Topic: Scary Stuff
Two days ago, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vest at the popular Ibn Zanbour restaurant, which is a few hundred yards from a heavily guarded Green Zone checkpoint, and unsettlingly close to my compound. Although the attack technically happened out in Red Zone, the effects of the bombing were felt inside the Green Zone. The explosion rattled windows, and frustrated police officers who arrived on the scene after the attack and saw dead colleagues laying twisted in pieces on the street decided to relive their frustration by firing rounds into the air. Some of those rounds landed inside the Green Zone.

From the safe confines of my compound's new bunker-like office building, I didn't hear anything. Although warning sirens went off inside my compound and I wondered what was happening, I was told that I was safe inside the nifty, new office building. The engineers who built the structure designed it to protect me from "distractions" such as this.