Before we crossed into Kurdistan, driving north from Baghdad, I changed nationalities. Even though most Kurds feel grateful (as they tell it) toward the United States for removing Sadaam Hussein from power, Hassan thought it was safer>at least at the border>for me to be German. Now that we are about two hours north, being an American isn't a problem. It's far safer here than in Baghdad. We drive sometimes leave the doors of the Jeep unlocked when we leave it parked>something unheard of in Baghdad.

I haven't spent a penny since we left Baghdad. The people are so generous I have to be careful of what I ask for, because, as the saying goes, I will surely get it. Yesterday I thought I was actually going to spend some money when I went into an Internet center near the center of town. A Kurdish actress I met earlier in the day walked in and, when I got ready to leave, refused to let me pay. She took care of it. No one will take my money. I never ask about food or water, because eventually, someone will feed me. It seems almost rude to want something. It's like criticizing your hosts.

While I've gotten some OK photos here, and I appreciate the hospitality of the people, and the chance to see something a lot of Americans don't, we haven't really gotten out into the countryside (but then I've only been here two days). Hassan had to conduct business yesterday, and I mostly hung out with he and Al-Tai while they visited a TV station, the Minister of Culture and an art gallery/coffee shop. Last night, they took me to the University Club in Arbil and got blasted while we discussed politics (I didn't bring up the subject; they did).

I think that as a social experiment they wanted to get me drunk. When I said that I don't drink, they thought I was joking. They wanted to know if I was a strict Muslim. I told them my religion was children. None of the men I was with had ever met an American who didn't toss back a few. I'm sure they would have died of boredom if they hadn't been impressed by the sheer novelty of it.

They turned out to be the experiment. Along with Hassan and Al-Tai, one of the most famous Kurdish poets, Mahmoud Zamder was at the table, emptying bottles of London Dry Gin and Johnny Walker into his verse, sitting in the near darkness on a green lawn outside the club. Zamder told me (with Al-Tai, who speaks five languages, translating) that the Americans saved the Kurds when they deposed Hussein. "We love them," he says, "and therefore we love you."

He wanted to know what I thought of the situation. Ferhad Pirbal, a Kurdish novelist, and Salah Hassan, director of TV Golan (a Kurdish TV station) were sitting at the table and, naturally, were interested in the topic. I told them I saw a lot of similarities between Hussein and President Bush. I talked about how I felt about war, that it was wrong under any circumstances, how Bush (and his father and President Clinton) had shown their concern for the Iraqi people by killing more than 400,000 children under the age of 5 through the UN sanctions program. I told them I believed the Kurds were useful as a tool for the US, because Bush could point to Hussein's treatment of them in order to help justify a US invasion.

Zamder became somewhat angry and said that I didn't understand the Kurdish position, how they had suffered under Hussein. "We did not have the power to rid ourselves of him," he said. "We have the Americans to thank for that."

The TV station director Hassan pointed out that the US was not particularly critical of Hussein during the period in which Hussein first gassed Kurdish villages (around 1987, I believe, near the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war). I got the sense that there was some risk of pointing this out. The table deferred to Zamder.

I tried to think of some example that would illustrate how I felt about the situation. I said, "Imagine a man owns a dog. He keeps the dog on a chain. Every day, he beats the dog with a stick, and the dog has no hope of getting away. The dog's life is miserable.

"One day, a man comes and kills the dog's owner. The dog thinks, "The man saved me! He loves me! I am free!" Then the man robs the house of the victim. He didn't care for the dog. He wanted what the man owned. But all the dog can see is the fact that the man who beat him is dead, and he believes, because of that, he's loved."

"Zen," said Zamder. Meaning, "Good." But, he said, "we are still grateful." He raised his bottle and tried to pour me some dry gin and I respectfully declined. He said, "I'm sorry if it seemed I was attacking you. We have hope now. The Americans gave us this."

I told him I was happy we could disagree and be friends (I was also happy no one had killed me for using a dog to represent the Kurdish people; of course I meant no offense. I tried to choose an example that would illustrate the relative position of the Kurds to Hussein and the U.S government). Zamder kissed me on both cheeks, spoke a spontaneous poem, kissed me again, got out of his seat and hugged me, invited me to travel with him through Kurdistan while he showed me "the real life of the people," threw his arms around me. By the time the night had ended, he'd kissed me at least 30 times.

