Just sitting down to dinner is sometimes an upended feat.
I was invited to dinner Monday night at Omar’s house. Omar is an Iraqi man who lives in Saqlawriya, a small town west of Fallujah. His house is next to a former college dormitory that the Marines have turned into a forward operating base. At the base, the Marines “cook” their own meals by super-heating pre-cooked, frozen packets of chicken, pork chops, whatever, then dumping them into a serving tray much like preparing large vats of Lean Cuisine dinners. They have a big-screen television with movies and a new X-Box, courtesy of a Navy corpsman whose sister mailed it last week. They have a weight room and air conditioning and showers. There’s no Internet and not much else.
Omar’s house is new, built in the year since the same company of Marines lived at the same dormitory a year ago. The Marines, Fox Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, were in Saqlawriya a year ago on a seven-month tour. They’re back in the same area again, another seven months that is set to end in August. They could get extended for 90 days, but it seems unlikely, they say. The battalion is supposed to stay home through this fall, six months of time off, before heading back to Iraq again. In the past few months, the company’s captain, a 31-year-old from Meterie, La., has made friends with his neighbor and has an open invitation to dinner. If too much time passes between visits, Omar sends food over to the camp. When we walked over Monday night – after 8:30 p.m. in the cover of darkness – we brought back a stack of plates from the last gift of food. Omar’s wife has been known to slip fresh baked flat bread through the barriers that surround the base to Humvees passing by, giving the Marines a snack on their way to patrol.
The darkness was to protect Omar, not the Marines. Earlier in the day, the captain and Omar had seen each other on the town’s main street. They barely made eye contact. Omar is a landlord for some of the small businesses in town, and he’s a general contractor. He’s helping his tenants rebuild after a car bomb last month destroyed part of the main market. Monday afternoon, the captain was walking around and listening to complaints about how a closed bridge in the city was suffocating business. He was planning to reopen it on Tuesday. The vendors are r
esilient. Since the April bombing they’ve cleaned and continued to sell vegetables, sew clothes, run money exchanges. One man’s stand held sacks of lentils, fava beans, cinnamon, rice and some brown crunchy nuggets that no one could quite translate. They are from Italy, the translator explained, so very expensive and they put them in soup and one kilo sells for $25 or more. The dogs must find them. “Truffles!” I said. “White truffles.” Yes, they agreed, while I looked at the bag that would sell at Whole Foods for hundreds of dollars.
In between Fox Company’s past deployment and now, Omar has finished his house. It’s at least two stories, probably three, with a patio roof that Iraqi use for sleeping during the summer months. I wasn’t invited upstairs. Nor was I invited in the kitchen, the domain of women in the family. We entered the main family room, empty save for a sink in one corner and a television and plastic chairs in another. To the right was the dining room, a space lined with mats and surrounded by cushions and pillows against three walls. A hutch in the corner held the family’s
valuables – dusty tea cups, stuffed animals, drinking glasses, ashtrays, all decorated with a vine of yellow, plastic flowers. Beside it was a press-board computer desk with a hard drive and screen. The room, at mealtime, is reserved for men, and I was invited inside.
Omar is the eldest in his family, and he as such he served his guests. His wife, dressed in a sea green dress and head scarf, looked wonderfully fresh after cooking all day. We were filthy, sweaty and worn from an afternoon walking the streets in full gear. We took our boots off and sat. The air conditioner in the window blew tepid, stale air. No one seemed to mind. Omar invited his two friends, two engineers, to dinner as well. One man brought his family, a wife and twin daughters. Along with Omar’s son and daughter, the children came in one by one to shake hands with their visitors. For the rest of the night they giggled between a Tom and Jerry video and our doorway, where they looked at me and whispered.
Omar opened the bottled water, poured it into wine glasses, and served them from a silver tray. We waited about 15 or 20 minutes for the meal. One of the engineers spoke English, and he asked how I liked Saqlawriya. It’s like a small American town? He asked. Yes, I said, where everybody knows everybody. It’s no exaggeration. If there were a small-town paper here, people would turn to the obits and police blotter first to see who died and who caught trouble. That’s what the Marines are counting on. Fox Company has been here since February, and they are just starting to gain enough trust from locals to get anonymous tips on people who are harboring and perpetuating the violence. The tips must come under the guise of some other communication – a complaint about water service, a request for reimbursement for damage caused by Marines – to protect the informer from the ones who want to kill.
Omar, too, walks that line. In the privacy of his own house he tells the captain what’s going on in town, who is stealing water from the town pipes, what a fair price is for repaving the streets. The engineers do the same. They explained how the man who owns the car wash has pretended to dig a well to rinse away suds. In reality, he’s tapped into the water system that already is too weak to serve all ends of town.
