.G.I.’s in Sadr City Laugh Off Shoe-Hurling
BAGHDAD — Late Monday night, as the international chattering classes were discussing the finer points of the Bush Shoe Throwing Incident, Lt. Jamen Miller’s platoon was on a six hour patrol in one of the world’s less Bush sympathetic neighborhoods, Sadr City.
There were a variety of items on the night’s agenda, including intelligence gathering, food delivery and helping Iraqis fill out compensation claims, nothing as “interesting,” to use the preferred euphemism, as what was seen on the platoons’ last deployment in super-violent Anbar in 2006. But it filled up the hours.
They knocked on doors in the moonlight, as many soldiers that could piling out of the cold muddy streets into a soft warm living room while the platoon leader and his interpreter sipped tea with the owner of the house and asked if he knew such and such person and if so and so had been seen around the neighborhood lately.
The Shoe Incident had barely been brought up among the soldiers all day. It wasn’t much of a priority, not compared to leave dates or the Cowboys-Giants game. The whole fact that the president had been in town at all wasn’t known for hours afterwards he arrived on Sunday and was really only worth mentioning because it explained the particular kind of patrol missions –a particularly boring kind–that are always ordered up along with an important visit.
“Hey you see George was hit with a shoe?” a soldier had asked Monday morning, laughing and lumping eggs into his plate in the kitchenette of the company’s security outpost.
“George who?”
And that was mostly it for Monday. By the middle of the day most had heard about it, on the Internet, from wives back home, but it was more or less dismissed with “I can’t believe that, that’s some funny stuff” (or so paraphrased, for this is a family blog).
Midway through Monday night’s patrol, Lt. Miller, one of the sergeants and the interpreter were standing in a kitchen trying to iron out a misunderstanding with a couple of nervous looking Iraqi men, when a burst of laughter came from the soldiers in the living room. The Shoe Throwing Incident was being shown on the Iraqi evening news, frequently, and in slow motion. The soldiers were guffawing and remarking on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s impressive attempt to block the second shoe. The Iraqis in the room stood in the back, unsmiling, as the throws were replayed, again and again. Then the news moved on to another story and the soldiers moved back out into the cold streets.
A few houses later, the last stop of the night, a little confrontation broke out when the women of the houses assumed the soldiers were robbers — their house had been broken into earlier this year — and began screaming. The owner of the house was angry but Lt. Miller calmed the man’s nerves, and they began the usual chat about the neighborhood.
I stayed out in the street, talking with the soldiers, who were discussing the wars or quiet lives that awaited them on the other side of this deployment. Soon Lt. Miller appeared and we moved on.
The next day, Lt. Miller told me that, out of nowhere, the man in the last house had announced that he wanted to apologize for the Shoe Incident, insisting that it not reflect poorly on all Iraqis.
I asked Lt. Miller what he said in return. He assured the man that it was OK, that they do not consider one Iraqi’s behavior indicative of the country, that this was what democracy can look like, etc.
And, he said, “I told him that a lot of the soldiers thought it was pretty funny.”
Baghdad Bureau
There were a variety of items on the night’s agenda, including intelligence gathering, food delivery and helping Iraqis fill out compensation claims, nothing as “interesting,” to use the preferred euphemism, as what was seen on the platoons’ last deployment in super-violent Anbar in 2006. But it filled up the hours.
They knocked on doors in the moonlight, as many soldiers that could piling out of the cold muddy streets into a soft warm living room while the platoon leader and his interpreter sipped tea with the owner of the house and asked if he knew such and such person and if so and so had been seen around the neighborhood lately.
The Shoe Incident had barely been brought up among the soldiers all day. It wasn’t much of a priority, not compared to leave dates or the Cowboys-Giants game. The whole fact that the president had been in town at all wasn’t known for hours afterwards he arrived on Sunday and was really only worth mentioning because it explained the particular kind of patrol missions –a particularly boring kind–that are always ordered up along with an important visit.
“Hey you see George was hit with a shoe?” a soldier had asked Monday morning, laughing and lumping eggs into his plate in the kitchenette of the company’s security outpost.
“George who?”
And that was mostly it for Monday. By the middle of the day most had heard about it, on the Internet, from wives back home, but it was more or less dismissed with “I can’t believe that, that’s some funny stuff” (or so paraphrased, for this is a family blog).
Midway through Monday night’s patrol, Lt. Miller, one of the sergeants and the interpreter were standing in a kitchen trying to iron out a misunderstanding with a couple of nervous looking Iraqi men, when a burst of laughter came from the soldiers in the living room. The Shoe Throwing Incident was being shown on the Iraqi evening news, frequently, and in slow motion. The soldiers were guffawing and remarking on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s impressive attempt to block the second shoe. The Iraqis in the room stood in the back, unsmiling, as the throws were replayed, again and again. Then the news moved on to another story and the soldiers moved back out into the cold streets.
A few houses later, the last stop of the night, a little confrontation broke out when the women of the houses assumed the soldiers were robbers — their house had been broken into earlier this year — and began screaming. The owner of the house was angry but Lt. Miller calmed the man’s nerves, and they began the usual chat about the neighborhood.
I stayed out in the street, talking with the soldiers, who were discussing the wars or quiet lives that awaited them on the other side of this deployment. Soon Lt. Miller appeared and we moved on.
The next day, Lt. Miller told me that, out of nowhere, the man in the last house had announced that he wanted to apologize for the Shoe Incident, insisting that it not reflect poorly on all Iraqis.
I asked Lt. Miller what he said in return. He assured the man that it was OK, that they do not consider one Iraqi’s behavior indicative of the country, that this was what democracy can look like, etc.
And, he said, “I told him that a lot of the soldiers thought it was pretty funny.”
Baghdad Bureau
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