at you from across the centuries, kohl under his eyes and you knew he'd just as soon kill you as look at you. Dumb as a brick but that hardly mattered. Great cultures are like that. Always have been. The Greeks, the Romans, the British: they didn't care what other people thought. Didn't care about reasons. Just up and did it. The Taliban: their strength was their ignorance. They didn't even know they were supposed to care.
They pulled me out of a taxi once [...] and one of them raised his gun to my head so I pulled out a business card embossed with gothic letters, Los Angeles Times, very impressive, a get-out-of-jail-free card. The Talib grasped it, looked at it and threw it in the street. I might as well have handed him a starfish.

The Black Hawk skirted the date palms and the mud-colored roofs, the altitude and the movement of the helicopter offering a cubist view of the world below. Green rectangles of farmland shifted as if in a mirror then flattened as they fell into the horizon. The anarchy of the streets carried no sound so high; every haphazardness of the place, the trash, the goats, the fields of junk, seemed, from the distance, planned and carefully measured, like a city by L'Enfant. Under the spell of the whirring motor I felt suddenly hopeful for the country below. I looked down at the tiny people and imagined them going about their days just as any of us would up here, with fears and desires no greater or lesser than our own, or which, in any case, were not so different that they couldn't be reconciled. It was useful to fly in helicopters for that reason, I thought to myself, useful to think this way, to take a wider view of the world. Too much detail, too much death, clouded the mind.

The airport itself, a favorite target of Massoud's rockets, lay in ruins.
As Farid and I waited in line for our tickets, we found ourselves next to a group of a dozen women. They were dressed in the mandatory head-to-toe burqas, which rendered them invisible, except from the shoes that peeked out from the bottom of their suits. And what shoes they were : stylish, expensive shoes, high heels, low heels and flats, of the latest Italian styles. Possibly Ferragamos. The women were speaking Arabic , with Saudi accents.
"I could be shopping in Paris, but instead, I am here, in this awful place" one of the women said to another through the vent in her burqa.
The other women nodded in agreement.
"Yes, my husband has to be the tough-guy warrior, fighting for Islam," another huffed. "He thinks it brings him closer to God, and so here I am."
"We are stuck here" a third woman said, "in this cursed place".
All the burqas nodded.

We'd have these conversations, usually over dinner. What would happen, someone would say ; if the bad guys got inside the compound? What would we do then? We'd knock that around a little. Then someone would say, What if they actually got inside the house? Would it be better, for instance, to use a pistol, which was more easily controlled, or a Kalashnikov, with its greater accuracy and power? A discussion would follow. All the Westerns in Baghdad were having the same conversations. Some of us had already been kidnapped. Some had been killed. There was a story going round about a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who had ordered his Iraqi guards to shoot him if any kidnappers managed to pull him from his car. Just kill me, he said. I don't want to end up in an orange jumpsuit.