Saddam Hussein is Dead

Saddam Hussein has dropped through the floor and hung by the neck until dead. And the feeling in the pit of my stomach is one I recognize and one I don't like. I've had it before, and something bad always happens.

On October 11, 1996 I had this feeling and couldn't shake it. I came home from work and tried all manner of distractions, to no avail. I tried to take a nap and I had a horribly vivid dream. I saw my '68 Cougar slamming into a specific pole on a specific corner that I passed every day on my way to and from work. I saw the steering wheel collapse and the steering column impale my chest, and I saw myself die. Like I said, it was vivid. I sat bolt upright in a cold sweat, and went to take a shower.

I had just stripped down and was ready to step into the shower when the phone rang. It was a policeman telling me that my youngest daughter had been struck by a car as she broke every rule we had stressed to her. She had attempted to cross Highway 99 to get to the convenience store on the other side and bubble gum.

I pulled on my clothes and stepped into my Birkenstocks and flew out the back door to the intersection the policeman told me they were. They were a block to the north, and I literally ran out of my shoes. Someone fetched them for me, apparently, because someone handed them to me before the ambulance left, and I recall first telling the ambulance driver to go to the hospital where I was employed; then having him turn around and go to another facility because if I lost it I didn't want my co-workers to see me flip out.

As it turns out I didn't flip out. In fact, when the nurse couldn't set the IV, I did it. I hadn't even thought about what I would say to my husband, who was (I thought) out of the country. Then I looked up, and there he stood, in the trauma room, with a look on his face I haven't seen since he had to go with the detail to tell a pregnant wife of an Airman in his command that her husband had been killed in a car accident. He had finagled two weeks leave and come home to be with the child in the trauma bay on her ninth birthday, a mere eight days hence.

And that is when I lost it.

We took her home a few hours later. Her front tooth had been reimplanted, and she had stitches in a couple of places, and one of them on her forhead was very nasty. There was a spot under her bangs, barely visible now, that looked like hamburger. We would spend the next year going to endodontists and orthodontists and plastic surgeons. (Her father would soon leave again and be gone for another six months, but I didn't have to face that alone. Apparently I could have, but I am grateful I didn't have to.)

As we talked on the way home, I told him about the feeling in the pit of my stomach and he told me to take a piece of paper out of his pocket. He had the same feeling and wrote me a final love-letter on the plane, he was convinced it was going to crash.

Tonight we have that same feeling, and we hope we are wrong.

We don't want to see the country finish imploding, we don't want to see the Green Zone over run and we don't want to see mass casualties.

I hope like hell my gut is wrong.

Shades of Amara

A little over a month ago, militias ran amok in Amara and showed the world that the coallition forces really don't have much control or say in how the hand plays out, and if Sadr want's chaos, chaos will ensue.

Today, we learned that Baqouba has been shut down, due to fierce fighting between insurgents and coallition forces. Schools and stores are closed, streets are deserted and violence flares.

And more and more, the U.S. military is repositioning to Baghdad, in an effort to quell the violence and prop up the nascent government. God damnit I can't help but see a Fall of Saigon moment and one last huey off of a rooftop in the green zone. I see the green zone over run. I see chaos and plunder and gory bloody death in the cradle of civilization. I hope I'm just paranoid and wrong. I also hope I get a pony for Christmas.

We have been there longer than we were involved in World War II. We have spent nearly $350 Billion dollars, and what have we accomplished? The conviction of a dictator in a show-trial and a sectarian civil war in a formerly stable and secular arab country, whether the president says we can call it that or not?

I'm glad I have finals to take my mind off this madness and I am glad I'm iced in. As long as I can make coffee and study, I'll eventually get my head around how fucked up everything is and get back on the horse. But right now, pardon me while I descend into a brown study. As a wise man once said, "Look what the Decider decided to do."