The war hits home
By
Peter Grier
| Staff writer of the Christian Science Monitor
Page 1 of 3
At the moment the war began, Khadouri Alkeysi was nestled in bed reading the paper in his suburban New Jersey home. His son, who was watching television in the living room, began calling to him: "Dad, Dad! They're bombing Baghdad. Come on!"
Mr. Alkeysi, an Iraqi-born American citizen, did not leap up to watch video of Cruise missile strikes. Instead, gripped with anxiety, he leaned over, picked up the phone, and dialed.
The line was silent for 10 or 15 seconds. Then it started to ring. It rang and rang, until a low buzz came on. Then he was disconnected. His family back in Baghdad wasn't answering.
In Baghdad, the Haidari family thought they were prepared for the start of a bombing campaign they had long anticipated. But as the full power of US bombs shook their neighborhood, this family of well-known artists found they hadn't understood the magnitude of what was going to happen.
Among other things they hadn't anticipated: the sound of a symphony of breaking glass.
"Slappy," meanwhile, was just waking up. Or being awakened, rather, by the beam of a flashlight in his face. His squad commander had called. He was "stepping" - flying an attack mission - in 25 minutes.
That meant there was no time for the Air Force captain to shower. After a dash of baby powder and a shave, he zipped into his flight suit in the tiny trailer he shares with two others from the 75th Tiger Sharks.
"We will sleep better knowing that you're defending freedom for us," said roommate "Tag," still snug beneath the covers. "Make sure you shut the light off when you leave."
In London, Robert Laughlin was already having a bad week. On Monday, antiwar protesters had invaded the floor of the International Petroleum Exchange, where he works as a trader. Work stopped for several hours. On Tuesday, oil prices had fallen 10 percent in a single day. The mood in the trading pit had turned ferocious. Now the phone was ringing at 3:15 a.m. "It's starting," said the voice on the other end.
The onset of the US-led war with Iraq has released a coiled spring of energy and emotion in people all around the globe.
Peace demonstrators have rushed into the streets at the same time that families of troops in conflict have rushed together for support. Iraqi expatriates worry about those they've left behind, while some wish most fervently for their homeland's liberation. Old Europe decries the new imperial America, while American officials retort that France and Germany have lost their moral bearings.
This human vigor will ripple outward for months, if not years, to come. Thus news of military advances tell only one dimension of this conflict. There are personal stories as well. As these accounts from Cairo to the Carolinas show, this "new" war of the 21st century is affecting people in new ways - ways that may foretell how it will ultimately impact the world.
• • •
The day after war started with a US cruise missile strike against Iraqi leadership targets, Khadouri Alkeysi awoke at 8 a.m. He had slept little the night before. Three sisters and their families live in Baghdad; a fourth lives in Basra, in southern Iraq. He had tried to reach them continually, but without success.
The rest of the family - his two grown sons live at home - was still sleeping, so he turned on the news, but kept the volume low. He ate some pita bread and cheese, then dialed Iraq, again without success.
A slight man with gray hair, Mr. Alkeysi was born to an upper-middle-class Iraqi family and came to the US to attend college in 1963. He graduated, married, and settled in the New York area. He became a citizen in 1979 and eventually went to work for Iraqi Airlines.
That job ended in 1991 when the FBI shut the airline's New York office during the first Gulf War. Since then, Alkeysi has been retired. He now spends much of his time as a peace activist with an antiwar nonprofit called the International Action Center (IAC).
After dressing, Alkeysi caught a bus into the city and went to the IAC by 11. He went immediately to his cubicle and tried his sisters again, with no more success. He turned on his computer, hoping for an e-mail message from one of them. Nothing. He sent a few messages and read the Middle Eastern newspapers online.
He picked up the phone again and dialed.
"Same thing," he said, handing the phone to a reporter to hear. "Nothing."
He stepped out of the office around 1:30 for just a few minutes to get some air. When he came back, he was told the ground invasion had started.
He stopped right inside the office door. "Really?"
"Turn up the television," a colleague said.
"I don't want to see it. I'm sorry," he said, and walked over to his cubicle. He picked up the phone and started dialing again, tears in his eyes.
• • •
At the Haidaris' house in Baghdad, windows had long since been taped and covered with plastic. Yet the power of the initial strikes was such that the ground shook and windows still broke. With relatives, they huddled together for support, on mattresses in the dining room, in the middle of the house among green concrete columns.
One of the rooms showered with glass was their art studio, in which stood an unfinished painting by family member Selma al-Allak of a blue Islamic-style dome and a peace dove.
Reached by phone from outside the country, Moayad al-Haidari said he hoped people all over the world would see what was happening in Iraq. "It is very bad, and very barbaric. It is not civilized," he said.
The bombing felt 10 times as heavy as that during the 1991 Gulf War. While electricity and water stayed on, and they had some news via radio, rumors traveling around the city played on their minds. Had the Americans really destroyed a history museum in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown? Had US aircraft killed four Jordanian students and a driver as they flew along the road out Baghdad?
"America has a very brave history, to build such a strong country, but this is ugly," Mr. Haidari said. "Baghdad is not a village in Africa. It is filled with civilized people."
• • •
When Slappy reported for duty, he heard that the air war against Iraq had begun, with a Cruise-missile strike at a leadership target.
(Slappy's name isn't really "Slappy," of course. Nor is his roommate's name "Tag." Those are call signs they use to identify themselves in the air - and that is how embedded journalists must refer to them, per Pentagon restrictions.)
