Uday's Palace

Sheridan 1 Brooke Sheridan ENG 580 Portfolio Paper #6 Uday’s Palace Our convoy followed a paved road through some park-like acreage in central Baghdad, near the Green Zone. I had been in Baghdad for about three months and this was one of my first trips off our base, located in the Southwest corner of the city. The convoy slowed when it entered the park since it no longer had to keep up with the furious local traffic. It was May, and there was suddenly an abundance of green. None of us was used to seeing green in Baghdad. Our base was sort of homogeneously tan, from the dirt up to the buildings, to the people. It made the alwaysclear sky seem even bluer. The convoy pulled up to a shell of a building, and I heard someone say it was Uday Hussein’s bombed-out palace, and we were there to take a look around. During the lulls in attacks on coalition forces, our command made efforts to get us off post and into the Green Zone or BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) areas, to break the monotony of deployment and hopefully lift any flagging morale. There was a relative peace in those areas, along with shopping and restaurants, and little Iraqi kids selling gum and bootleg DVD’s on the streets. Uday’s palace was a tourist destination for us.

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Image courtesy Jon Mike

Sheridan 2 The palace itself was bombed by Navy missiles during the first strike on the city in early 2003. Uday Hussein, Saddam’s eldest son, was killed a few months later, in July of 2003, and by all accounts the palace was empty when the missiles hit. I’m guessing command’s motivation behind having us visit this place was for us to see proof of the force we worked for, or to share in the sense of accomplishment that we maybe didn’t feel on the day-to-day level of deployment. I think they were offering us a bigger picture.

I went inside the palace with two other soldiers, Maria and Iris, and our platoon leader, Jon. We were all in military intelligence in one capacity or another, and none of us was madly in love with our jobs or the army. That only matters insofar as our shared sense of what it meant to be walking through the very real evidence of American firepower – unlike the more gung-ho soldiers who were visiting the palace, we weren’t climbing on top of piles of rubble and having our friends take pictures of us making the “thumbs up” sign.

Iris, Maria, Jon and I walked through the first floor of the palace. Paths had been swept through the rubble to allow people to walk through. For a site of destruction, it actually had its own sense of order. It was a clean mess. There was no trash, no pillow-stuffing floating in the air, no torn pictures askew on the walls. No blood. Of course, the place had been thoroughly looted at this point, almost a year after the bombing. What remained were uniformly gray-tan piles of plaster, stone, and other building materials. We walked through the debris separately, looking around. At one point I looked up and saw Maria, a petite blonde counterintelligence agent with an M-16 slung over her back, standing in the path looking up at the portions of the high ceilings that remained enough to keep us all in shadow. Sunlight made it through a high-up hole in the wall and Maria was silhouetted by the shaft of light and motes. She turned around and

Sheridan 3 said to me, “Wild, huh?” Then she shrugged. It was the best sense we could make of it at the time.

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I knew Uday Hussein’s reputation at that point as a self-indulgent, entitled man who enjoyed gratuitous sex and violence and could afford to pay for both, or at least to keep them as hidden as he needed to. I didn’t feel like we were walking through Uday’s bombed out home; it felt like being inside an abandoned hotel. There were, of course, bombed out homes in other areas of the city, but we weren’t visiting those places.

There were ponds outside the palace with lily pads and reeds growing in them. There was no scum of garbage accumulated around the edge of these man-made ponds. There were geese.

This may have been the oddest part of the trip for me, seeing geese. They were carrying on so normally. The only other animals I saw in Iraq, besides the little birds that scavenged in the dirt on base, were feral dogs and a kitten we found in the barracks. We fawned over the kitten for a day until some short-straw soldier came and took her away, to get burned in the stray animal trench. Another plume of black smoke going up in the sky.

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Image courtesy Jon Mike

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I looked through the rubble at Uday’s, kicked around a few pieces with my toe. I found a bit of plaster frippery that looked like it had been the corner piece of an elaborate picture frame.

It was a small curlicue, about the size of an orange, and reminded me of the head of a duck. It was dusty with a thin coat of gold paint underneath. I put it in the cargo pocket of my uniform pants, though we weren’t supposed to take anything. I kept it because it reminded me of the head of a duck. It sat on a table in my room for a few weeks, and then I put it in a padded envelope and mailed it to my dad, told him it came from Uday’s bombed out palace. He wrote back, utterly delighted with this loot. He mounted it in a shadow box and it hangs framed on his wall.

