Want to Take a Dip in Uday's Pool?
Mood:  smelly
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Topic: Gin&Tonics on the Tigris
The U.S. Army had made the fine people at KBR responsible for running various exercise facilities throughout the Green Zone. Although most Americans enjoyed working out at KBR’s large, warehouse-like gym near the Palace, I never went to that gym because getting there required calling the motor pool and asking them to shuttle me back and forth just so I could work out. I also didn’t want to work out in front of the muscle-bound soldiers, who made my scrawny 170-pound frame seem meaningless.

Thankfully, USAID had built a small exercise area in my compound: the basics, crammed into three small bedroom-sized rooms inside a larger building. They had installed a complete set of mechanical weights and one set of free weights for those who wanted a more intense workout, but most people preferred to use the running machine, bike, or elliptical machines. There were two running machines in the gym, but someone broke the first one shortly before I arrived. During the 12 months I lived in Baghdad, the GSO was never able to obtain the parts and find a repairman willing to come to the Green Zone to fix it.

I decided to work out five days a week to stay thin, largely because I ate too much greasy food in the cafeteria. Some people worked out as part of a promise to turn over a new leaf and lose weight while in Iraq. Other people used the gym as a way to relieve stress. Everyone on my compound had different reasons for using the gym, but sometimes it was just a social place. On most days, my friends and I would pick an exact time to meet at the gym and work out together. I often had long debates with colleagues while I ran on the running machine and went through a hard 30-minute workout on the elliptical machine.

The gym was also a place where Marines would try to pick up one of the handful of women on my compound. Unlike in the large gyms elsewhere in the Green Zone, when a Marine walked by my gym, he could safely assume that he would be the beefiest man in the area. He also had a high probability of finding a young woman in shorts or perhaps a workout bra who had nowhere to go until she finished her workout. I never saw a Marine succeed in picking up a woman at my compound’s gym, but they kept trying every day until the Marines finally left our compound in early summer.

My workout routine changed considerably once KRB opened Liberty Pool, a large pool complex right next to my compound that had once served as Uday Hussein’s personal playground. It goes without saying that Uday was nuts. The Iraqis I worked with said that Uday murdered people at will and tortured with zeal. He routinely ordered his guards to snatch young women off the street so he could rape them. Supposedly, he had once been a strong candidate to succeed his father, but he’d fallen out of favor when he killed one of Saddam's favorite bodyguards with a club and carving knife. Shortly after that incident, assassins opened fire on him as he was driving through Baghdad, and the attack left him permanently crippled. From 1996 until his death during an American raid in 2004, Uday had to walk with a cane. A number of Iraqis also told me that his lust for violence grew after the accident because he was frustrated that he could no longer make love to women.

After the assassination attempt, Saddam had built a large pool complex to help Uday relax and recuperate. The complex, which the Americans renamed Liberty Pool, put most public and private swimming pools in America to shame. Saddam had built three pools and a large supporting building that had an almost Nazi-esque architectural style. The small pool, which was perhaps 20 feet in diameter, was designed for children and had a small elephant-shaped slide. The diving pool was more oval in shape and was perhaps 60 feet from one end to the other. The main pool was the shining jewel of the complex: a gently curving L-shaped pool under a sweeping big-top-style tent, with a water slide on one end and a large Olympic-style diving board on the other. The depth varied from four feet to over 15 feet, depending on where you swam in the pool.

When the Americans took control of the Green Zone, they also took control of Uday’s pool. During the early days of the occupation, Americans, British, Australians, and a host of other international visitors flocked to the pool to escape the deadly summer heat. The sides of the pool attracted the handful of young women posted to the Zone, though they had to respect the strict rules of modesty that forbade two-piece bathing suits. Still, young men came to watch the women, though many also came to jump off the diving boards and forget the pressures of the war as they dove deep underwater.

This magical little playland temporarily disappeared in the fall of 2004. During September and October of 2004, insurgents lobbed rockets and mortar shells into the Zone on a nearly daily basis. Security officers considered the highly exposed pool a significant security risk, and they worried that people would not be able to get out of the pool quickly enough to reach a concrete bomb shelter during an attack. I also heard that an unexploded mortar shell had crashed into one of the pools, causing extensive damage. Eventually, the State Department decided to close the pool complex.

