Bombs over Baghdad

Ed's note: here are a few pages from one chapter on our Iraq coverage during the Gulf War for my book Correspondent. Please feel free to comment. Thanks!

+++++++++++

Fast forward. Baghdad, 2003.

Ever heard an air raid siren go off? It's a sound you never forget.
I was on the phone with my wife, assuring her we were safe and fine and well protected and that we knew exactly what we were doing when the frigging air raid sirens went off and I remember hoping to God she couldn’t hear the wailing sound over the scratchy phone line because I would never hear the end of it.

I've never heard sirens like these before; they wailed like banshees down Baghdad’s empty streets, sending echoes through the canyons of high-rise buildings and apartments that characterized the western bank of the Tigris where we were. There were three or four sirens throughout the city, wailing up and down an asynchronous otherworldy scale that made your hair stand on end. The distances between the sirens made it all the more eerie; one would hit a high note while a more distant siren was hitting a low. It’s how you’d imagine air raid sirens to be like in the movies, or in those old movietone newsreel clips of the Blitz over London. But the wailing and the message they brought were unmistakable.

War had started. And we were still in Baghdad.

I cupped my hand over the phone’s receiver, trying to block out the noise. Esther was still talking when I finally decided to interrupt.

"Uhm bubba, I have to go. Now. Something's happening," I remember telling her as calmly as I could.

The rest comes more clearly, since I had remembered to switch on the videocamera hanging by a strap from my neck. The video is dark and grainy, and jittery, like a badly directed movie. I nervously banged the phone down so hard that the ringer sounded off, and then I ran for the balcony, where Val had already set up his camera.

"Pare yan na," Val said from under his steel helmet.
He had his camera out on the ledge, shooting the twinkling lights of Baghdad on the first minute of the second gulf war. I was rolling with my own camera too, the jerky video capturing the nervous run from the room to the balcony. The autofocus struggled with the low light, and the video had the surreal image of the blurred lights of the Baghdad skyline slowly coming into sharper focus while sirens wailed in the background. It was like waking up to a nightmare.

Val turned to me and said, "Pare patay mo ang ilaw."

The lights inside the hotel room were still on, which meant we were silhouetted against the bright room while we stood filming out in the dark balcony. It may seem insignificant, but it was an important detail. Five stories up, we could be clearly seen from the street.

It was dangerous because we weren’t even supposed to be shooting any video without the presence of our minder to tell us where we may or may not poke our nosey lenses. Not that we planned to obey to the letter, but you don’t violate their rules and rub it in their face at the same time. More importantly, we simply did not want to call attention to ourselves from the streets. The Iraqi government was already pretty paranoid, even before the bombing. From the streets, in the dark, with our helmets, flak jackets and equipment, we could be mistaken by soldiers or policemen for spies or saboteurs. These are details that help keep you alive.

I ran inside and turned off all the lights. The only light left in the room came from a small stubby candle Val had lit beside a bible given him by the nuns of Lipa.
With the lights off, I switched on my camera's night vision sensor and headed back to the balcony.

The sirens continued wailing while Val and I jockeyed for position in the balcony. Baghdad was still brightly lit, and every streetlight looked like an inviting bullseye. We had half expected city officials to plunge Baghdad into a blackout at the first sign of an air raid. But no, Baghdad was on fire, and no bombs had been dropped yet.

The first sign came from fireflies to the south. Lights flickered in the sky over southern Baghdad, followed seconds later by the sound of airbursts. The anti aircraft defenses have opened up. The shells burst with sharp pops, much like a string of baby rockets let loose on New Year's. Somewhere up there in the inky blackness, coalition planes were prowling the skies of southern Baghdad, and Baghdad’s air defenses were reaching out for them. In a few minutes, more anti aircraft fire lit up the skies of Baghdad, punctuated by the glowing tailpipe of an occasional surface to air missile.

Then the bombs came.

From our perspective, they didn’t come as massive explosions that would shake our foundations. Not yet. Instead, we saw weak flashes of light in the horizon, like distant lightning during a brewing thunderstorm. Then, the low rumble that you heard vaguely, but felt more with the soles of your feet. The bombs were falling to the south of the city, perhaps in the Al-Doura district, where the main power plant and the oil refineries were located. I remembered Farida, a Filipina married to an Iraqi who lived in the Al Doura district. We had dinner a few nights ago at their home, while her teenage son played Filipino songs on their karaoke.

Val and I were caught in a trance; the blinking lights were hypnotic, like a million fireflies from childhood, zipping harmlessly past to disappear in the inky blackness. The low rumble of bombs could be felt in the gut, like the humming of a poorly tuned car. But at this point, it all seemed so distant, so far away. We were easily nothing more than spectators watching a distant play unfolding. At this point it was still easy to forget those bombs and missiles were falling on the heads of other people. I hoped Farida was safe.