The wife brought dinner to the door, and Omar retrieved it and put it on the floor. First there were pickles, okra, hot peppers, cucumbers, sour and spicy. Then, bowls of lamb and tomato and okra soup. Finally Omar brought in the upside down and gingerly set the giant tray in the middle of the picnic. It was a tureen of sort, with a foundation of steamed rice in turmeric, then crowned with layers of chicken, potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes. It stood like timbale, the Italian delicacy made in “Big Night” full of pasta and meats and cooked slowly in a drum of pastry casing. But this had no case, just yellow rice and rich chicken and roasted eggplant all held together by their own juices. The dish is called, simply, upside down, and I have no idea how she made it hold together.
The last item food handed through the door was a foot-high stack of freshly baked bread. It’s like Indian naan, but more pliable and chewier and about twice as large. Each diner takes a disc and tears at it through the meal, using the pieces to soak up soup and grab parts of the upside down as it starts to fall apart. Omar was thoughtful enough to pass out plates and spoons, but they were an afterthought. Like my presence, no one seemed to mind that I kept eating with my left hand.
After dinner, Omar cleared the floor. He brought out the ashtrays and served the chai, strong hot tea filled with sugar that makes southern sweet tea tart by comparison. The talk grew more serious. The city council hasn’t met since last year, and they’re scared to turn to the Marines openly. They want the tunnels under the train tracks blocked to further limit travel to and from the city. The reopening of the bridge in town is good for business, but also good for car bombers. They want the local police to be more confident, to come out and settle neighborly disputes like real cops. They are worried that the police are corrupt. As the conversation went on, Omar’s daughter brought in a flash light. The lights at Omar’s house are fueled by a grid that switches off at night. It was 10:30 p.m., and it would soon be lights out.
The engineer turned to me again. Before you go back to America, he said, tell them this. We cannot do it alone. We need your help. You cannot leave us here. We want to do great things. “Without your help, we can’t do it.” I nodded and took notes.
We left Omar’s about 11 p.m. The kids were still up, anxious to get on the computer once the grown-ups left the room. One Marine let Omar’s son practice holding his body armor. The boy couldn’t lift the vest on his own. The daughter asked if my armor was as strong as the Marines. Not as heavy, I said, but as strong. The men shook my hand. We said thank you and good-bye. Omar’s wife was not in sight. We left and crossed the field between his house and the Marine base in the darkness. Omar’s lights were still on.
I was invited to dinner Monday night at Omar’s house. Omar is an Iraqi man who lives in Saqlawriya, a small town west of Fallujah. His house is next to a former college dormitory that the Marines have turned into a forward operating base. At the base, the Marines “cook” their own meals by super-heating pre-cooked, frozen packets of chicken, pork chops, whatever, then dumping them into a serving tray much like preparing large vats of Lean Cuisine dinners. They have a big-screen television with movies and a new X-Box, courtesy of a Navy corpsman whose sister mailed it last week. They have a weight room and air conditioning and showers. There’s no Internet and not much else.
Omar’s house is new, built in the year since the same company of Marines lived at the same dormitory a year ago. The Marines, Fox Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, were in Saqlawriya a year ago on a seven-month tour. They’re back in the same area again, another seven months that is set to end in August. They could get extended for 90 days, but it seems unlikely, they say. The battalion is supposed to stay home through this fall, six months of time off, before heading back to Iraq again. In the past few months, the company’s captain, a 31-year-old from Meterie, La., has made friends with his neighbor and has an open invitation to dinner. If too much time passes between visits, Omar sends food over to the camp. When we walked over Monday night – after 8:30 p.m. in the cover of darkness – we brought back a stack of plates from the last gift of food. Omar’s wife has been known to slip fresh baked flat bread through the barriers that surround the base to Humvees passing by, giving the Marines a snack on their way to patrol.
The darkness was to protect Omar, not the Marines. Earlier in the day, the captain and Omar had seen each other on the town’s main street. They barely made eye contact. Omar is a landlord for some of the small businesses in town, and he’s a general contractor. He’s helping his tenants rebuild after a car bomb last month destroyed part of the main market. Monday afternoon, the captain was walking around and listening to complaints about how a closed bridge in the city was suffocating business. He was planning to reopen it on Tuesday. The vendors are r
esilient. Since the April bombing they’ve cleaned and continued to sell vegetables, sew clothes, run money exchanges. One man’s stand held sacks of lentils, fava beans, cinnamon, rice and some brown crunchy nuggets that no one could quite translate. They are from Italy, the translator explained, so very expensive and they put them in soup and one kilo sells for $25 or more. The dogs must find them. “Truffles!” I said. “White truffles.” Yes, they agreed, while I looked at the bag that would sell at Whole Foods for hundreds of dollars.
