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Authors: Lawrence Anthony

BOOK: Babylon's Ark
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True or not, these stories were so embedded in Baghdad's folklore that most Iraqis considered them fact, particularly as owning man-eaters was something typical for the psychotic Uday. On several occasions I was asked to shoot the entire pride.
I obviously refused, emphasizing that there was no proof, but privately I also confessed to harboring some niggling suspicions. The zoo lions, I recalled, had been lethargic and disinterested when I first approached them. No so with Uday's three cats, Xena, Brutus, and Heather. Whenever I came near they rushed up to the fence, aggressively eyeballing me. I wouldn't go as far to say they only viewed me as a tasty snack, but they certainly had no fear of humans.
These concerns were passed on to the military and SF soldiers who subsequently dug up every suspicious mound in the palace
grounds to see if they could locate buried human remains. None were found, to my huge relief.
At the time nobody at the zoo paid particular heed to the man-eaters legend, as there was a load of other tasks, not least the extra mouths to feed. It made little difference as long as the three lions were in cages.
However, it would return to haunt us with a vengeance later.
I
T WAS ONE OF THOSE EVENINGS that makes you want to pull up a deck chair, pour something long and cold, and appreciate being alive.
The sun had just set and the cool star-studded evening soothingly doused the dying fire red desert rays. Even the incessant blood-sucking mosquitoes that made life a misery had returned to base for a brief respite.
I was chatting to the Third ID commander, Capt. Larry Burris, a frontline leader of the audaciously swift American advance to Baghdad, and some of his troops relaxing near their tanks parked outside the Al-Rashid when loud volleys of gunfire rattled through the sky.
Panicked, I dropped to the ground, hugging the grass for cover. If I could have dug a hole and crawled into it, I would have.
Then silence.
I looked up to see several quizzical pairs of eyes upon me. All the soldiers were still standing next to the tank. One or two sniggered.
I got up, feeling somewhat foolish. Obviously military etiquette means you don't dive for cover.
Half an hour later another spurt of bullets shattered the heavens. I steeled myself and resolutely stood my ground.
I suddenly realized I was alone. All the other men had hit the dirt, rifles at the ready. I was unsure what to do; should I do a belated dive, like a character in a cartoon comedy, or show that hey, I had meant to keep standing all along?
“Get down! Get down!” screamed one of the soldiers, and I quickly dropped to the ground.
When the firing stopped, the grinning Americans got up. One took pity on me and explained the diving procedure: If you hear shots as “bangs” the gunmen are aiming elsewhere, but if you hear the bang and a simultaneous “crack” overhead, then lead is flying your way. You had better take cover. Fast.
That was during the first week I arrived and it was an invaluable lesson that I had plenty of opportunity to put it into practice. Twice during those early, tenuous days there were full-scale battles with Saddam's die-hards in the heavily guarded streets around the Al-Rashid. On one occasion, it was so ferocious I feared that the insurgents would break through the so-called steel cordon and storm the hotel. I was in the foyer with psyched-up soldiers awaiting orders and asked an officer what was happening.
“I don't know, and I'm sure as hell not going out there to find out,” he replied.
The deafening gunfire, interspersed with the screeching of tires and screaming metallic “clangs” of vehicles crashing, eventually fizzled out and all of us in the foyer exhaled loud sighs of relief.
“Okay, that's it. We'll find out what happened when the checkpoint shift changes,” said the officer, putting his M-16 down.
I heard later that it was an attack on the checkpoint just down the road in an almost suicidal attempt to break through to the Al-Rashid. But by morning all evidence of the attack was gone.
Equally terrifying was when the alarm went out that suicide bombers were poised to penetrate the building through underground
tunnels. This really touched a nerve, as the hotel was riddled with secret chambers built as bunkers for Saddam. The Americans had fine-combed what they believed to be the entire network, but there was always the worry that a semtex-wired fanatic would find an unwatched manhole covering some unchartered drain and obliterate the building.
Fortunately, the alarm proved to be false—or else the bombers had heard the Americans coming and scampered away. But each day those of us in the hotel lived with the knowledge that there could be something lethal emerging from the sewers below.
