Different games

March 09, 2005

The kids didn’t know what to do with it.

They tried kicking it like a soccer ball. They tried bouncing it off their heads.

The oblong football didn’t work that way, however.

We’re on our way to Kuwait, will be there tonight.

On one of our stops along the way, soldiers tossed out the remaining cookies and candy to a family who lived in a tent packed with kids on the side of the road.

The soldiers threw out their football, too.

There were eight barefooted kids in that family, as far as I could tell. And they knew soccer.

They’d clearly never seen a football.

One soldier punted the ball from the roadway to the kids and they studied it, holding it in grubby hands before trying to play with it the only way they knew how.

Beggars have been a constant sight on this road, just as they were a year ago when we convoyed north.

The filthy faces of children in tattered clothes and pleading hands were hard to see then. Now they’re something that I spent a year seeing.

Soldiers never stopped giving out candy, food and toys to the children, however. On patrols in Baghdad, gunners would toss things from their turrets to children on the side of the road.

Each time we’ve stopped on the way out of Iraq today, they’ve handed out more stuff.

And they’ve been offered stuff.

At the first stop of the day, little entrepreneurs appeared from the sandy desolation, offering to sell old Iraqi money, cartons of cigarettes and DVDs.

Where do they get this stuff? There are no towns anywhere near where we are. In fact, there are no homes nearby, except for one mud village I can see way to the west.

All we’ve seen for two days is desolation, miles of sandy dirt with the occasional herd of camels and sheep. There have been no trees, no towns. Nothing.

One kid walked up to the humvee with a handful of DVDs saying, “Freaky, freaky?”

He was no more than 8 years old and peddling pornographic films.

The soldiers shooed him away.

Unbelievable.

Posted by Amy at March 9, 2005 10:33 PM