Escape from Saddam Read Free Page A

appropriately. The waiting lines for the telephone were long, however, and I was not in the mood to hear the playful laughs of my brother and sister in the background. So I decided to rest before the rigors of the next day.
    The following morning we were each assigned a weapon—an Iraqi-made AK-47. Each gun had a piece of what resembled black surgical tape stuck on the side, on which was scrawled a number so that the quartermasters could keep track of who had been issued which weapon. I soon found out that, although our training period was at an end, there was much that we were still expected to learn. At the Baghdad training compound, we had been taught how to handle weapons at the most basic level; now our skills were to be honed and specialized. A special unit came in, for example, to teach us how to plant land mines. We were each given a box containing several heavy, defused land mines. As I slowly took one of the weapons from its packaging, I was very aware that this was the instrument that had almost killed my uncle during the Iran-Iraq war.
    While stationed on the front line, on Iranian territory near Basra, Saad had been ordered to lead his men into a minefield. He was one of the lucky few to escape with his life. Debris from a nearby explosion detonated a cluster of mines, and he was knocked unconscious. He awoke to discover that he had been blown one way, his leg the other. His remaining leg had been cut deep enough to expose the bone of his knee, and his whole body was deeply splintered with sharp, angry pieces of hot shrapnel. How he survived is a mystery even to him.
    The day I went with my family to visit Saad in the hospital is one of the most vivid memories of my youth. We all packed into his tiny hospital room, and had I not known it was Saad lying in the bed, I wouldn’t have recognized him. His face and body were bandaged up. The outer layer of his skin had been burned and peeled away by the force of the blast; what remained was red and sore. The land mine had severed his leg below the knee, but the remainder of that limb was so riddled with shrapnel that it had been removed several inches above the knee. The other leg was little more than a patchwork of skin grafted from different parts of Saad’s body. You could place a magnet on certain parts of him and it would stick because of all the shrapnel embedded beneath his skin. He was unconscious when we saw him, and my mother and grandmother wailed with tears at the sight of their beloved Saad in such a state. I remember my father standing emotionless in the corner of the room. “I told you this is what would happen if you ran off to war” the look on his face seemed to say. It was a stark introduction for a six-year-old to the realities of battle.
    Now I was learning how to plant the same weapon so that it could mutilate some other foreign soldier or maybe an unsuspecting civilian unlucky enough to stumble across it. A thick circle of gray metal, perhaps two inches thick, the mine had a second, smaller circle protruding from the top. The mine was to be placed in the dirt, or underwater in the mud, so that it was not visible, and then a small pin was removed to arm it. The slightest movement above the mine would detonate it, and the results would be devastating. We were not taught how to defuse land mines. For that knowledge, we were told, we had to wait until our second year.
    We were taught how to arm and fire heavy BKC machine guns that could hit targets over two kilometers in the distance. Two soldiers were needed to operate them—one to fire the weapon, the other to feed the long chain of ammunition into it. On the grounds of the unit was the shell of a Russian-style tank. We were not taught to drive tanks—that was a specialized job not suited to such low-ranking soldiers as ourselves. Instead we were taught how to fire the machine gun perched at the top. In a battle situation the gunners would be on full display—cannon fodder for enemy troops,