Those were indeed helter-skelter times. I was once discussing the awesome firepower of an Abrams tank with a lieutenant when he casually asked if I would like to go for a drive and fire the main gun. That, he said, was the only way to experience such cataclysmic potency with a simple touch of a finger.
I was stunned. Here we were in a main street outside the city's premier hotel and I was nonchalantly being offered the chance to fire a shell from one of the most fearsome weapons in the U.S. Army.
“It's okay,” said the tank man. “I've cleared it with my superiors. We'll shoot high.”
To my eternal regret, I had to get to the zoo urgently and said no. But it did show what state of mind the city was in—that you could fire a live tank round in a main street and no one would even blink.
The bizarre thing was that with the anarchy came a weird sense of freedom. There were simply no regulations or rulebooks. No police, administration, government, officials, traffic lights, shops, water, electricity, sewerage, or refuse removal. No businesses were functioning, and nobody went to work. There was no constitutional order whatsoever. Civic anarchy ruled.
This meant that to survive I had to rely purely on my own moxie. Everything I did was based solely on whether I could pull it off. I structured my day entirely as I saw fit. How I got food and drink for myself, the staff, and animals was totally up to me. I had to find a way to make it happen or all at the zoo would starve; it was
as simple as that. The only way to do that was to wheel, deal, loot, beg, trade, and barter with as much chutzpah as I could muster.
For the first time in my life I was living off my wits through absolute necessity, on the edge of survival. And there is no better way to sharpen the mind than to find every code you live by, everything you have always taken for granted, has simply been chucked out the window. You wake up—smartly!
In today's strictly regulated world, laws don't only tell you what you can't do; they now also tell you what you
can.
But in Baghdad in those wild early days, there were no laws. What you did or didn't do was totally up to you. And I hate to say this, but it was exciting, in an exhilaratingly primordial sense—even though it is no way to live for long.
However, amid all that palpable tension, I knew something had to crack soon. We were all operating at breaking strain. And sure enough, a day or two after the “ostrich run” from Uday's love nest the two men on loan to me from the Kuwait City zoo came storming up.
Both were highly agitated. Abdullah Latif let rip in Arabic and I put up my hands: “Whoa, I can't understand.”
I called over Husham, who attempted to translate the words erupting in a torrent, but I soon got the gist of the problem. The Kuwaitis wanted to leave Baghdad immediately. Apparently rumors were rife that the Kuwaiti army was about to invade Iraq under the protection of the Americans and exact bloody retribution for Saddam's brutal invasion of their country twelve years ago.
When the Iraqis stormed Kuwait in 1991, the highly disciplined Republican Guard—probably the toughest troops in the Middle East—had been at the forefront. But once the tiny country had been seized, Saddam sent in his conscripted army, which pillaged extensively. The Iraqi commanders made no attempt to discipline their ill-trained troops, as it was a matter of policy to frighten the Kuwaitis into submission. And now many Iraqis believed the time for revenge had come.
Obviously this was just wild talk. The coalition would never countenance another invasion, let alone allow the Kuwaiti army to go on a reprisal rampage even if the Kuwaitis had wanted to. But rumors, once they're in motion, gather an inexorable momentum.
It was well-known around the zoo that Abdullah and his colleague were Kuwaitis, and even Husham agreed that their lives were in danger and it was imperative they flee the country as soon as possible. They wanted me to come with them, pointing out that the security situation in Baghdad was much worse than we anticipated and I also was in serious danger. Our trip, they stressed, was only meant to be a fact-finding mission—something we had achieved.
I understood their predicament, even though I didn't agree. This trip had progressed into more than just a fact-finding expedition. It was now a full-scale rescue mission.
“When do you want to go?” I asked.
“Tonight, must drive out tonight,” Abdullah replied. “Daytime too dangerous.”
I shook my head. If I left now, I might as well do what had originally crossed my mind: shoot all the animals. There was no way the zoo would survive without our help and our collaboration with soldiers.
But the Kuwaitis were adamant; they had to bolt right away. And their only way out was in my hired car.