Then it occurred to us - the battle for Baghdad had been raging for several minutes, yet the office had not bothered to call us for a live phone report. We had no satellite phone to make the call, part of the cost cutting measures I had to institute just to get Manila to agree to our trip. Any communication between Manila and my team was done through the unreliable and severely compromised Baghdad telephone exchange.

And, as part of our cost cutting measures, we avoided making outgoing calls to Manila. Especially for phoned-in live reports. It was simply too expensive, and I had to stretch my budget. Besides, the studio would keep you stewing on the line for ages while you wait for your turn to deliver your report. It was simply financially unfeasible. Sometimes, they would keep you on hold for half an hour or more while a producer in his nice airconditioned studio figures out what to do with you.

It was already morning in Manila. The network had earlier started a special countdown to war program throughout the last nights of the ulitmatum. As the night deepened and the bombing continued without a ring from Manila, we wondered if Manila had fallen asleep on the job.

I was severely tempted to call Manila. After a while of waiting, I asked Val if I should just get it over with, damn the budget, and call Manila. The first night of the war was going to pass us by, and we may as well have stayed asleep. Eventually, Val concurred. I picked up the hotel phone and dialed the operator to ask him to connect me to Manila. To my horror, the operator refused to pick up. I called several times just in case the guy was just taking a leak, but there really was no answer. Now I was really worried.

Standing up, I told Val I was going down to the front desk to find out what was wrong. Still heavily clad in a flak jacket and helmet, I violated a cardinal rule and strode into the elevator for the six-floor ride down to the lobby. In hindsight, I should have just taken the stairs; they say you never take the elevator when the building is on fire, so it presumably follows that you also don’t take the elevator when the city is being bombed.

The lobby was deserted except for a few of the staff running around. I cornered one and asked him why no one was answering the phone. The guy looked at me in disbelief. The phone? Of course no one is answering the phone. Everybody is in the hotel bomb shelter, where sane men go whenever there are bombs falling. And that includes the telephone operator.

Of course that made sense. But whoever said this job had to be sensible all the time? In the bomb shelter? I slapped my forehead. We were finally witnessing the bombing of Baghdad, yet we couldn't report it because no one was answering the phone. For a moment I considered manning the operator's booth, then I remembered I didn’t speak Arabic.

I need the operator at his post, I pleaded with the man, Manila was calling. Okay okay I will call him, he said. To be sure he wasn't pulling my leg, I watched him rush off to the bomb shelter.
That settled, I went up to the room again. Via the elevator, of course.

Up in the room, I told Val the problem. Fuck, he said. Paano yan? I crossed my fingers and hoped the telephone operator would pull his head out of the bomb shelter. Miraculously, after a few minutes, the telephone finally rang - it was Manila on the other line!

I no longer remember much of what I reported, since they called us so many times over the course of that early morning that it all merges into a blur. I spoke of fireflies from childhood, of popping firecrackers, the distant thunder underfoot, and of the burning lights of Baghdad. Most of all, I talked of history, ancient and recent. I realized that at this point, everyone was talking about the bombs falling down and the anti aircraft fire going up, but most viewers didn't have the foggiest idea of Mesopotamia, Uruk, the Garden of Eden, the Hammurabi code, and a couple of thousand years of Iraqi history going up in smoke. People wanted to hear about the bombs, but they didn't hear enough of the people whose heads the bombs were falling on. And I remember speaking of tyrants, pro and anti American, and how the world can be so selective in the way it defines who stands on the other side of the line between good and evil.

The night passed as a blur of successive programs and inquisitive anchors who passed me on from one hour to the next. Over and over, again and again, I told them what I was witnessing, which at this point was not really much. I called it a virtual lightshow, and a weak one at that, with sparks twinkling over the city to the counterpoint of detonating anti aircraft artillery. I told them of the virtually empty streets, not unusual given the fact that it was past four in the morning here. And I told them too of the occasional taxi and bus crossing the bridges over the river Tigris, as if nothing was happening tonight in Baghdad. If this was shock and awe, it certainly wasn’t shocking or awesome – yet.

Later we would learn that the first strikes in the new Gulf war were directed at Saddam himself. It was supposed to be a decapitation strike, an assassination attempt if you will, directed at the Iraqi leadership in hopes that a quick kill of Saddam would end the war on the first night.

