My sight-seeing tour of Baghdad

2005-04-08, 4:14 p.m.

Well, I finally got to go out and cover a REAL story today, now that I'm away from the Office Of Sickening Insanity for a week or so.

I went out on a patrol with one of the infantry units, whose job includes helping to train the Iraqi soldiers to do their jobs, so we can get out of here and come back home eventually.

Or something.

The Iraqis, most of them, at least, are still pretty new at being functional, ("herding cats" is the term one of our guys used to describe the training process) so they need lots of help, but everyone training them seems to think they're coming along nicely.

On the patrol, we went to quite a few places.

The first one was some kind of garbage dump next to the Tigris River (but then, a lot of places in Baghdad look like a garbage dump) where the soldiers looked for unexploded ordances and other fun stuff.

They found a couple of old log books from the Special Republican Guard, Saddam's boys, among other things, like defunct RPGs and rusted ammo.

I got a souvenir of my own: an old Iraqi army helmet. It looks pretty beat, but now when I get bored at home, I can put it on and pretend I work for free for a ruthless dictator.

After the dump, we went to an ex-theater, which you could tell was once pretty amazing, but is now a bit of a wreck.

How much of a wreck?

Well, there are people illegally living in it, and since they don't have any electricity or plumbing, they made a huge hole in the floor, into which they put all their excrement and garbage ... it's about 7 feet high.

The smell almost knocked me over when I walked up; it's such a sobering thing to see people actually living like that.

There were some little children living there in the vicinity of the Massive Shitpile and they absolutely LOVED my camera, especially when I took pictures of them and let them see themselves on the display. I hated to walk away from them.

After we left, someone told me that the kids were the siblings of one of the Iraqi soldiers with us, and that the soldier lived in that place.

Talk about bad military housing ... this guy lives a few feet away from a steaming dooky mound.

We then took a little jaunt over to Saddam's private prison ... possibly the most unsettling place I've ever been.

The cells were maybe 5 feet by 3 feet, and used to hold 25-30 people at a time, they said. There was a tiny window in each cell, which was the only source of light, and a hole of about 1 foot in diameter served as the toilet.

All over the walls you could see where people made scratches to keep a tally of the days they had been there, and notes that said things like, "I beg the prophet Mohammed to help me."

We were told that we didn't need to be afraid of insurgent attacks while we were at the prison, because they're all afraid to come near it, even though it's completely empty, and mostly destroyed, by now.

I can't even imagine being afraid of an inanimate object, but I guess that speaks volumes for the horrible things that used to happen here.

We visited a few other places around town, and in the process, I almost was slain by the driver of my humvee, who kept pretending to try to run people over and laughing maniacally at every turn.

When we passed the whorehouse ("the world's oldest profession"), everyone pointed it out, which I found a bit scary ... along with some of the other "sights of the city:"