I thought about that for a moment or two. The car might be their only getaway, but it was also mine. If I gave it to them there would be no escape for me, a major worry considering the violent circumstances we were living under. Military convoys refused to ferry civilians, and all air traffic to and from Baghdad was also purely for military purposes. Without my car, I would be trapped in the war zone for God knows how long.
But it was also true that if I left, the project would collapse. That was the stark reality of it. At that time I never even knew how many people would arrive for work each morning. Every day was based on wildly blind optimism that we would be able to stay out of danger, source food, have enough hands to lug water from the canals,
and keep out as many looters as possible. And as none of the Iraqis could communicate effectively with the Americans who were still fighting a hit-and-run street war, there was little doubt the zoo rescue would implode without me there to act as an intermediary.
I considered again my reasons for coming here. For me, this was more than just about saving a zoo. It was about making a moral and ethical stand, about saying we cannot do this to our planet anymore. This realization had a profound impact on me, and I decided that an example had to be set. A responsible, influential stand had to be made against mankind's irreverence for other life-forms. I decided then and there that Baghdad was to be the place it started.
It was to be my line in the sand. This far and no more. I couldn't leave now that I had started the rescue operation, no matter how dangerous.
I handed Abdullah my keys. “I am staying. Thank you for what you have done.”
He again signaled frantically that I must come with them.
The closest cage was a Bengal tiger 's. I pointed to him. “If I leave, he will die.”
Abdullah went silent and then nodded. He understood. We shook hands and they left. I hoped they would make it safely. They were both brave men and had been a great help.
I never saw them again, but months later I received a receipt from the rental company. The car had been returned in one piece, and my two friends had made it home.
With the Kuwaitis gone the reality of Abdullah's warning struck home and I realized how precarious my security situation at the zoo actually was. About a mile south of the zoo inside the park was a military base. To the northwest outside the park were the tanks at the checkpoint where I first came in and met Lieutenant Szydlik. In the north and east there was no military presence at all for miles. This area, soon to become known as the Red Zone, was completely open to the park and zoo. It was a gaping security hole through which Adel, Husham, and the workers came to work every day. And if they could get in, so could anyone else.
I was the only western civilian in the entire lawless area, unprotected and exposed, and I felt very alone. The questions I received from looters or intruders who were brazen enough to stride up to me and ask, “You American?” compounded my fears. Husham, always at my side, would quickly answer that I was a South African and that South Africa was neutral and had sent me to help Iraq. His answers in Arabic were always sprinkled with the words “Nelson Mandela,” the only part of the discussion I ever understood.
In an area where soldiers only ever moved around in tanks and armored vehicles or convoys of heavily armed Humvees, my sole protection was the goodwill that was generated by Husham and the zoo staff actively spreading the word that I was a South African. I believe it was the only thing that kept me alive.
 
 
IT WAS ONLY 10:00 A.M., but already sun rays shimmered like high-octane gas fumes. Even in April, early spring, the heat wilted energy into apathy and you continuously craved ice water, an unheard-of luxury at the time. All drinking water tasted as though it had been tapped straight from a warm geyser.
It was a day or two after the Kuwaitis had left and I was outside the trashed three-room bungalow that was the zoo's headquarters, contemplating which of the gazillion tasks to prioritize, when a Humvee with four soldiers clutching M-16s came skidding up.
A man dressed in newly ironed combat fatigues hopped out of the passenger seat and introduced himself: Capt. William Sumner of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.
“I am the zoo man,” he said, smiling.
I let this sink in for a while, then grabbed the officer 's hand and shook it hard. I could scarcely believe it. The zoo now had an accredited representative. Someone out there in the sacrosanct halls of administration had actually decided that what we were doing was … well, worthwhile. We at last had a direct link to the hallowed powers-that-be. We were officially a blip, albeit tiny, on the radar screen of bureaucracy.
Up until now, almost everything that had been achieved was thanks to the goodwill and compassion of ordinary American soldiers who had the common decency to do what they could under extreme circumstances. From Lieutenant Szydlik to patrol-fatigued soldiers who gave up their time and rations, people helped because it was the right thing to do. Whenever I thanked them, they just said it was “because of the animals.”

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