On a personal note: Lara Marlowe on a correspondent's daily life in the heart of wartorn Baghdad
I received a difficult request from Dublin the other day, to write about my daily life here. It's not that there isn't plenty to say about explosions and danger, black-outs and water shortages, bad food and grotty hotel rooms. All of these are much as you'd expect.
But however challenging the assignment, Western journalists are privileged people, even in this war zone. US bombers are less likely to target our hotel. Wads of $100 bills can perform almost any miracle, short of stopping a cruise missile or healing a wounded civilian. So let me apologise from the outset for trying to describe my life here . . .
Saturday is my day off, because The Irish Times isn't published on Sunday. So on Saturday morning, I listened to the BBC, breakfasted on biscuits and Nescafé, then enjoyed a glorious cold bath and hair wash. My hotel had been without water for 36 hours and it felt fantastic to be clean.
A joke during the Lebanese civil war had it that Beirutis were the happiest people in the world, because they knew true joy every time the water and power came back. Here too, simple things bring inordinate pleasure: being able to recharge your sat-phone, laundry that you'd given up on, a good night's sleep.
The BBC was reporting that the risk of chemical warfare had never been higher, so I pulled the suitcase holding my €300 Finnish gas mask from the top of my hotel room cupboard. I'd attended a nuclear-biological-chemical training session for journalists in January, but it was almost as incomprehensible as the manual that came with the gas mask.
"Tell me something practical," I had pleaded with the French briefers. If there was a chemical attack, they said, get the hell out of the area. If that wasn't possible and you were in a tall building - and I'm thinking of my 17-floor hotel - go to the roof. A friend in Paris suggested I paste a sticker with my name and blood type on the mask's plexiglass visor and I washed the drinking water bottle with the special screw-in nozzle before leaving.
But my preparations ended there and I thought I'd devote my leisurely Saturday morning to learning how to use the gas mask.
The only section I understood was "using the drinking device", so I filled the canteen with bottled water, tried ridiculous contortions to trap the transparent straw inside the mask with my tongue and teeth, as per instructions. Impossible. I stashed the mask back on the top shelf and decided to worry about chemical weapons if and when the problem arose.
After giving up on the gas mask, I thought I'd stock up on supplies. A pack-rat mentality comes naturally in war; you buy anything that might prove useful. Shopping enables you to talk to people and see what is going on in the city. And it brings more of those small pleasures, like finding the computer diskette I needed to clear the memory on my Toshiba or a bar of Nivea soap to replace the skin-peeling variety provided by the hotel.
Since the battle for Baghdad started at the weekend, most shops have shut down. Tension rises by the hour, along with the number of armed men in the streets.
The search for an open grocery store took me to the south-west of the city. When I saw a duschke anti-tank gun and pieces of wreckage at an intersection, I realised we had wandered on to the front line. Two burned-out Iraqi army trucks smouldered beside the boulevard; a charred BMP armoured personnel carrier lay at the base of a scorched palm tree. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were in the area, sheltering next to walls, riding in the back of open lorries.
I felt sheepish over my cheery Saturday morning fussing and grooming, while this battle was going on just a few kilometres away. A pick-up truck, its back gate open, drove by with four militiamen perched on the sides, their guns pointed outwards. The bed of the truck was layered with bodies, two deep, under blankets. A naked foot stuck out.
Back at the Palestine Hotel, dozens of Iraqi police cars were speeding by, their sirens on, their occupants waving Kalashnikovs out of the windows as they headed for battle. The information minister was holding a press conference, a staple of daily life here, in which he claimed that the Republican Guard had taken the airport back from the Americans.
There was a terrible racket outside - anti-aircraft artillery - and everyone ran to the window. "He's shot down! He's shot down!" the Iraqis exulted. Then we saw the contrails of a US jet zig-zagging - the pilot had escaped after all. By nightfall, it was the turn of the Republican Guards to circle the hotel in pick-up trucks, joy-shooting to celebrate their "victory" at the airport.
No description of life here would be complete without the noise. The best words are comic strip onomatopoeia, written with an exclamation point: "crash!", "bang!" and especially "boom!" Some of my more macho colleagues claim they can hear the difference between incoming and outgoing artillery fire, between Tomahawk cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs. The only sounds I recognise with certainty are jet engines and, because it's so distinctive, the drum-rolling detonation of cluster bombs.
I barely notice the noise now, unless an explosion is particularly loud or close by. Ear-plugs enable me to sleep for hours at a stretch. In Baghdad, detonations are part of the background, along with ambulance sirens and the thrum of the television networks' generators.
Visually, the night of March 21st was the most dramatic violence I have witnessed in more than two decades as a reporter. From my balcony, I watched as building after building was enveloped by giant bubbles of golden flame. I couldn't help thinking of my late mother, who believed the world would end with the battle of Armageddon.
On an infinitely smaller scale, the anti-aircraft artillery that fired as I drove past it a few days ago was fascinating. The guns could have been US Civil War cannons. The analogy that came to my mind - of white lizards' tongues - was so strange that I left the word "lizard" out of my copy.
The present in Baghdad constantly takes me back to other wars: the crashing of cruise missiles in the dark is familiar from Belgrade; the devastated Mokhabarat building I saw last week looked like the former US marine headquarters in Beirut, destroyed by a suicide bomber in 1983.
On Friday night during an air raid, a raucous group of Iraqi children - doubtless the progeny of high-ranking officials - rushed into a lift in the Palestine Hotel, giggling and pushing and jamming the system. There was a loud detonation as the door finally closed and one cried out, "Oumi!" (Mamma), to be slapped in the face by a sibling.
In 1991, at the Meridien Hotel in Dhahran, spoiled Kuwaiti children behaved the same way.
Several times over the past 2½ weeks, I've thought of that scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole watch an artillery bombardment at night, from a distance. "Pity those poor bastards, under that," Sharif says. "But they are Turks!" O'Toole protests. "Pity them all the same," says Sharif.
When you hear a bombardment, you can't help feeling sorry for anyone near it. But subconsciously, there's a selfish undertow, a gratitude that it's someone else, not me.
Feelings about "the big picture" are equally contradictory. In moments of weariness, you want the bombardment to end immediately, no matter what, no matter how. At other times, out of dread of the sheer violence of it, you want to postpone the final battle indefinitely, forever.
War breeds irrational fears and superstitions. Before the electricity went out last Thursday night, I kept fighting the urge to turn out my hotel room lamps, in the absurd belief the light might attract a US bomber. Am I tempting fate, I sometimes wonder, by wearing a red pullover? Is it better to joke about private fears or keep quiet?
For 25 years, Guillaume Apollinaire's Alcools has been my livre de chevet , the thin volume of poetry that I keep on the night stand. It was with me in the Saudi desert in the previous Gulf War. Most nights I lie in bed in Baghdad, with a battery-run halogen miner's lamp on my forehead and read a poem or two.
Poetry, I know, is no antidote for this madness. All the more reason to read La Chanson du Mal-Aimé for the umpteenth time, turn out my miner's lamp and hope, selfishly, that the explosions will be far away, at least until morning.