Baghdad highs and lows
My life in Baghdad is most often a daily grind of regular habit broken up by the adrenaline rush of an ever-challenging story.
Days begin - around 8 a.m. - with a bowl of Sultana Bran (I handcarry from my base in London) or a cheese omelet by our well-trained Iraqi cook. Two cups of tea will get me through the morning wires and on-line newspapers.
My days usually end (at 2:30 a.m.) with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the incoming 'feed' of our Nightly News program, live from New York.
In between, time is taken up by work: interviews, phone calls, e-mail, news shoots, live shots, embeds, and the complex logistics that keep us alive.
Occasionally, there are uplifting highs and heart-stopping lows...but, like Baghdad itself, it's mostly in-between. Dusty-grey. Like a gnawing anxiety.
Except this week. In just two days I lived my year’s high and low in Baghdad.
First the low.
In a world where mortars land with regularity near your doorstep and suicide car bombers manage to take out your floors, ceilings, and windows even when they fail to breech your hotel blast walls, it's understandable that the steady crack of small-arms fire loses its ferocious bite over time.
Until an AK-47 round of hot lead (stray bullet? sniper?) passes through your newsroom window, ricochets off a wall several inches from your head, and burns a slight hole in the carpet only yards from your feet.
I'm keeping the blunted round as a souvenir.
Call me sentimental. The one that didn’t have my name on it.
Now our security folks are "making adjustments" for a threat we had overlooked because it's as common as gravity. What goes up must come down - usually tumbling in motion and at a speed that could kill you.
But I soon got over that 'low' when a group of us NBC staffers attended the wedding reception of one of our young Iraqi fixers.
A real full-blown, spit-broiled Iraqi party. It was replete with hummus and chicken, fireworks INSIDE the wedding hall and a gyrating belly-dancer who, as my colleague Karl Bostic put it, ''was mostly belly."
The 'high' came as I looked at the young couple, resplendent in their dark suit and white gown, seated on a traditional Arab raised sofa overlooking the festivities like a royal couple.
They beamed like happy newlyweds anywhere else on earth - and a universe away from the car bombs and drive-by shootings just beyond the compound.
Another high note: the vision of 300 or so guests. There were Sunni and Shia, secular and religious, young and old. It was like parties here used to be before the sectarian killing and fear turned Baghdad inward and began to separate friends and even families.
This looked so normal. So Iraqi. Someone told me Iraqi weddings like this are back on the rise, despite the terrorism.
Maybe there is hope, I thought, as, hours later, I dropped my dusty flak jacket over my blazer and tie, jumped into the dirty armored car, and headed back in a convoy to the bomb-damaged hotel - and to the daily grind - before it got too late.
Repeating history?
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Suicide attacks and murders due to sectarian conflict continue around Iraq. See how residents live their lives amid the attacks.
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