______________________
Tom Fillion
Elm City P.O.W.
Everyone in the Suburban was quiet until Nelson Glassby broke the silence. We were on the way back to our compound. Elm City, Saudi Arabia.
"I'm for total destruction," he yelled from the back of the Suburban.
"Now that we got that settled," Peter Mann whispered to me.
"Total what?" Kurt Weimar, driving, smoking, and balancing his umpteenth cup of coffee for the day, shouted from the front seat.
"Total destruction," he announced again, his voice booming like he was an actor on a stage. "I think it's great. This is going to make my day. Total destruction. In fact, I'm for total destruction of everything," he said, then laughed. "Chemical and biological warfare, that too. I think it's great."
Peter raised his eyebrow. He sat in the middle section of the vehicle with me. Glassby sat in the back with the empty aluminum cans he had dropped there for months. They rattled around whenever the Suburban changed momentum.
"You know my feelings on this so called war," Peter whispered. "I'll be a good boy and not say anything or there’ll be war in here."
Glassby stopped yelling but continued murmuring to himself in English interspersed with a few Arabic words that fascinated him.
"Well, gents, if the war does start, tonight or tomorrow night is the best time. I've been saying that all along," Peter said. "It’s a new moon and a high tide."
"I think Bush will give them a few days to get nervous and think about what's going to happen," I offered. "If they start tonight it’s too cut and dry. Everybody knows when it's going to happen."
"I think he'll go in as soon after the deadline as he can," Peter answered. "I think Bush is trying to make a point. Cross this line and this is what happens."
***
The phone rang for a long time in my dream. But even when the dream ended, the phone still rang. Finally, I realized what it was and struggled to get up. It was close to 3:00 A.M. Baghdad time. We were in the same time zone, same war zone, except we had wall-to-wall carpeting, air conditioning, cable TV piped in from Aviano in Italy, bottled water, and Third Country National houseboys to clean up after us. The phone continued ringing. It hurt my ears and head to hear its urgency.
My villa mate Richard Wellman didn't wake up. He had spent the previous evening hitting his bottle of sadeek; lowered it several inches so he was anesthetized, toasted on Saudi moonshine. When I reached the phone, I was disoriented and half-asleep.
"Turn on the TV," an unfamiliar voice said.
"Who's this?"
"You don't know who this is?" the voice answered.
"No."
"Peter."
"Oh, Peter, yeah," I said when I finally matched a face with the voice.
"Turn on your TV. It's started," Peter said.
"What's started?"
"The war. The war has started. We're bombing Baghdad."
"The war? You're kidding?"
"Turn it on. I've got other people to call. See ya."
I turned on the television, and Peter was right. Baghdad was ablaze. My hand shook from the cold inside the villa and the excitement of the moment.
I went to Wellman's bedroom door.
"Richard, they're bombing Baghdad!" I called out several times.
"What?" Wellman finally answered.
"The war's started."
"I'll be right there," he said.
I made some coffee in the kitchen. It was cold outside, and the heat was off inside. My whole body shivered.
Wellman staggered out of the bedroom, his comb over out of place, and sat in his overstuffed, beige chair. He was half-drunk and pasty.
Glassby, I thought. He was the sorriest motherfucker I knew. This will make him happy, though. It wasn't total destruction like he yearned for. From what I could see, it was more like elective surgery. Maybe this would get him out of the doldrums or whatever he was in. I put in a call to him. His phone rang several times, but there was no answer.
"I'll be right back. I want to go knock on Glassby’s window and let him know the Superbowl, I mean, the war has started," I said.
"Yeah, okay," Richard mumbled.
I put my bathrobe on over my short pants and “Go Gators” t-shirt and walked outside into the cold air. I hurried along to Glassby's villa. His was unmistakable. Nearly everything in the front yard was dead. The yard was covered with desiccated leaves and small plants that had turned light orange from lack of water. Three cacti with long snakelike branches twisted into the air. A large long-needled fern overflowed onto the sidewalk. The needles were eye level. I dared not step off the sidewalk either. He probably had it mined.
There was a light on in the front bedroom. The phone call must have awakened him or he was up watching a cable movie. Probably the one about Idi Amin Dada. He was always ranting about how good it was. It figured he'd like somebody as horrible as Idi Amin.
I walked on the sidewalk, dodging the large ferns with the hypodermics. Passing those without any puncture marks, I was on the front porch and went to the bedroom window that radiated with light. I tapped on it several times and saw the movement of a shadow in the room.
Glassby still didn't answer. I rapped several more times. Finally, he responded.
"Who's there?" he called out from behind the curtains.
"Your hero. Idi Amin. It's Jim Tierney. The war started."
"What'd you say?" he called out again.
"The war started."
I expected him to come to the front door, but he flung open the curtain and for a brief second, out of the corner of my eye I saw what occupied him so early in the morning. He was already up. It was only a brief glimpse then Glassby stood in my line of vision unaware that I saw anything. He wasn't watching cable.
"I called, but there was no answer," I explained.
"I heard the phone ring," Glassby said.
Not surprising, considering who I was calling.
"The war started," I repeated.
Finally, it sank in.
"Fantastic! That's great!"
