Escape from Saddam Read Free Page B

who could pick them off with the greatest of ease.
    I remembered the maxim I was taught at school, a favorite saying of Saddam’s that we were forced to commit to memory: “He who does not sweat to build his country will not bleed defending it.” We had been trained since childhood to see weaponry as part of everyday life. Guns were commonplace, of course, but even when I was young I had come into contact with weapons of far greater destructive power. As a young boy I spent time living with my father in the northern city of Mosul, in the semirural surroundings of the College of Forestry and Agriculture. One day my friends and I decided to go hunting for the foxes that had been terrorizing my beloved chickens, which I kept in the yard, so we set off along the road that led into the forest.
    After walking for an hour or so, we came across an area enclosed by barbed wire. We had all been into the forest before, but none of us had stumbled across this enclosure. Not far inside, we saw a huge mound covered with army camouflage material. Peeping out from under the camouflage were large, metal, pointed tips; they were clearly either Scud missiles or some other form of rocket-propelled weapon. A family of foxes were scurrying over the missiles or nestling peacefully under their tips. We stood in silence for a few moments, staring at our discovery, when suddenly we heard the sound of a car approaching. A red Chevrolet drove up slowly; not wanting to be caught here by a member of the security forces, we ran away as quickly as we could, vowing to return the next day.
    Every time we went back to spy on our discovery, the red Chevrolet was always nearby. We never got close enough to find out who was in it, nor did we want to, for fear of being seen. Gradually, though, we began to work out the times that it disappeared—presumably so that the driver could get something to eat or go off duty and swap with somebody else—and we started to formulate a plan. We took an old wheelbarrow to a section of the surrounding wall that either had crumbled naturally or had been destroyed by villagers trying to get in. We filled the wheelbarrow with small pieces of rubble and then took it to the weapons dump, waited for the Chevrolet to disappear, and rolled it close to the barbed wire. If we could throw the rubble at the missiles, we naively thought, and explode one of them, we could launch our first strike in the battle against the foxes. They would be painlessly dispatched, and we would be far enough away to avoid getting hurt.
    Of course, the missiles were too deep inside the barbed-wired area for us to score many direct hits, and our aim was not that true in any case. Occasionally a small stone rebounded off the metal with a satisfying clunk, but when we saw the red Chevrolet approaching after about forty-five minutes, we scampered away, and the foxes lived to scavenge for chickens another day.
    The next time I spoke to Uncle Saad on the phone, I casually told him about our exploits. He listened attentively before speaking very quietly but with the full weight of his authority: “Listen to me very carefully, Sarmed. You must
never
do that again. The chances of exploding one of those missiles with a piece of rubble are minuscule, but if you did manage it, you wouldn’t just be wiping out your foxes—you’d be wiping out your home and probably the surrounding villages too.”
    I fell silent as the implications of our stupidity were spelled out to me.
    “Promise me you’ll never go back there, Sarmed,” Saad continued, “even just to look. It’s not the sort of place you want to be caught snooping around.”
    “I promise,” I replied quietly.
    Back at my unit, we learned how to use different types of grenades. Special honor was reserved for those soldiers who threw grenades the farthest, and the day after a training session our arms were bruised from the effort of several hours of hurling these heavy weapons into the desert surrounding