We stopped at one of the open-air fish restaurants. After a time, she indicated that she needed a rest. She kept up the pace.įatima and I ran for a couple of miles, her sandals making a scraping sound on the pavement. She wore sandals, and she was very dirty. Her name was Fatima, she said, huffing next to me and looking up with enormous brown eyes. One afternoon later in the summer, another Iraqi youngster pulled alongside me as I made my way down the street. I resumed my running, but I never saw Hassan again. All traffic ceased.Ī few days later, sensing the disruption they had caused, the Americans made an opening in the razor wire so pedestrians could walk through. A barricade now stood between me and the rest of the neighborhood. Somebody somewhere had decided that the Sheraton Hotel, which sat just 100 yards away, was too easy a target for the car bombers, who had begun striking the city. One night, without warning, a wall of razor wire went up across Abu Nawas Street. We ran together some more, and Hassan motioned again across the river. Hassan motioned across the Tigris, toward the sprawling compound that once housed Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace and that was now the headquarters of the American occupation. We ran together for a while, me in my running shoes, he in his bare feet. The Iraqi boy, who was perhaps 9 years old, kept running the two and a half miles to the Jumhuriya Bridge, and as I turned to run back on a trail along the Tigris, he dropped off to wave goodbye.Ī few days later, at twilight, the same boy appeared again, picking up the trail along the Tigris. The locals sometimes did that, but usually they dropped off after 50 yards. He had been kicking a ball along Abu Nawas, and as I came running, he left his friends and started running next to me in his bare feet. Once, early on, a young Iraqi boy ran up alongside me. It was as if the city, in the heat of the afternoon, had exhausted itself, only to lighten with the setting sun. And yet at night when I hit the streets, in the fall of 2003, I could not find a trace. All day long reporting in the country, I encountered hostility and chaos, which was intense and growing and very real. In an odd but real way, my five-mile runs up Abu Nawas Street made me wonder what the war in Iraq was all about. My reception was always the same: cheering crowds, squealing children and happy stray dogs. I started running that same route every evening after that, usually well into twilight but early enough that the streets were still filled with people.
LONG WAR SECOND WAVE MOVIE
I felt I was living the scene in the movie “Rocky II,” when the character played by Sylvester Stallone goes for a training run in his Philadelphia neighborhood and all the children clamor after him. Children stopped their soccer games and ran after me even the stray dogs gave pursuit. “America good!” Abu Nawas was lined with fish restaurants that overlooked the Tigris as I passed, men held up chunks of masgouf, their beloved bony fish, and asked me to join. Men looked up and waved they held up bottles of water as I ran by. I felt like a revelation, like a prophet. The reaction of my neighbors was immediate. Running at night seemed reckless, but given the otherworldy heat, running during the day was impossible. And the Iraqis in the neighborhood were friendly, waving whenever we passed. The other houses around us were either abandoned or rented by foreigners: the French Embassy and the BBC were around the corner. In the beginning, Baghdad wasn’t that threatening. Cars motored past our front yard on their way to the Jumhuriya Bridge a couple of miles up the road. In those first days, we didn’t fortify the place no razor wire or blast walls, no watchtowers or machine guns mounted on the roof. We lived and worked there: an Ottoman-style house with a gated yard and a veranda on the second floor that looked out on a boulevard that tracked the eastern bank of the Tigris River. We had set up the New York Times office on Abu Nawas Street. If this ended badly, the only thing anyone would remember was how stupid I was. It was a Thursday in July 2003, twilight, and well over 100 degrees.
I pulled on my running shoes and stepped into the sweltering streets.
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