Peeps and Saddam's Playground

I’ll admit it…I’ve grown a little jaded in Iraq. I don’t look at the progress as much, don’t smile at the little street urchins trying to sell me chewing gum and porn, don’t really care about going back to the flea market to see what cool relics of the culture I can find. All I’m looking for now is a C-130 doing a combat take off to fly me and a handful of others to Kuwait.
Which is why today was…sort of cool. It was like everyday has been lately, come in, work and drink a pot of coffee. But then I realized how little some people do here, especially when they get short like me. So I abandoned all pretense and allowed short-timers syndrome to wash my stern bitter jaw-set aside, at least I gave into it a little bit. That was necessary for all the stuff that eventually made the day cooler than any have been lately.
First, 5000 boxes of patriotic Peeps came in. Yes, red-white-and-blue marshmallow chickens. Lt L walked around flinging cases of them into people’s offices. I ate a whole box, pleased as a fat kid eating cake. I posed for the mandatory pictures. The whole point of Peeps sending all the little chickens to us was to take pictures of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines biting in to the chewy goo of the marshmallow chickens.
Then, I thought about going to workout but instead got Angie and Lt L and drove them over to the crossed swords at Saddams old parade field. I’ve been up in the 60 foot tall tower of Saddam’s hand before but Angie needed her picture taken hanging out of the crack at the wrist so I stayed down taking pictures until she climbed the girders to the top with the help of the Iraqi police man with the Veterans For Kerry bumper sticker.
It was late afternoon so I was able to get some really cool shots, playing with the angle of the sun. We took pictures of the security guards holding the peeps we gave them and then took their one AK-47 they shared and climbed up on the concrete part of the memorial and shot various poses of us holding the gun. I can’t believe owning something like that is legal again in the U.S. I wanted to shoot the gun off in the air and yell, I just won a soccer game, I just won a soccer game…but that may have cost more than the $5 we paid the guards to look the other way, I mean show us around.
Afterwards we made an impromptu movie which…maybe could have used a script. But in a way I felt that old collegiate feeling out there today in the bright, slanted sunlight and crisp 98 degree air of Baghdad in autumn. Something about today made me say, its not that bad…and to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, sometimes not that bad is the best anything can be.