In between Fox Company’s past deployment and now, Omar has finished his house. It’s at least two stories, probably three, with a patio roof that Iraqi use for sleeping during the summer months. I wasn’t invited upstairs. Nor was I invited in the kitchen, the domain of women in the family. We entered the main family room, empty save for a sink in one corner and a television and plastic chairs in another. To the right was the dining room, a space lined with mats and surrounded by cushions and pillows against three walls. A hutch in the corner held the family’s
valuables – dusty tea cups, stuffed animals, drinking glasses, ashtrays, all decorated with a vine of yellow, plastic flowers. Beside it was a press-board computer desk with a hard drive and screen. The room, at mealtime, is reserved for men, and I was invited inside.Omar is the eldest in his family, and he as such he served his guests. His wife, dressed in a sea green dress and head scarf, looked wonderfully fresh after cooking all day. We were filthy, sweaty and worn from an afternoon walking the streets in full gear. We took our boots off and sat. The air conditioner in the window blew tepid, stale air. No one seemed to mind. Omar invited his two friends, two engineers, to dinner as well. One man brought his family, a wife and twin daughters. Along with Omar’s son and daughter, the children came in one by one to shake hands with their visitors. For the rest of the night they giggled between a Tom and Jerry video and our doorway, where they looked at me and whispered.
Omar opened the bottled water, poured it into wine glasses, and served them from a silver tray. We waited about 15 or 20 minutes for the meal. One of the engineers spoke English, and he asked how I liked Saqlawriya. It’s like a small American town? He asked. Yes, I said, where everybody knows everybody. It’s no exaggeration. If there were a small-town paper here, people would turn to the obits and police blotter first to see who died and who caught trouble. That’s what the Marines are counting on. Fox Company has been here since February, and they are just starting to gain enough trust from locals to get anonymous tips on people who are harboring and perpetuating the violence. The tips must come under the guise of some other communication – a complaint about water service, a request for reimbursement for damage caused by Marines – to protect the informer from the ones who want to kill.
Omar, too, walks that line. In the privacy of his own house he tells the captain what’s going on in town, who is stealing water from the town pipes, what a fair price is for repaving the streets. The engineers do the same. They explained how the man who owns the car wash has pretended to dig a well to rinse away suds. In reality, he’s tapped into the water system that already is too weak to serve all ends of town.
The wife brought dinner to the door, and Omar retrieved it and put it on the floor. First there were pickles, okra, hot peppers, cucumbers, sour and spicy. Then, bowls of lamb and tomato and okra soup. Finally Omar brought in the upside down and gingerly set the giant tray in the middle of the picnic. It was a tureen of sort, with a foundation of steamed rice in turmeric, then crowned with layers of chicken, potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes. It stood like timbale, the Italian delicacy made in “Big Night” full of pasta and meats and cooked slowly in a drum of pastry casing. But this had no case, just yellow rice and rich chicken and roasted eggplant all held together by their own juices. The dish is called, simply, upside down, and I have no idea how she made it hold together.
The last item food handed through the door was a foot-high stack of freshly baked bread. It’s like Indian naan, but more pliable and chewier and about twice as large. Each diner takes a disc and tears at it through the meal, using the pieces to soak up soup and grab parts of the upside down as it starts to fall apart. Omar was thoughtful enough to pass out plates and spoons, but they were an afterthought. Like my presence, no one seemed to mind that I kept eating with my left hand.
After dinner, Omar cleared the floor. He brought out the ashtrays and served the chai, strong hot tea filled with sugar that makes southern sweet tea tart by comparison. The talk grew more serious. The city council hasn’t met since last year, and they’re scared to turn to the Marines openly. They want the tunnels under the train tracks blocked to further limit travel to and from the city. The reopening of the bridge in town is good for business, but also good for car bombers. They want the local police to be more confident, to come out and settle neighborly disputes like real cops. They are worried that the police are corrupt. As the conversation went on, Omar’s daughter brought in a flash light. The lights at Omar’s house are fueled by a grid that switches off at night. It was 10:30 p.m., and it would soon be lights out.
The engineer turned to me again. Before you go back to America, he said, tell them this. We cannot do it alone. We need your help. You cannot leave us here. We want to do great things. “Without your help, we can’t do it.” I nodded and took notes.
We left Omar’s about 11 p.m. The kids were still up, anxious to get on the computer once the grown-ups left the room. One Marine let Omar’s son practice holding his body armor. The boy couldn’t lift the vest on his own. The daughter asked if my armor was as strong as the Marines. Not as heavy, I said, but as strong. The men shook my hand. We said thank you and good-bye. Omar’s wife was not in sight. We left and crossed the field between his house and the Marine base in the darkness. Omar’s lights were still on.
1 comment:
Omar and his family and town do need our help. The question is how long can we give it. The US and world seems upside down at times.
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