As usual, the work day ended and it is sunset and I am heading back from Baghdad to Fallujah.
I was in a taxi with two other passengers, and we had to wait for one more. The other two men were not going to Fallujah, but to villages along the way. One of them looked upset. I asked him, Are you ok? He answered with tears, "I want this car to start moving. I want to receive the dead bodies of my two brothers."
I couldn’t understand. It took me a few seconds. This man is crying and he cannot afford to tell the driver to move… We asked the driver to move and said we would pay him… His two brothers were soldiers serving in Abu Ghraib and were killed by a sniper. He would have to take them to Basra on his own.
It struck me when he said he lost five brothers, two brothers in the Iraqi-Iranian war and one early this year.
He was sobbing as we drove toward the military camp near Abu Ghraib on our way to Fallujah.
The two passengers arrived at their destinations and it was only me and the driver. We talked about our memories in Basra and how Basra people suffered through the last three decades. The driver told me of the many friends he misses from Basra and how he served in the army in Basra.
It is dark, about 7 p.m. and the speeding car lights passed a young man pointing to us, "Please stop," with his two hands… The driver stopped and drove back and the young man said there is a guard in the nearby factory who fell off the roof and he needs help. The driver told him to hop in. The young man found the night guard accidently as he was trying to pass by to say hello.
We took him to the nearby Jordanian military field hospital, a hospital that helped Fallujah people a lot through the last five years. The doctor told us that they could not help us and we have to take him to the general hospital in Fallujah.
The doctors asked a liaison officer to ask for an ambulance from Fallujah on the radio. The voice from Fallujah told the Jordanian officer if there is a civilian car that can transport the man to Fallujah faster!
We took the man to the hospital; I will skip details of how we managed to enter.
At the hospital, police were in every corner. A policeman was killed that day. It was chaos, loud and weapons were all around.
The ER doctors sent for X-rays for the trembling man. He was cold in a place where no blankets were available… American military arrived and brought even more chaos to the place. One on the radio told guys outside to search every person entering the hospital because one day earlier there were two suicide bombers in Fallujah. What a mess.
Attempts to call the man's relatives failed. We took phone numbers from his cell. After an hour we had to go and search for his house in Fallujah. He gave us his name and his neighborhood and we left him with doctors, who told us he will be fine. The young man who found him and I went to start our search for his family. Luckily the search didn’t take long we asked bunch of guys near a shop and one of them was a relative of the man in the hospital. To my surprise, the man's brother told me "Oh thank you" he looked to another cousin "I will go to the hospital in an hour"
Both of us, the taxi driver and I, told him just take him a blanket and he needs you.
Then I went back home… it wasn’t a day like every day.