In 2004 I was on a break in May and most of June, so I wasn’t around as the heat escalated.  It turns out there’s not much escalation; in the past week or two the temperature has gone from tolerable to ridiculous.  I don’t see any weather forecasts, and don’t really need to since the weather is always the same.  But a few of the soldiers say the temperature is now getting up to about 110 degrees during the day.  It gets better at night, but the cool evenings won’t be back until sometime this fall.

The Hamra, the US bases and the Iraqi Police stations compensate, when they can, by ratcheting the air conditioning up so high that it’s sometimes too cold to wear a t-shirt indoors.  I think if we lived in an age before air conditioning I’d give up covering the war and go to law school.

At a couple of the IP stations I’ve visited this week I’ve seen prisoners.  They’re kept together in a big room.  When we arrived yesterday a man was kneeling behind a barred door, his hands sticking through to hold his young child.  His wife was a crouching black shape draped head-to-toe in black fabric.  Inside men lounged on the floor on blankets.  A few of the prisoners were observing afternoon prayers.

The prisoners seemed strangely cheerful and well-behaved.  Earlier in the week a couple guys who’ve worked as civilian cops in the States noted that the Iraqi prisoners did what they were told and generally didn’t act like their foul-mouthed and unruly American counterparts.  They marveled that when the Iraqi Police asked for the number of men in the cell the Iraqis counted and replied with the correct number.  In the States, they said, answers would have ranged from, “Why don’t you come in here and count it yourself?” to, “Fuck you!”

The Americans spent some time yesterday doing routine medical checks on the prisoners—tending to minor scrapes and rashes, stuff like that.  They were also entering their names and other data into a computer.  Like all Iraqis, the prisoners smoke.  Through the bars I bummed a cigarette and a light off of a thin young man who claimed that he was the guy in the infamous Abu Ghraib photo of a hooded detainee with electrical wires attached to him.  The obvious improbability aside, he seemed far too cheerful about this revelation to be taken seriously.  Later he gave me a letter, in Arabic, that supposedly will prove that he’s innocent of murder.  I’ll find someone to translate it when I’m through with the embed, and rush my findings onto the blog as this important story unfolds.

I had a slow day today and didn’t go out to any stations.  The guys I was with yesterday were taking a maintenance day, and I was happy to sit on base, get some work done and lounge around a little.  I’m staying in a private room with some reading material.  I read a book called, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” a novel about an autistic teenager who sets out to solve they mystery of who murdered his neighbor’s dog.  It wasn’t bad.  I’ve avoided “Executive Power” by Vince Flynn, even though “Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown says it proves that Flynn “remains the king of high-concept political intrigue.”

But I’ve flipped through the book and found a few highlights I wanted to share:

Well-drawn characters:

“The captain smiled in the manner of someone who’s confident in his professional ability.”

“The man moved with an athletic grace that hinted at his many talents.”

“She was a feminist, after all, with definite liberal leanings, but she could also be an old-fashioned romantic.”

Intrigue and suspense:

“They eagerly looked forward to carrying out their mission.  Unfortunately, they were unaware that thousands of miles away they’d already been fatally compromised by someone from their own country.”

“Who could have known in 1922, when Great Britain created the new country of Transjordan, that one day its capital of Amman would grow into a city of international intrigue?”

Romance and eroticism:

“The man was a prime physical specimen, and she wasn’t just thinking that because she was married to him.”

“He watched Anna slip out of her bikini bottom, and the problems awaiting him in Washington vanished.  They could wait, at least for another day.  Right now he had more important things on his mind.”

A protagonist you can… A protagonist who… well, let’s just call him a protagonist who defies categorization:

“Not one to let a problem fester, Rapp arranged to have a few noses smashed.”

“Thousands if not millions of crazed Islamic zealots would gladly give their lives to take him down.”

“The plastic surgeons had minimized the scar to a thin line, but more important to Rapp, the man who had marked him was now dead.”

“He’d had some death threats lately, quite a few of them in fact, but despite the danger he needed some time alone to think before he met with the president.”