But there was no time to ponder the geopolitical import of the moment. He went straight into a preflight briefing with "Cooter," another Air Force captain and lead pilot on the mission. That meant running through a checklist of topics: intelligence reports, flight paths, radio frequencies, and targeting. Final briefing points were buffed up in the back seat of a Ford F-350 pickup on the way to the flight line.
Once there, Slappy walked around his A-10, a US attack plane built decades ago. Designed for close air support of ground forces, it is equipped with a huge gun, a 30mm Gau-8/A Gatling that can fire 3,900 rounds per minute.
Inspection complete, Slappy climbed in, carrying bottled water and PowerBars. At 6:17 local time, he taxied to the runway. Neal, the crew maintenance chief, watched from the tarmac, and pumped his fist in the air. Slappy responded in kind.
It was only a few minutes' flying time to the Iraqi border. When he reached it, Slappy said a short prayer: "God be with us and keep us safe."
The mission lasted two and half hours, and resulted in the destruction of its intended target. Upon his safe return, Slappy told his crew chief the plane flew "Code 1" - no technical difficulties. Later, Slappy saw a report about the mission on TV. "Hey, that was us," he said.
• • •
After being awakened with news that the war has begun - courtesy of a call from a colleague in New York - Robert Laughlin didn't go back to sleep. After showering and a quick look at the news, he headed off to the front lines.
It's not Baghad or Basra, but there are times when the floor of London's International Petroleum Exchange feels like a battlefield.
Mr. Laughlin has seen it before. He was there during the first Gulf War, and knows what to do in a crisis. Eat, sleep, trade. No time for anything else. That's why he has been staying in a hotel just around the corner for a week, instead of at home some 60 miles away.
"It's just the lack of sleep factor," he says. "You're on your feet all day. It's an aggressive business, a tiring business, and the traveling just takes it out of you even more."
By 10 a.m. the phones were ringing and the shouting frenzied, and the huge electronic "scoreboard" was blinking as prices continued to fall.
In the GNI-Man Financial "box," Laughlin juggled three phones as clients tried to predict how oil prices would move in response to war news.
"Where's the May bid?" barked one, asking after a contract known as a future. "Sell me 500 at best." Laughlin obliged, somehow connecting with a buyer among the cacophony.
The phones are rarely quiet, but on Thursday they were abnormally busy. It was not just clients. The press, too, was calling. Laughlin had interviews with the BBC and Agence France-Presse. They wanted to know why the price of oil was falling so heavily.
"It's what's known as 'buy the rumor, sell the fact,' " Laughlin said. "We've been building up and up in the past few weeks, and now that it's happened, people are betting that it will be a short, sharp war."
• • •
Near the moment when oil trader Laughlin was talking to the press in London, Alaa Moharm was in the afternoon of a routine day in Cairo.
Or at least Dr. Alaa was going through the motions of a routine day: seeing patients at a walk-up neighborhood clinic, buying a geranium plant to present to his wife (Friday, March 21, was Mother's Day in Egypt), sharing a quick falafel lunch with a new friend.
But as he did these things, he was doing something else deep inside his mind. Alaa is an ophthalmologist by profession, but his real calling is Islam. In Alrmaya city, a neighborhood of faded yellow cinder block apartments in the shade of the Pyramids, he is known as "Dr. Imam." Dozens attend Alaa's late-afternoon or early-morning Islamic classes, hundreds come to hear him preach on Fridays at the small Al Rahman Mosque, and everyone in the neighborhood turns to him - day or night - with questions of faith.
And as precision-guided missiles rained down on Iraq, the Muslim cleric was mentally planning his Friday sermon - a sermon against the war. "Against" did not even begin to convey his negative feelings.
His Islamic brothers did not need comfort, he felt. They needed instructions in how to respond. They needed to be told to pray for their Muslim brothers, to give alms, to boycott US products completely ... and to prepare for jihad.
Two years ago he might have felt differently. On the Friday after Sept. 11, his sermon focused on peace and healing, and he condemned the actions of Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers.
"But if those soldiers took action today they would have reason, and I would understand," he said. "It is wrong and I hate it - but the US has begun the war and now it's impossible to stop it."
At 1 p.m. in Beit Sahour, West Bank, teacher Hanna Bannoura looked out at the sea of anxious, expectant faces in his English class, feeling as if his eyes were lined with sandpaper.
He hadn't slept at all the night before. He'd stayed up watching the war unfold on television - and trying to contact his son Bashir, a dentistry student in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
In his last year of study, Bashir had refused to leave despite growing danger, fearing that he would never be able to return and his years of academic work would be lost.
Mr. Bannoura was beside himself with worry. Call after call had yielded nothing but but a single, secondhand reassurance from a friend in Jordan who said he had spoken to Bashir and that he was fine.
Now his seventh- and eighth-grade students at Beit Sahour's Evangelical Lutheran School were jittery with their own worries. They didn't want to study English; they wanted to talk about the war.
And they wanted to talk, not about the threat from Iraqi missiles, but about what they saw as the threat from Israelis. Israelis had been issued gas masks and ordered to create safe rooms. Why weren't there Palestinian gas-mask centers?
As he fielded their questions, Bannoura sensed that the kids were waiting for an adult to say, "There's a war, let's go home." He explained why that wouldn't happen: They have already missed so much school because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We can't throw up our hands, we have to go on, we have to face these things," he told his students. "We want you to study, to at least have something."
He told them to write down how they felt, trying to make the moment teachable. He watched their emotions take shape in their notebooks. Confusion and uneasiness abounded.
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