He could barely stand, but he wanted someone to take a picture of us together. The director and Al-Tai put Zamders arms around their shoulders and carried him into the light. Al-Tai took the pictures, the first of which shows Zamder schrunching his lips against my right cheek. I couldn't stop laughing. We drove him home. Al-Tai, Hassan and Zamder sang Iraqi folk songs all the way, and I drummed on my legs. I helped Zamder to the gate, where he stopped me from ringing the bell and, of course, kissed me. He didn't want to wake his wife. He was going to sleep outside in the garden.

Today we are going to Salamaniya, where there is a beautiful lake in the mountains about an hour from here.

Things are considerably quieter here than in Baghdad. I haven't heard any gunfire, there seems to be little chance of running across Ali Baba-thieves-and it's about 15 degrees cooler. The day I left, Baghdad, I was working at the Al Rashid conference center (where Paul Bremer, the US administrator for Iraq, holds press conferences) when I saw a plume of smoke rising from an area of the city where I hadn't seen smoke before. There are so many fires-from burning trash, oil refineries and industries-it's hard to tell which of them are out of the ordinary.

I asked a guard outside the conference center if it was a new fire and he said, "No sir, that's just a trash fire that's been going for months."

I decided to check it out anyway, so I got in a taxi, crossed the Tigris River in Karck, the east side of Baghdad, and drove north up Al Rashid Street. The driver spoke pretty good English, and asked people on the street what was happening. It was a new fire, in a shoe factory. Purely out of luck, we'd stopped at the alley that led to the fire. I got out and started winding down the alleys into the interior of the complex of buildings. People pointed out what direction to turn; it was clear to them, given I was carrying two cameras, what I was after.

The fire had already consumed two buildings and had been burning about half an hour.

A group of about 50 men and children had gathered and were watching the smoke boil out of the building above us, and the flames eating the timbers of a building in front of us. All of them seemed to live in the maze of alleys, and a few of them were salvaging goods out of their stores. One man, about 25, kept asking me to be careful. He organized a bucket brigade and men began hauling water out of their houses and throwing it on the outsides of the buildings. A couple of them climbed onto rooftops overlooking the fire and threw water across, onto the flames.

A few windows blew out of the building above me, and bricks began to fall. The awnings and landings above us caught most of the bricks. Someone got the idea of throwing bricks at the crumbling walls to bring them down, before the fire could spread to new buildings. The problem was that there was no coordination. The fire was near the intersection of two alleys, and the two groups stood out of sight down each alley. When one group would throw a brick, it would sometimes ricochet down the other alley and, of course, the second group couldn't see it coming until it was almost on them.

I got hit square in the middle of the head with a brick. It just exploded. It hit me and bounced off in fragments (a testament not to how hard-headed I am, but to how poorly things are made here). It didn't even raise a knot, but it still hurts. I got doused with hot water after someone threw it up against the building and it bounced back and went across my back. People were offering me cigarettes, a man came up and poured water over my head because I was rubbing my eyes, there was so much smoke. A little girl, about 7, kept going into her house and bringing me stainless steel cups of cold water.

Then men started pulling electric wires off the buildings, which was really scary. Wires were flying through the air, hanging chest level into the alley, snaking all over the ground. Al Tai told me later that they were probably trying to prevent shorts from causing more fires, but if the wires were live, it seems like they would have taken more care to keep from being electrocuted. They would grab a few wires, three men at a time, and heave ho. The wires would snap and sing through the air, sailing over their heads. Avoiding being hit with one became my main interest.

A group of men found a 20-foot long iron bar and began prying at the second level of a wall on fire at the head of one of the alleys. I got ready to photograph it, waiting for it to come down. It was about 15 feet high, and began about 15 feet off the ground. I figured it would fall slowly and I would have plenty of time to get out of the way, so I stood about 10 feet away from the base, composing the shot. When it started to crumble, I got off two shots and turned to run. The little girl who'd been bringing me water was standing behind me and I ran into her, almost knocking her down. I don't know if she'd even seen the wall coming down. I grabbed her under one arm and ran. We cleared the wall by about five feet. The smoke and dust boiled over us and everyone disappeared in it. A minute later, the smoke had cleared and people were throwing rocks and ripping more wires off the buildings. When I set the girl down, she started crying, but came back in 10 minutes with more water. She seemed to get over it pretty fast.