Let me correct something – it didn’t feel like walking around in an abandoned hotel. It felt like walking around in a post-blast proving ground house. There was no sense that anyone had ever lived in Uday’s house, not the way we live in a home. No shattered dishes, no poignantly severed doll heads. It felt like a structure that was made to destroyed. If bodies had been pulled from the debris, I may have felt differently. But the palace felt symbolic, both as Uday’s playground and as a target for the missiles. The only aspects of the destruction that gave me an ache were the deteriorating mosaics on the floors and walls. The massive carport outside 3

Image courtesy Jon Mike

Sheridan 5 the palace was essentially intact, and I could see evidence of the complete work of the mosaicists – they were the only real people connected to this place for me. I dramatically imagine Uday lounging with a cocktail, underdressed women fanning him with palm fronds while he barks at a lackey to “whip harder!” at the sweating artist, laying one little colored tile at a time to create this elaborate and beautiful design meant, essentially, to decorate a garage.

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On the way to BIAP, convoys can see the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. Before we knew what it was, we generally agreed that it was a hideous structure, looking more like a thick, concrete clam shell than the falling shield it’s meant to represent. It was visible only from a distance – the road we travelled was several hundred meters from the monument.

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Every time we drove past it, somebody would wonder “why didn’t we bomb that?” and we’d laugh. After we finally learned what it was, we still thought it was ugly, but few continued to suggest bombing it.

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Image courtesy Jon Mike Image via Flickr

Sheridan 6 Last year I lived in Washington, DC for a few months, and often travelled in and out of the city on one of the main highways that went past the Pentagon. There is a tall structure near the Pentagon, visible from far away, of three pointed plumes rising and then arching away from each other at the ends, like a minimalist fountain, or Brâncuşi’s Bird in Space. I thought it was striking, and then learned it was the Air Force Memorial, and it took on a different meaning for me.

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Or more meaning, anyway. I remembered the Baghdad monument, and the weight of it. It seems like it shouldn’t be able to support itself. The cube below the Baghdad monument is made of seven layers of metal, meant to represent the seven levels of heaven for Islam. While it may seem the shield is protecting the cube, I can’t help thinking that it seems like the cube is in constant danger of being crushed by the shield. The Air Force memorial is reminiscent of airshow fighter jets, flying in formation and then just disappearing.

I don’t know if tactitians knew, or at least suspected, that Uday’s palace was empty when they planned to bomb it. A lot of the post-Shock and Awe commentary I’ve read suggests that the military bombed the palaces and official residences on the off-chance that they’d get Saddam

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Image via Flickr

Sheridan 7 or his sons or other tactically important people. That “off-chance” bothers me, and is largely the reason I left the army as a conscientious objector. I don’t even know what to say after that. Were they looking for people or symbols? Who decides we can spend $2-3 million on a symbol? Or more, if someone’s aim is off. Of course the military didn’t bomb Baghdad’s Monument to the Unknown Soldier, if they were only looking for people. What if they had? It presents a massive overhead target and, I think, would have changed the face of that war. Would our command have decided to send us out on a day trip to walk the paths swept through the rubble of a dead monument?

I’m not attempting to hint at an answer here. Writing about the Iraq war, specifically, has been an act of meaning-making for me, just as I think it has been for the people responding to my questionnaire. I didn’t ask about the Baghdad monument, and no one mentioned it. I’d like to hear what they have to say about both that and Uday’s palace.

I write this in response to Brooks’ “In the Mecca,” and Martin’s “The Strangest Place in Chicago.” I initially considered creating a series of vignettes of the soldiers I knew (and know) who were in Baghdad with me, and also of some of the other “types” of soldiers I may not have known personally, but heard about every day. I decided to focus on my experience at Uday’s palace, which led me to think about the other monuments related to war.

A note: I took a lot of digital photos while I was in Baghdad, but they lived on a computer that has since been ruined, and the photos lost. After I wrote this paper, my (old Army) friend Jon called me and I thought to ask if he could send me all the photos he had of that palace trip. I was delighted that so many of the pictures he sent me fit into the essay so well.