Acting on a tip from a supposedly reliable Iraqi spy, President Bush authorized the airstrike several hours earlier than his own deadline. The spy told the Americans that Saddam was, at that very moment, in one of his smaller Presidential Palaces on the south western bank of the Tigris. Bush thought it best to risk an early strike that could mean an early end to the war. With that, F-117 stealth fighters loaded with smart bombs took off from a Middle East airbase and released their payload in the inky blackness several thousand feet over Baghdad. The Americans would later realize that they missed their target, and it would be nine months before they would finally get Saddam.



Over and over again, the anchors at home would ask why, with the whole of western civilization seemingly bearing down on their country, the Iraqis didn't simply overthrow Saddam since he's such a bad guy. Since he's caused so much misery in his own country, and made billions for himself, why don't they just boot him out. And over and over again I told them that in this region, Saddam didn't belong to the lonely-hearts club of tyrants and dictators; there were plenty of them to go around in this region. He did belong to a subcategory that includes Muammar Khaddafy where the members were tyrants like most other leaders around here, except that they were also anti-US. But if you're looking for ruthless dictators intolerant of other beliefs, the anti-US club doesn't hold the monopoly there. If Saddam would throw you in jail for carrying anti Saddam publications and for criticizing him, Saudi Arabia would do the same thing if it catches you so much as carrying a bible or praying to a Christian god. In fact they would also give you a couple of lashes of the cane as a bonus.

Of course the US wouldn't dare invade Saudi Arabia, so instead they give them billions in military training and aid, sell them the most sophisticated weapons and aircraft that oil money could buy, pat them on their back, and call them buddies in the war against terror. This, even though most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis, Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi before he was booted out, and most of Al Qaeda's core group were Saudi; there were no Iraqis involved. Most anchors would just give intelligent-sounding grunts to that reply, and move on carefully to other topics. I understand that it is difficult for studio monkeys to comprehend something that goes against the accepted tone of the western news agencies, but there you go. Of course it was a roundabout way of answering their question, but I was avoiding making simplistic comments on such a complex region. Simply said, Saddam was a dictator, but he was not the only dictator in a region where the west props up plenty of other dictators. He simply was a dictator that, after the debacle of the first gulf war, Americans would simply love to hate. He deserved to be bombed in the same way that all other dictators, both of the pro or anti US varieties, deserve to be bombed.

Every once in a while, the anchors would pop a gem. Where was Saddam right now? Have we seen him? Another priceless question: the Americans have crossed the border of Iraq and Kuwait some 600 kilometers down south - do we have a situationer? Manila had been hearing of reports of Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the thousands in the south. Do we have anything on that? Sometimes you get the impression that some people never even bothered to glance at a map. Or perhaps it was a misperception of scale. Perhaps since Iraq is just one large landmass and not seven thousand islands, people sometimes think of the map of Iraq in the same scale as the map of Metro Manila. So, I would try not to sound too stunned and croak out a safely vague answer about distances and censorship and the basic natural law that says you can't be in two places at once – even at the best of times.

A lot of the questions also revolved around Val and myself. How did we feel? Were we scared shitless? Do we have insurance? Some were really expressions of concern; others just seemed to be designed to drum up the fact that we were the only Filipino newsteam left in Iraq, and that we were in extreme danger, "in the service of the Filipino," as the station blurb went. It was embarrassing at times, but the air war over Baghdad was off to a slow start, and there was little else I could tell anchors at home except for the thunder of antiaircraft fire, the twinkling lights in the sky, and the slow rumble of distant bombs. You can only repeat that so often. In the end, the studio anchor would drift back to the question “how are you holding up?”

It helped that I had done quite a good deal of research before leaving Manila. Like what I did during my first on-camera live from Baghdad, I took this chance to talk a lot about the Iraq that few people knew about, or cared to know. Every chance I got, I backtracked thousands of years to talk about the history and culture of this land, and how it tied in with the present. Then, there was also a lot of contemporary history to talk about, from the rise of Saddam to the unwavering US support of his regime during the Iran-Iraq war, to his fall from grace with the invasion of Kuwait. Post-Gulf War, there were 12 years of UN sanctions that crippled this proud country. There were so many other issues to talk about, and the lightshow over Baghdad now was just a colorful sidebar that you could unfortunately not ignore.

The air raids came in several waves. After a few hours, dawn broke over the city, to the continuous popping of anti aircraft artillery. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds, rays treaming out through the morning condensation, making the sunrise look positively, well, religious, like God was cluck clucking down from his perch while the red and the black ants went to war again.

Thus ended the first night of the bombing; nothing spectacular or visually sensational like CNN's "fireworks" video from the first Gulf War. But it didn't matter to Val and I; despite all the odds, we had made it to Baghdad, stayed in Iraq way past the dates our permits and our money would allow, and we had made it through the first night of the second gulf war.