I wanted to photograph the single firefighter who showed up (how he got the hose through the maze I'll never know), so a man took me up to his apartment, which overlooked the alley. He couldn't find a key to the door that led to the landing, so he improvised a crow bar and began taking the door off the hinges. I tried to tell him it wasn't worth the trouble and no thank you, but he insisted. He laid the door aside and we walked out on the landing.

I photographed about 10 minutes before I turned around and noticed that he was gone and two men were standing there in his place. One put his hand out and said, very forcefully, "Money!"

I walked up to him, in his face, and said, "Enta Ali Baba?" You're a robber?

"Enta la Ali Baba. Ana Ali Baba."

"You're not robbers. I'm a robber." I told him, get the (word better left unsaid) out of here or I will rob you."

I went back to photographing and they stood there grumbling quietly for five minutes, then asked to see the photos (on the monitor of my digital camera, where I would stop every couple of minutes and go through the shots, deleting ones I didn't like in order to save space).

I left in another five minutes and they didn't follow me. Al-Tai and I talked about it last night, after the drinking spree. I told him I hated acting mean, which I've had to do a few times in order to make somebody believe I'm scarier than they are, but it seems like the only way to survive some days. I know there's a contradiction in my conduct during these times and the goals I have in working here, and I'm not happy about it. At this point I think it's worth the risks, and facing off with some of the pushier or more violent people is also worth it to me. If I let these things stop me, I'd never leave the house.

With love,

Joel

Ar Ramadi, August 21

Dear Everybody: I'm fine. I'm with the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment at Hussein's North Palace in Ar Ramadi, about two hours northwest of Baghdad. Today is Thursday; I arrived Tuesday afternoon, by bus.

We had a mortar "attack" on the base that night, but it was only one round. My building shook, and you could hear the whooooof, but no one was injured. Because the mortar attacks are fairly frequent, and seem to come from the same area with the same degree of inaccuracy, the troops here believe that it's the work of one person. He's called "Mortarman."

Of course he doesn't have a face, or a name, but he's spoken of in terms almost of affection, partly because he's relatively harmless (unless you happen to be walking through a field or sitting in the latrine; he's so bad at his job, it seems that the closer a soldier is to something that's valuable, the less likely they are to be killed or wounded).

"I wonder when Mortarman will call tonight," troops talk among themselves.

"Haven't heard from Mortarman for a few days. Wonder what he's up to."

Yesterday I went out into the desert about an hour east of here to blow up 110 artillery rounds that were discovered in a weapons cache. I went out with the Explosive Ordnance Detail and Army engineers that were assigned to guard them. It was a wild ride across the desert in the back of a 5-ton truck, with the dirt boiling in the open bed of the truck. I spent more time flying around in the air than I did sitting (if the truck had a propeller, I would have sworn we spent the whole time airborne).

A sergeant gave me a helmet, goggles and flak jacket, so I'm about as protected as anyone else here. That didn't prevent me from feeling absolute terror when, after we located the weapons cache and they were setting C-4 on top of it, a white Toyota passed by on the horizon, turned around and came back. This is suicidal; you simply don't hang out for fun around these troops. There's too much of a chance of being mistaken as an enemy and fired on with rocket or grenade launchers.

Weapons from all five trucks were turned on the Toyota and five troops ran for a reinforced Jeep and took off after it. It turned out to be a farmer (growing dirt, from the looks of the land).

Being out there, with absolutely no cover, no where to run, you get a good sense of the danger that the U.S. troops face. Whether a person agrees or disagrees with the conduct of this war, or any war, it's easy, when you're just as afraid as they are, to feel compassion for them. Ar Ramadi, and Fallujuah--45 minutes from here--are extremely dangerous. There are two to three attacks on soldiers every day, mostly from improvised explosive devices. These range from radio-controlled triggers set on artillery rounds by the roadside, to hard-wired primitive explosives such as a can of ball bearings.

A favorite of the locals is setting out some piece of garbage--like a pile of rags, a 5-gallon alumimum can, etc.--by the roadside and leaving it there a few days. After the troops get used to seeing it, and if they haven't removed it, the locals come back and rig it with explosives. If it's a radio controlled explosive, it can be set off half a mile away as a convoy passes by. If it's hardwired, the wire can run to a building a few hundred yards away. After the bomb is detonated, the convoy will often be fired on by rifles or rocket-proppelled grenades. There are an average of three casuslties a week in Ar Ramadi (wounded or killed).

