Mood:
downNow Playing: Dave Brubeck Quartet
Topic: Gin&Tonics on the Tigris
Americans like me, which never made me feel comfortable when I when shopping for booze and especially when I had to kill time sitting in front of one. However, my greatest fear involved the EXO. If he had driven past the White House seeing my friend and I sitting on the corner with a case of booze without any helmets, cell phones, or working radios, I would have been in deep trouble. Needless to say, when S returned with the van, I let out a great sigh of relief.
Toward the end of my tour, I had grown very comfortable going to the liquor stores, especially the White House. Sadly, most liquor stores inside the Green Zone were closing during the final months of my tour. The stores had given in to the same pressures that forced liquor stores outside of the Green Zone to close. Strict Muslims had threatened liquor store owners, and even though the profitability of running liquor stores had kept them in business for many months, eventually the thought of dying convinced them that they had earned enough money to ride out the rest of the war.
The White House closed without any warning. In early December I drove up to the White House only to find that the owner had sold off the countless cases of booze and stacks of bootleg DVDs and moved everything into the small white blockhouse. As I went into the blockhouse to see what remained, I felt like I had slipped into someone’s secret hiding place. The blockhouse had grown dirty with only the single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The light didn’t even work. Only a few dusty bottles of wine remained. The owner smiled at me in hopes that I would buy one of the bottles. I felt that I buying for a crazy man as he leaned in close and motioned at the booze without saying anything. I left without saying anything.
Seeing what had happened to the White House and with the many rumors floating throughout the Green Zone of the American Ambassador soon-to-be-issued decree closing down all the liquor stores, I quickly drove to McDonalds to see what I could buy. Unfortunately, the store had completely emptied its outdoor beer storage area. The door to the caged area that normally stood locked and filled with cases of beer swung gently in the breeze and piles of garbage stood where the beer case were once stacked nearly 8 feet high. I didn’t even bother to go inside to check if the owner had any more bottles of wine or liquor. I heard that he had a small stash for preferred customers, but I didn’t want to disappear into a dark back room far from public eyes. I never wanted to be backed into a corner anywhere inside the Green Zone.
I drove over to the only other liquor store that I knew, the IZ Liquor Store, and found that, thankfully, it had remained open. Until that day when I found out that the other two stores were closed, I rarely went to the IZ Liquor Store for my drinking needs, partly because it has an infamous history. Before I arrived in the Iraq, insurgents snuck into the Zone and blew themselves up at the Green Zone Café, which shared the same compound as the liquor store. After the attack, most westerns stayed away from the Green Zone Café and the nearby liquor store partly out of fear that perhaps the insurgents would stage another attack. The State Department also forbade anyone from going to the café after it reopened. Perhaps I was naive, but since the State Department ruling didn’t specifically mention the liquor store and I needed a lot of beer for an upcoming party, I decided to take a risk and go there to fill my shopping needs.
In an effort to improve security after the suicide bomber attacks, the Green Zone Café and IZ Liquor Store hired a handful of poorly trained guards that would stand at the gates to their walled compound. Whenever someone approached the compound, the guards, who wore an old style of camouflage body armor dating back to the Vietnam war, would stand up and check to make sure everyone in the car had some type of U.S.-issued ID badge. Even a simple IZ ID Badge would work, which the U.S. gave to Iraqis working and living inside the Zone. Presumably, the owners rationalized that if the U.S. had giving someone a badge, they had already done a cursory level of screening on the badge holder. Additionally, even though I never asked the guard to make sure, it seemed that they would only let a car into the compound if it had at least one western.
The guards never seemed prepared or properly trained for their jobs as security officers. They didn’t carry a rifle or sidearm, even though the rest of the Iraq had enough weapons to open a small armory. The guards did check the underside of very vehicle for bombs using a small mirror, yet I never saw the guards open the hood and check in all the little nooks and corners surrounding the engine block that could serve as great places for hiding a bomb. Despite their apparent lack of this skill, the guard always said hello, even if they didn’t seem to know any other words of English. My drivers, some of whom were devote Muslims and didn’t drink, never said more than a few words to the guards, which lead me to believe that my drivers didn’t respect the guards. Considering that my drivers saw more soldiers, thugs, and terrorists than I would ever see in a lifetime, if they didn’t respect the guard, I couldn’t respect them either.
Driving across the small courtyard from the gate to the liquor store always reminded of how dangerous Iraq could be. Overhanging the small courtyard stood the ruminants of the awning that the insurgents blew into small pieces when they attacked the Green Zone Café. The walls of the compound were still blackened from the blast. Whenever I went to the liquor store with an old-timer, they shuttered slightly when they saw the blast mark. Old-timers always seemed to remember exactly where they were when the Green Zone Café and a nearby outdoor market had been attacked in 2004, almost like baby boomers who knew where they were when they learned that Oswald killed Kennedy, only this memory seemed much, much darker. Every old-timer mentioned how they had spent many hours at the café and seemed to feel very lucky that they weren’t there on the day it was attacked. Many mentioned how they were on the way to the café or had just left. They also said that the Green Zone felt much smaller after the attack. Nothing was safe anymore.
The liquor store itself was perhaps 40 feet long and 100 feet deep. Just like the other liquor stores, the owner had stacked a large assortment of beer, hard liquors, and wine stacked from the ground to the floor. However, unlike the other liquor stores, the owner seemed to understand that offering a wide variety would attract in a wide collection of customers. His selection of wines included bottles from France, Argentina, and South Africa, and California. His beer selection ranged from bottled MGD to pilsners from South Africa. To be blunt, he made my hometown liquor store in the States seem lame.
I should have received a frequent drinker’s card for the amount of booze that I bought from the IZ Liquor Store during my final few months in the Zone. While some people bought a case or two at a time, I bought 5 to 10 cases each time I went, along with an assortment of wines and hard liquors. One day, I bought nearly $400 of alcohol because I heard yet another rumor that the U.S. ambassador intended to make the Green Zone go dry. If true, the prohibition of liquor sales would bring a quick end to all the parties at my house, which I couldn’t accept. The owner of the IZ Liquor store tried to reassure me that he would never stop selling alcohol, yet with the demise of the other two major liquor stores in the Green Zone, I felt that I had no choice but to stockpile a stash of booze to make it through to the end of my tour.
The rumors never came true. The booze never stopped flowing in the Green Zone. On the night that I left Iraq, I had to give away the many bottles of hard liquor and cans of beer that I had left. .
