Some Corner of a Foreign Field

April, 2006

Camp Taji

Just outside of the northwestern reaches of Baghdad there is a city called Taji. It’s a city that I know next to nothing about. Here’s what I’ve heard: for hundreds of years, Taji has been the place that Iraqis go to hide from the government.

It’s only 28 kilometers from the center of Baghdad. Grove after grove of date palms. Farms and mud huts near the banks of the Tigris. Multiple places to lay low. Plenty of people to hide you. Some that would turn you in, for the right price… or for no price at all. I guess it’s been that way for hundreds of years, and that’s the way it is now. In Taji, Sunni meets Shii, and right now that’s a recipe for disaster. And did I mention West meets East?


I live in a walled American city; a base, not surprisingly, called Camp Taji. The soldiers that serve here will some day, over beers at some VFW hall, say “Yeah, back in Iraq I served in Taji.” But most of them won’t mean “the Iraqi city of Taji.” Because most of them won’t leave the base. They’ll do their six months and then go home. Out there, the Iraqis have their Taji. This base is our Taji. The base here is divided into two parts that are separated by a sturdy barbed wire fence. One side is an “Iraqi Side”, home to thousands of Iraqi troops and the Americans that train and advise them. The other side is called the “Coalition Side.” (That’s a fancy name for “American Side.”) I happen to live on the Iraqi side. Some day the whole base will become an Iraqi Army base, as it was before we got here. But for now, it’s like East and West Germany. The American side has improved dirt roads and clean sidewalks. A movie theater. A Pizza Hut. A recreation center with pool tables and sodas. Bingo Night. Hip Hop Night. Salsa Night. Soldiers on the dance floor in their PT gear, trying to be the young kids they really are. A swimming pool. Basketball courts. Military police handing out speeding tickets. Then, when you pass through one of the gates that separates the two sides of the base, you are back in the third world again. The Iraqi Army guards wave you through after checking your ID, which they most certainly cannot read. I usually try to say a few words in Arabic to them, which they like. Their heads are often wrapped in a t-shirt or scarf, and they wear sunglasses. Not really to guard against the sun, but to guard against being marked by an informant as being in the Iraqi Army. Sometimes when Iraqi soldiers leave our base to visit their families, they don’t come back. Usually it is because they’ve been killed. Sometimes soldiers are killed soon after they leave the gate. The insurgents follow them and wait for a good place to shoot them.

After passing through the guard house and onto the Iraqi side of the base, you begin to hit potholes. Dusty streets. No speed limits. Terrible drivers. Iraqi soldiers hitchhiking rides to their barracks in the sweltering sun. Sewage ponds in parking lots. I live in a small compound on the Iraqi base; an island of America in the midst of their broken Iraqi buildings. The U.S. bombs all but demolished this place. Taji was once the home of the Republican Guard units that were charged with the defense of Baghdad. It was the home of tank factories, Scud plants, and special weapons research facilities—(“Chemical Ali” had a weapons lab here). It’s a huge base, and you never know what you might find if you start to drive around. There’s a huge dump of scrap metal, wood, and concrete. Random engines from Russian Migs, with titanium still gleaming underneath their rusted hulks. One day I wandered into the remnants of a driving school. I can only imagine what stories this place holds. Most of them will never be old. Today the base I live on is a place of contrasts. It is a dumping ground for thousands of blown up or rusted out Iraqi tanks, trunks, and artillery pieces. Yet it is also the home to a huge depot full of armored trucks and weapons that are building the new Iraqi Army. It isn’t strange for me to see a new “chocolate-chip” colored Iraqi Humvee speed down a road past a blown up Russian-made truck from a now long-gone era. And in the same way that many current Iraqi Army officers are former Republican guards or members of Saddam’s army, soldiers now roam the fields of junked out tanks to find parts for their newly refurbished ones. Things have come full circle for the Iraqis, though I’m not sure what that really means at this point.

Taji is my new home. When I got here in April of 2006, the war was still raging. And as I settled in for my first few nights in this place, I was sure that I would spend much time away from the war, a bit of time on the outskirts of it, and maybe some time right in the middle.