One solider from the 3rd Armored Calvary, the unit I am with, was killed yesterday afternoon in Fallujah. The soldiers I was with were going on a patrol in Fallujah in the afternoon, and I was worried last night that it had been one of the soldiers I'd ridden with. It turns out that I didn't know him.

I went out on a boat patrol on the Euphrates yesterday evening. Four soldiers were searching buildings along the river for explosive devices and weapons caches. Being on a boat is even scarier, because there's so much cover for attackers to hide alongside the river. The reeds are 12 feet high and grow from the banks 20 feet into the water.

This morning I am going out on a patrol in Ar Ramadi and plan to go on another boat patrol this evening. I might be back in Baghdad tomorrow or Saturday.

Love,
Joel

Ar Ramadi, September 5
Last night (I arrived in Ar Ramadi at 10:30 a.m.) I went out on patrol on River Road with 3rd Platoon (the Lost Platoon) again. We were supposed to be out one hour. At 7:45 the soldiers in my vehicle (there were six of us in the back of an open-bed Humvee were handing out water and patting kids on the head. It was wedding night (one of two a week in Ramadi) and kids were running out to the street to say hello, give the thumbs up, ask for food.

Trucks and cars were passing us, with brides in the back seat with their mothers, men hanging out the windows, dancing.

At about 7:42 a bomb missed our Humvee by 10 feet. The blast knocked me down, I was sitting on the floor of the truck, composing a photograph. A second blast caught the Humvee behind us, lifting it into the air. Then a group of Iraqis opened up on us with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. Instantly, everyone in my vehicle was firing back, shooting at a building about 150 yards to our east. Because I'd been lower than everyone else in the truck, they were all firing over my head. I was trying to photograph and the medic kept grabbing me (twice) and pulling me back down. I don't remember him doing it. He told me about it later.

The smoke is from a bomb that exploded 10 feet from our vehicle, seconds before the photo was taken, and from incoming rocket-propelled grenades striking the road.

It was dreamlike--a common way soldiers describe combat. I remember feeling perfectly calm, completely at peace, looking from face to face, watching them. The soldier to my left layed across the bench, away from the building where the fire was coming from and looked at me with something between terror and disbelief. It seemed that he stared at me that way for half a minute, and I kept searching his face, trying to understand. Then the first terror struck me. I realized he wouldn't be looking at me like that unless he was dying. I grabbed his arm and shook it and yelled ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?

He said, calmly--as calmly as you can yell--I'm empty. I knew he was talking about his M-16 magazine. I thought he was too frightened to go through the motions of changing it. The vehicle was starting to speed ahead and we were completely exposed. I reached up and pushed the button that releases the magazine. It fell from the rifle and he didn't move.

He said, I don't know where the clips are. Then he looked around. He yelled, Does anyone have a clip?

The others were too busy shouting and firing to hear or answer him.

We'd driven maybe 250 yards. The medic was yelling, Is anybody hit, Is anybody hit? Not one was hit. Then the medic yelled, Where's the Humvee? Jesus Christ, it's not there! We looked behind us. The second vehicle was gone. He called out for the driver to stop. The driver stopped and began driving in reverse back down the road. The medic, who'd fired 27 rounds from a pistol, was calling out the position of men on rooftops. Everyone held their fire.

Suddenly the Humvee came to a halt. The non-commissioned officer in the front passenger seat decided that it would be better to surprise the attackers, and safer for the soldiers, to come up from behind the Humvee. We sped forward, turned down a road, with everyone hunkered down behind the railing of the truck, made another right, drove a few hundred yards with the medic calling out the positions of anyone who looked threatening, and turned right again. We came up behind the vehicle, expecting carnage. I felt a serious mistake had been made (and it had) in leaving the vehicle behind. It was an easy mistake to make, though, with everyone just doing their best to live through the fight.

The second vehicle was dead in the road, an oil slick extending a hundred feet down the road. No one was injured. The blast that had rocked the vehicle into the air hadn't damaged it or the soldiers, but a single machine gun round had passed through the driver's front engine panel, ripped through a steel support panel and severed an oil line. The driver had tried to back away from the area, but the oil quickly leaked out and killed the engine. For the next five hours, we walked through fields and searched empty buildings and waited on the road, trying not to be silouhetted against the lights of buildings behind us in the city.