During my first five months in Iraq, Uday’s pool taunted me. I could see the tips of the circus-style tent that covered the main pool poking over the wall of my compound, and “old-timers” who had arrived in Iraq three or four months before me occasionally talked about the fun parties they had near the pool in late 2004. Rumors constantly circulated through my compound about when KBR would finally open the pool, but no one had any reliable information. Even in the days leading up to the official opening, I never believed it would open.

On the first night that KBR opened the pool, I easily convinced my friends Kirk and John to walk over to the compound with me. We went out my compound’s front gate, or CAC, and turned left to walk the 50 yards to the Liberty Pool CAC. As we strolled on that warm summer evening, I realized that it was the first time I had ever walked outside a secured area in the Green Zone without my body armor. Even though I was still within sight of one of the security guards from my compound and the Iraqi security guards from the nearby Iraqi president’s compound, I felt a little exposed, like a child kicking off the training wheels for the first time. More than once, I looked up and down the street, which was lined with 10-foot-high concrete T-walls, to make sure some random driver wasn’t racing down to kill or kidnap Americans like me who were walking around without any soldiers or personal security detachments (PSDs), which was the fancy name in Iraq for mercenaries.

My fears were totally irrational. Although thousands of Iraqis did live inside the Green Zone, I had only heard of two violent attacks against Americans inside the Green Zone. The first involved a stabbing, which might have been a lover’s quarrel. The other attack, the coordinated bombing of a restaurant and shopping area, had happened many months earlier and seemed like a distant, prehistoric memory to me because it had happened before my arrival. In hindsight, those short steps away from my compound without body armor don’t really compare to the steps that soldiers were taking every day or that my friend Kirk would take later that year when climbing into the back of a five-ton truck in downtown Fallujah with a squad of young Marines at his side.

On the first night we visited Liberty Pool, my friends and I had the place completely to ourselves. We wandered around the pools, which were softly illuminated with underwater lamps. We played short games of pool and foosball. We wandered around the exercise rooms of the main building and checked out an outdoor bar on the roof that could be rented for parties. We passed by an outdoor movie theater that would show movies every night of the week, and we wandered through the covered seating area next to the pool, which eventually would host countless small parties, karaoke nights, cover band concerts, and simple evenings of drinking a few beers and taking a few dips in the pool. In the middle of Baghdad, KBR had created a mini-oasis that made me feel like a spoiled Englishman living in India before the Second World War. On most days, I was highly grateful for that escape.

During the summer of 2005, I visited the complex at least twice a week to work out. For some reason, during the hottest months of the year, Kirk, Pennell, and I started to play basketball at the complex after eating dinner. KBR had bought a second-rate movable basketball hoop and installed it in the former parking lot. At first, we played simple games of Horse and Tip, simply to burn off a few extra calories. Eventually, we started inviting other people so we could play two-on-two. That was when the games became grudge matches that brought out my vindictive childish side. I didn’t have an outside game, and I couldn’t make a lay-up to save my life, but I could position my body and push off better than Bill Lambert in his prime. I used this skill to thug my way around the basketball court. It didn’t matter who was playing. I would often try to manhandle my friend Serbia, a man with at least four inches and 40 pounds on me; I also tried to shove around Jaws, a Marine built harder than a brick house.

Despite my thuggery, Kirk often won through finesse and grace, accompanied by a wicked outside jump shot. When he took his shots, he often forgot to focus on where he was moving his body and where I was moving my body, and from time to time he would get slightly dinged up. Twice, I actually hurt him: once, he twisted an ankle, and the other time, he split a bone in his arm near the elbow. However, I didn’t feel that bad for him. After the injury, he kept playing because he didn’t want to lose, despite the fact that he had hurt himself.

In addition to playing sports at the pool, Americans would bring beer and simply lounge around the pool. Once a week, the manager of the pool scheduled a DJ who would spin loud, thumping hip-hop in an effort to get everyone to dance. Those who wanted a more refined evening could visit the pool on salsa night and dance with women who were more than willing to pull men out on the dance floor. For those people who did like to play sports, KBR had set up pool tables, table tennis, and a foosball table.

This whole complex formerly owned by Saddam’s son had become an American playland. Everyone who went there forgot about the war. They walked around the complex like Englishmen in a former colony. Except for the occasional reminder, such as the holes in the tarps where the stray bullets had cut through, going to the pool meant leaving Iraq.