RELEASES in JUNE 2012
Author's Note:
This book is the story of parallel events occurring in a desert outpost in Iraq in 2003 and 2010. The chapters are staggered between those years: odd numbered chapters based in 2003; even numbered in 2010.
However, no chapter is an island. There are no clean separations of time—not in the book; not in life. Every yesterday influenced today. Every today, tomorrow. Every parent, every child, every war, every bomb, every bullet that finds its target leaves an impression that continues through time.
How well our history informs us, shapes perspectives and prejudices, is a matter separate and subjective. But its influence is immortal, from Holy Land clashes to stock market crashes, from the Ottoman Empire to an American Superpower . . . and so on.
Which brings us to Iraq. Literally. Twice. Some lessons are so revealing and counterintuitive that they bear repeating. Still, history repeats. So, here you go.
Nine days into the 2003 war three American peacemakers figured they were as good as dead after their taxi was wrecked on a desolate stretch of an Iraqi highway. Injuries—serious and critical—were not considered to be the biggest threat. Survival hinged on the humanity of the “enemy.” The nearest town, Rutba, was a hub of the Ba’athist despot; it was reputed to be hard, hostile, gritty. Civilian Americans didn’t go there. Iraq’s Fedayeen fighters were there, and three days earlier the town’s only hospital had been bombed by U.S. forces.
Spoiler alert: Rutba saved the Americans. Never hesitated. Refused payment, even. Hugged them, bandaged them, stitched them, planted kisses on their cheeks, and sent them away from the war that they were stuck in. It asked only that the Americans use this lesson of shared humanity to seed more of it. Pay it forward.
Fifteen days into 2010 the three Americans returned to Rutba and were given more seeds for planting and sharing. This time they brought with them an Iraq war combat veteran and student peacemaker; a Christian Peacemaker Teams member who had been kidnapped in Iraqi Kurdistan; an Iraqi-Muslim who, after the invasion, moved from the United States to Iraq and founded a Muslim peace movement; a documentary filmmaker; and me.
As in 2003, the peacemakers returned in 2010 without guns or any conventional security. Unarmed and with their hands extended in friendship, they entrusted their lives (by choice this time) to the locals of Rutba.