Everyone kept asking me if I was all right and I kept telling them I was fine, except that my ears were pounding. I remember thinking, at the height of the battle, which couldn't have lasted more than two minutes, I'll never hear again.

None of that my-life-passed before me stuff happened. I didn't think about anything other than what was happening, and I didn't feel afraid, although I did try to keep my body low. It was so much different than the ammunitions demolition convoy I went on last week. When the truck kept passing us on the horizon, and everyone believed it was a set-up for a grenade attack, I was terrified.

When the fight was over I was tired, but I appreciated the ground crunching under my feet, and the aching in my back, and the mud I was slogging through in the farmer's fields, and the reassuring voice of Sgt. John, and the briars that kept sticking me in the legs, and having water to drink, and even the flak vest that kept creeping up against my throat and choking me.

I was so grateful no one had been hit. I would love to have the emotional capacity to be able to say how I feel about those five hours. I understand the soldier's fears. I feel I understand the Iraqis' anger--that I've seen enough of both sides to be able to draw conclusions. But I feel, this close to surviving it, that there isn't anything more to say other than when I was walking across the sand later, in my bare feet, at Sadaam Hussein's South Palace, the sand was cool and delicious and I felt like laughing, and all the stars in the sky seemed to be like candles lit for an eternal birthday.

With love,

Joel

A street scene (wedding party) from Karrada Dakhil Street in Baghdad.

When I saw him, I said, "Oh, no, not you again. I didn't eat breakfast, so don't even bother."

He laughed and didn't say anything. About 10 minutes later, after I'd buckled in and was waiting for them to crank up the engines and take off, I overheard him talking to the crew chief. He said, "Our photographer passed the test last time. We won't be doing anything too wild. I even scared ME."

The ride OUT of Ar Ramadi was like an airborne rollercoaster, only there's no roller coaster in the world that could compare with that ride. He would roll it over on its side, doing (I guess) around 110 knots, right it, roll to the left, climb steeply, dive, bank again - Over and over again, first across the desert, then about 500 feet off the Euphrates, following the meanders.

During the ride (I was the only passenger on the wildest leg of the flight), the door gunner kept looking back at me, then would look out the door and smile and talk to the pilots. The Blackhawk would dive or roll, then the gunner would look back at me, look out the door again, and grinning, would report back to the pilots. I think they were looking for the manuver most likely to do it. None of them worked-although they came close.

I could feel the sweat boiling to my skin, but the wind roaring through the cabin-the doors were open-would dry it immediately. I could feel the terrible taste in my mouth. I thought about what would happen if someone in the cabin were hit by groundfire (while the pilots were mostly having fun, they later admitted, they do make evasive maneuvers constantly, and check the aircraft, upon landing, for bullet holes; it's impossible to see groundfire, unless they're tracer rounds, during the day). About how hard it would be to move around to help the door gunners if they were hit, about being sick and wounded and terrified and vulnerable and mortal. And that made me all the sicker.

I closed my eyes during a sharp left bank during which it looked like we were going to dive nose first into the Euphrates, and all I could see was water under my elbow as I looked where the horizon SHOULD have been, and meditated. I said, "The world is beautiful. The world is good. Everything is fine."

I felt the sickness pass away like no more than a bad dream, and I looked out and the world WAS beautiful. The emerald river, with old Roman bridges crumbling at the banks, snaking through the desert, gleaming in the afternoon sun, was gorgeous. I enjoyed the rest of the ride tremendously, although I did eventually feel a little sick again just before we landed in Al Asad.

I talked to a Kiowa (observation helicopter) pilot about it two days ago. She said it was a game that pilots play with civilians and with "hard core" troops in particular. "Anyone who thinks they're hot" (Special Forces, Rangers, Long Range Recon Patrols) is in for a bad ride. The pilots want to make sure that the troops arrive humble, and respectful of Army aviation.

She said, "If you didn't throw up, the next guy certainly did." Apparently it's a point of honor to not allow two consecutive non-puking civilians in a row.

There was a huge firefight in Ar Ramadi day before yesterday. The troops I was with previously on 8 patrols were fired on by at least 15 attackers on River Road. No American troops were injured, but two Iraqis were killed. How they got 15 as an exact number, I don't know. I do know that there's so much confusion during a firefight that the troops lose track of each other. That they could actually count the number of attackers-unless they got aerial photos of the incident-is, ummmmm, amazing. Or improbable.

