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Tales from the Sandbox: Utopia is Green

Baghdad, Iraq — March 15, 2006

So everybody’s heard about the Green Zone here. It’s the area of Baghdad with all the government buildings occupied by Americans, Iraqis and officials of other nationalities. There are some palaces, an area called Little Venice, an area called Freedom Park, Iraq’s memorial to its war dead, Saddam’s monument to himself and more.

It is the consummate land of “fobbits,” the people who inhabit the forward operating bases in Iraq but never, ever go to the war.

There are swimming pools, banks, post offices, snack bars, laundry facilities, restaurants, gift shops, gyms, a hospital, a women’s outpatient clinic, a food and shopping court, a convention center, a hotel, an area for transient journalists in a building called Ocean Cliffs (named by the British, who used to live here – obviously there’s no ocean anywhere nearby).

There are all manner of living quarters. Most Westerners living and working here operate out of comfortable Internet-wired trailers surrounded by piles of sandbags.

There’s a heliport with a busy passenger terminal, dusty parking lots packed with gigantic SUVs — some armored, some not — and throngs of men who look like the square-jawed Team America puppets — a lot of whom live in a prison yard-like area known as “the man camp.”

I’ve seen Western women dressed in a manner more consistent with downtown Washington, D.C., than a war zone and others running at midday in the kind of skimpy clothes you’d see in South Beach. I’ve seen civilian women in the chow hall with sidearms, presumably working in an official law enforcement or security capacity. one in particular caught my eye because of her unusual get-up. She was wearing some sort of pull-on pants made of what looked like parachute material and her sidearm challenged the limits of the elastic waistband. She wore a tight polo shirt and spike heeled shoes with pointy toes. Her coiffed hair was perfect.

There are a lot of Iraqis working here, too — the men dressed neatly in shirts and slacks with leather shoes and women in dark clothing, some with their heads covered, others not, some in sexy jeans, others in abayas, the black head-to-toe cloak familiar in Muslim culture. They belong here and eventually will get all this back.

The Iraqi journalists are brave men and women; some of their colleagues have given their lives for writing critically of the goings-on in their country.

But for now, as one U.S. citizen working in the Green Zone put it, “it’s an American utopia. Everyone should live like this.”

At the Blue Star restaurant, the wine and beer flow as medical evacuation and attack helicopters pass overhead, deals are made and journalists discuss story ideas.

It has been described as the “heavily fortified” Green Zone, and it’s true that you can’t just walk in to the area. You’d definitely be, um, stopped in you tracks.

But I think the real fortification comes in the form of a little piece of plastic about the size of a credit card … the coveted all-access U.S. Embassy badge.

And, of course, last but certainly not least, there are scores of American GIs of every rank, the most visible being the soldiers who patrol in their up-armored humvees, with gunners manning 50-caliber machine guns. They race around and keep things safe, as do Air Force police, working dogs and hundreds of contracted men brought in from other nations who check badges and fight the boredom of manning a checkpoint.

Army Times photographer James J. Lee and I have been here for a week writing a story about the 10th Combat Support Hospital and we’d like to thank our hosts at Ocean Cliffs — the Coalition Press Information Center — for putting up with us as we move out to spend some time getting dirty and wearing our body armor for a change.