"I'm going back to watch it. I'll see you," I said, once I had delivered what for him was a heart-warming message.
"Yeah, tfaddal," he said, using one of his favorite Arabic expressions.
On the way back I didn't look into the deep bluish-purple Saudi sky jeweled with stars. The brief image of what I saw in Glassby's bedroom flashed before me like the bombs dropping in Baghdad.
It was stacked on the end of his double bed from one side to the other. I had never seen that many kings before, American or Saudi, and I've been to Vegas and Tahoe. Stacks of King Fahd in pastel colors like Monopoly money, except this money was real. Behind all the Saudi riyals were empty boxes of Meals Ready to Eat. Every villa came with MREs in case we came under attack. It looked like Glassby had polished off five or six boxes of MREs and was using them as his piggy bank. So that's what he did with the money he was paid for being a stranded and disgruntled contractor in Saudi Arabia.
***
A few hours later I went to the compound cafeteria for breakfast. A party-like atmosphere replaced the silence and gravity that had pervaded the compound the previous few days. The smoking and non-smoking sections of the cafeteria buzzed with euphoria. Noticeably absent from the non-smoking section were the U.S. pilots in jumpsuits. I could hear warplanes in the distance taking off from King Fahd air base in ominous-sounding packs.
"Everyone's restricted to the compound," Kurt Weimar informed me.
He sat in the smoking section. His voice was tight and alarmed.
"We were supposed to go to a wedding in Taif tonight," I replied. "Mansour Al-Gamdi invited us. His brother is getting married. Wife number two. Maybe number three."
"That's the word from Colonel Weatherspoon. He got his orders from Riyadh. Everyone is to stay here until the situation becomes stable. There are Palestinians in the area. Terrorism is a possibility," he stated.
Weimar was in his groove. A cigarette in his hand and a war not far over the horizon. He was a retired E9, a cold warrior from a B-52 gig that taxied nuclear bombs as close to Russian air space as the Russkies would let them in the game of nuclear tag.
"I was looking forward to the wedding," I said.
"Nobody is going anywhere," Weimar barked. "Fuck the wedding. We’ve got a war instead."
***
I went back to the villa. Wellman sat in front of the television watching CNN and munched on an egg salad sandwich. That's pretty much what he ate all the time. Egg salad sandwiches that he bought at the snack bar. He chased it with a glass of sadeek.
The video signal out of Aviano was fucked up ever since I had been there, but the sound was clear. The picture on the screen was scrambled like a cubist painting. It was something you got used to if you watched CNN.
Newscaster Bobbi Battista was attractive but one of her eyes was at the top of the screen, the other eye dangled on the side. Her mouth moved up and down next to her blonde hair and her nose was next to the running tickertape of Wall Street returns. The tickertape was chopped up like confetti. So was the headline news. Wellman raised part of the sandwich to his mouth as he watched intently.
I looked at it for a little while, but there was no new information and my eyes were starting to cross so I went for a walk along the perimeter of the compound. The weather was cool and crisp. No one else was outside. The compound felt like an eerie ghost town. Inside each villa I saw the light blue glow of a television, my fellow contractors and soldiers of misfortune trying to piece together the CNN confetti.
A high, concrete wall surrounded the compound. In the back near the one-hole golf course with the hula-hoop water hazard there was a break in the wall where a large, wooden gate had been placed. It reminded me of what I had read about the gates of Troy. The gate was wide enough for big trucks or a Trojan horse to maneuver through. A long, horizontal piece of metal crossed it. Several buttresses anchored into the ground supported the metal.
I pulled myself up one of the buttresses until I reached the horizontal crossbar. It enabled me to see all the way to the large Bedouin tents at the base of the nearby mountains. I stood there for a few moments, enjoying the serenity, the pristine beauty. Only the smell of burnt chicken feathers from a nearby chicken farm ruined the scene. A covered jeep with two Saudis in it drove to the gate. They were from the National Guard and dressed in tan fatigues and red berets. Both were armed with pistols. The driver motioned with his hand for me to get my ass down. He said it in Arabic to emphasize his point.
"No problem, no problem," I replied then lowered myself to the ground.
I felt like I was in a cubist painting. Elm City, Saudi Arabia on a high plateau in the western Saudi Arabian mountains. The compound was on a magic carpet that had lost its bearings and descended to the ground one clear purple night. If I dug into the earth a short distance, the carpet, intricately woven by nimble fingers, could be found. Someday it would levitate again and whisk the compound away to some other bizarre location. In the meantime, the Bedouins rearranged their tents and grazing spots, ignoring the large edifice that appeared in their midst with a bowling alley, tennis courts, weight room, swimming pool, library, closed circuit television, commissary, clinic, villas stocked with bottled water and MREs, and a snack bar with egg salad sandwiches and greasy Sri Lankan club sandwiches made with turkey ham and turkey bacon. Everything, all the way.
I was on the winning side from what the chopped-up CNN confetti said, but for the moment I felt like a P.O.W. I felt deconstructed, unassembled like a box of Tinkertoys and then put back together at sharp angles. I headed for the snack bar to try one of the egg salad sandwiches Wellman was always wolfing down.