Last night, a 25-year-old Medevac pilot sat outside with me from 11 to 1:30 a.m. and talked about her experiences flying wounded troops out of Ar Ramadi. She was one of the pilots that picked up the crew of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that was hit by an Improvised Explosive Device which it was driving through town with its rear hatch open. There were three soldiers in the vehicle and each one lost a leg. She said, "I had to get out and take a walk after that one."

She said her crew had once been called to go out to River Road and walk around and pick up pieces of soldiers after an IED had hit a ground patrol. "Better us than their buddies," she said, "but I don't like flying dead troops. Our job is to get troops to the hospital, not carry bodies."

She says she's not staying in the military, but wants to believe that the sacrifices the soldiers have made will utimately be worth it for the Iraqi people. She's engaged to an artillery officer in Samarra, Iraq (an American) and wants to be a stay-at-home mom. She worries about civilian casualties here and says she tries to be conscientious in the way she treats Iraqi prisoners.

Because she speaks Arabic, she's been asked to also serve as a translator for several prisoners. A few weeks ago, she says, an Army sergeant major was abusing a prisoner who'd been caught with two handgrendes and an AK47, and she--an officer--says she screamed at him. "The poor guy probably just found the stuff," she said. "Our troops do it all the time--try to sneak home an AK or some rounds they found. It's nothing new."

"I don't know if it did any good," (yelling at the sergeant major) she said. "They probably started on him again when I left. 'I'm not doing that any more,' I told them. I'm not the person for it. I'm like, 'OK, sir (in a voice sweet and fluid), why did you have those hand grendades?' And they're like ... (she pretends to shake an invisible body in front of her and mocks screaming)."

She said that the first time she went into Al Baghdadi (10 miles or so off Al Asad Air Base), she was talking to a little girl about 7 years old, and a truck was driving by, too close, and ran over the girl's foot, crushing her ankle. She wanted to fly the girl to a hospital, but a senior officer told her it would set a bad precedent, and the Iraqis would be demanding helicopter evacuations every time someone in Al Baghdadi was injured. She said there WAS a hospital nearby, and the child wasn't critically wounded, but believes that because the family was poor, they never took the child.

What disturbed the pilot most was that the man who ran over the child, an Iraqi, immediately stopped his truck, walked back to where the girl was laying on the ground, bent down to look at her foot, shrugged, walked back to his truck and drove away. "It happens all the time in the US," she said. "Hit and run. But I've never seen anything like that."

The incident is a good case in point. Many of the troops ARE conscientious, and do work in some ways inside the system for humane treatment of "the enemy," but many of them have stories similar in character to that of the pilot. Not as dramatic, in some cases, but full of brutality--Americans mistreating Iraqis, Americans mistreating Americans, Iraqis mistreating Iraqis. It feels many days that the world has come apart here. That there is no sane or stable place or person. And no one, if they stay here long enough, is innocent.

With love (and fatigue),

Joel

Bagdad, September 16

Dear Folks: Thought I'd send a few more photos from Iraq. Brief explanations are listed below. I hope you are all well. I will be here around 10 more days before leaving for Jordan for about four days, then returning to Portland, Oregon.

I was photographing this man yesterday in Medicine City hospital, in the emergency room. He had been shot in the left leg 11 days ago and steadily declined in health. He--Ammar Shackar--was brought to the hospital in renal failure. He died on the table while I was photographing him. His mother and aunt were waiting outside. When they were informed, they fainted in the lobby. A man brought cold water in a plastic liter 7Up bottle and poured it over them. When they woke up, they began wailing and screaming and pleading. Shackar was 26. The hospital had no record of who had shot him.

This image was taken today at the University of Baghdad College of Culture, in the former university library. The library was attacked by U.S. forces soon after the war began in March. A student explained to me that the roof of the building had anti-aircraft guns and they were used to fire on U.S. forces. The building, she said, sustained some damage, but Iraqis looted it partially, and then set fire to the books that remained. A professor disagreed with her, saying that the building was not bombed by U.S. troops, but was damaged entirely by looters. This is a common problem, in terms of sorting out the truth here. What the truth "is" depends sometimes on the interests of the person being interviewed, their bias and, of course, their knowledge. I have no idea which was the accurate account.

Sincerely yours,
Joel