I felt privileged to be in Baghdad today. Weird, I know, to talk
about the "privilege" of being in war zone. Personally,
I think the very act of war is nothing more than a demonstration
of humans at their worst. Blame whoever you want for this mess.
Blame Saddam Hussein. Blame George Bush. In the long run, it doesn't
matter. Killing other people is a stupid way to solve anything.
The privilege of working in a war zone is witnessing the extraordinary
dignity in the manner that other, innocent people choose to respond.
Today I watched volunteers digging bodies out of shallow, temporary
graves at a hospital. Each mound of dirt is marked with an empty
pop bottle. Inside the bottle is a written description of the
person in the grave. Parents and siblings shake the paper out
of each bottle and when they find a description that comes close
to describing the person they're looking for, the volunteers go
to work. They wear blue hospital smocks and rubber gloves. I watched
four of them, on their hands and knees, brushing the dirt away
from the cloth covering the face of someone's son. They do it
with all the care of a parent brushing the hair from a sleeping
child's face. It is horrible, and yet deeply moving to see the
respect they show, for both the living and the dead.
Also today, I visited another school. I was standing in yet more
debris, this time it was musical instruments. Violins, lutes and
oboes shattered on the floor. No reason. No rationale. Steal or
smash seemed to have been the motto. There was a piano, the only
one of its kind in the world, two keyboards, one in western tones
and half-tones, the other tuned to eastern quarter tones. Think,
if you will, in metaphorical terms of someone's painstaking effort
to integrate east and west in a single musical instrument. It
was smashed too.
A man was there too. Majid is his name. He had three sons at
the school. He was a music teacher there. I use the past tense
because he has no idea when or if, he or his children will ever
be back there. Majid is also principal second violin with the
Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. He'd brought his violin. He
unpacked it, and right there, in the utter disarray of his own
life and his sons' future…….he started to play. I recorded
it. You can hear it on The Connection on Friday's show. It was
a piece by the Iraqi composer Munir Bashir, called appropriately
"Baghdad Music." I held my microphone in one hand and
wiped tears from my eyes with the other.
I was privileged to be there.
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