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Bad start to the day

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

May 5, 2004

Baghdad, Iraq - Last night, I worked till 3 a.m., and I've been running short on sleep for several nights. So early this morning, when an explosion rattled the glass doors to my hotel room balcony, I came only about two-thirds awake. I stared, stupid with sleep, at my watch, imploring it to make sense.

Whenever an explosion rattles Baghdad, people check their watches. That's because U.S. troops who are blowing up captured ammunition or other unwanted ordinance generally do it on the hour. That helps everyone know it was a controlled explosion instead of a catastrophe.

Now my befuddled brain told me it was almost exactly 7:00 -- so the explosion was no big deal and I should go back to sleep.

But maybe I wasn't sure, because an hour later, I was stumbling out of bed to the shortwave to snap on the BBC. The explosion had been a car bomb, the radio said, at the southern entrance to the Green Zone, the U.S. occupation headquarters in Baghdad.

My hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris, offers a fine view of the river and the Green Zone (which is centered on Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace). Across the river, I now noticed, a few helicopters were buzzing like wasps amid a pall of smoke hanging over the Green Zone. I dug out my binoculars and hesitantly stepped onto the balcony for a look.

Hesitantly because, for journalists, binoculars can be a double-edged sword in a war zone. Given that our purpose here is to witness and report what's going on, a compact pair of binoculars seems entirely to the point: it lets us see further, especially when movement is difficult. (I first got the habit 20 years ago, covering the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)

But in a conflict in which you cross the lines between the fighting forces, or in which you can be suspected as a spy by men with guns, binoculars can be a problem. And Iraq can be a high-suspicion environment, notably for a journalist with an American passport. So I've kept the binox stowed away.

Even from the relative safety of my hotel-room balcony, I was a little nervous using the binoculars. The American soldiers who guard the street below in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle are more likely to understand that a journalist isn't a spy. But you never know. Wars turn ordinary things fearful, for them as well as us.

Smoke was still rising from behind the thick growth of date palms around the palace where Paul Bremer administers Iraq. As I watched, the calm voice of the BBC floated out of the open door behind me. Five Iraqis were reported dead and three soldiers badly injured. All signs were that it was a suicide bomb.

We haven't had suicide bombs in Baghdad these past weeks, since a spate of them earlier in the spring. Some U.S. officials say they think the U.S. blockade around Fallujah has cut off the bombings here, because Fallujah was where the bombs were coming from. We don't know, of course. But maybe now, I've got to be quicker to jump when there's an explosion -- even if it comes on the hour.