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Monday, March 28, 2005
Happy Kurdish New Year!
A few nights ago we found out that it was the Kurdish New Year’s Eve. Of course it was a night that we were supposed to be ‘off’ (those times are becoming more and more rare, since they continue to add another patrol here, another detail there – all cutting into my precious emailin’ time) and of course we found all this out in the evening, as opposed to say – a few days before.
Somehow there’s a legend attached to the Kurdish New Year where there was an evil king here who was killing off everyone and their brother, apparently. Everyone talked about killing him but no one would actually do it until a brave blacksmith said he would. Once he was done with the deed, he would light a bonfire to let everyone know the king was dead. Once the bonfire appeared along the walls of the castle, the people rejoiced.
To this day, the Kurds continue to celebrate this moment in history with huge bonfires… usually now made with truck tires. Imagine huge, sometimes massive, piles of cooking, smoldering, melting, oozing rubber and the consequential black smoke that billows off these things. Oh and, as so many Middle Eastern folks do, they also celebrate with ‘celebratory gunfire,’ along with the occasional roman candle, which at night looks deceptively like tracer fire.
So we rolled out into all this (to be ready ‘just in case’ and to look out for any bad guys) but, luckily, the night was an otherwise quiet one and we spent the evening on the roof of a law school, chatting away, snacking on trail mix and bars, and trying to stave off the cold.
Watching distant bonfires and thinking about all the trash burning that goes on here (until the US arrived, there was apparently NO method of trash removal whatsoever), and watching all the usual and numerous refinery fires that keep the horizon a constant dull orange, I thought about what our medic told me. He said that after being deployed to Iraq, everyone in the military has their medical record marked ‘Significant Respiratory Exposure.’ Yeah, tell me about it.
Somehow there’s a legend attached to the Kurdish New Year where there was an evil king here who was killing off everyone and their brother, apparently. Everyone talked about killing him but no one would actually do it until a brave blacksmith said he would. Once he was done with the deed, he would light a bonfire to let everyone know the king was dead. Once the bonfire appeared along the walls of the castle, the people rejoiced.
To this day, the Kurds continue to celebrate this moment in history with huge bonfires… usually now made with truck tires. Imagine huge, sometimes massive, piles of cooking, smoldering, melting, oozing rubber and the consequential black smoke that billows off these things. Oh and, as so many Middle Eastern folks do, they also celebrate with ‘celebratory gunfire,’ along with the occasional roman candle, which at night looks deceptively like tracer fire.
So we rolled out into all this (to be ready ‘just in case’ and to look out for any bad guys) but, luckily, the night was an otherwise quiet one and we spent the evening on the roof of a law school, chatting away, snacking on trail mix and bars, and trying to stave off the cold.
Watching distant bonfires and thinking about all the trash burning that goes on here (until the US arrived, there was apparently NO method of trash removal whatsoever), and watching all the usual and numerous refinery fires that keep the horizon a constant dull orange, I thought about what our medic told me. He said that after being deployed to Iraq, everyone in the military has their medical record marked ‘Significant Respiratory Exposure.’ Yeah, tell me about it.
Posted by: Unknown / 4:25 AM 
