Iraqi blogger "The Kid" loses four friends in one day to roadside bomb

Four of my friends were killed by a huge double roadside bomb that exploded in Karada on Sunday June 11. That’s right, four, count them … that is, if you can identify their bodies. Forever gone — can you imagine that? Since you are all comfy in your air-conditioned rooms sitting on armchairs, sipping Pepsi or Kool-Aid or whatever it is that you care to sip while your sons and daughters go safely to colleges and your spouses sleep in bedrooms million miles away from here, I’d like to take the opportunity to offer what it feels like to be insane amidst the apocryphal hell of Iraq, both weather-wise and people-wise.

I wish I could fill the rest of my article with expletives, but since I am writing for The New York Times, I can’t. So be it.

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I remember precisely the moment when I got the phone call at 10:30 p.m. telling me that three of them were dead (the 4th died from his wounds later). The time went very slowly. The room, just a minute earlier moist and extremely hot, became sullen and cold. In the living room an Arabian singer was loudly assuring us of her undying joy and devotion, strangely out of context.

I went upstairs and wept alone. I wept all day, frequently looking at the mirror and gesturing incoherently … Robert DeNiro would’ve been ashamed …

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And there you sit, comfortable in your ignorance, sipping on your Pepsi and choking on your Burger King while I tell you the a story of one of those statistical body counts. You are to blame. Your ignorance was a major cause of all this.

I remember back in 2003, when the Americans were still treated as curious aliens. Children of all sorts walked to the American soldier, the proud, brave liberator … Strangely, he was Mexican in origin and the first question that he asked was, Sunni or Shiite? See what I mean? In my past three articles, you can clearly see that I went with the sectarian trend of my times, but now I see my grave mistake — it was a trend undoubtedly ignited, encouraged and adopted by the ignorant anti-terrorist-pro-divide-&-conquer U.S. liberals. It was with difficulty that I identified my friends today, my dearly loved friends, as “Shiite” and “Sunni” and “Christian.” I will never do that again.

Later that night, I printed out a glorious color picture of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the flag of Iran, and the American star-spangled banner, put them one on top of the other in the backyard, the American flag on top of all, and set them all to flame … I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. I don’t consider my actions in the above paragraph justified, even morally correct. I apologize for that, but it’s the truth. Heck, I’m going to write to Bono to ask him if he can do a song about my friends, but I’m not hoping for much.