Mandelstam, Myself Included by Mary Susannah Robbins - HTML preview

CHAPTER 32

IRAQ

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In February of 2003 I flew to Iraq because I wanted to see what was really going on and it seemed as if they weren‘t telling us. I took a BOAC plane with a lot of Arabs – they served us sandwiches and potato chips. We were supposed to fly to Basra but everywhere was in shock and awe and we had to land on an airstrip outside the no-fly zone. The plane was just going to refuel and turn around and come back, and they let us walk outside. In the distance there were a lot of telephone poles and something like windmills. An old stone foundation lay on the airfield partly covered with weeds.

I walked to a hill and I saw an ambulance, white with a red cross on it, hit and blown up.

I saw people‘s limbs, toes and fingernails and even ―organs‖ flying around. Part of a burlap sack flew up in the air. The blast singed my dress and I was crying and screaming.

I can still smell the smell of burning flesh in my nostrils.

I dashed back to the plane. There was a sunset and a rainbow and raindrops all over the nose cone, which was red and blue, of the plane.

We flew back and I went to sleep. I had the most terrible jet lag.

This is what prompted me to do my book, Peace Not Terror: Leaders of the Antiwar Movement Speak Out Against U.S. Foreign Policy Post 9/11.

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