T-shirts for Americans only
Published 07 October, 2008, 14:14
Ukrainian military officer and journalist Dmitri Timchuk spent more then a year in Iraq with the Ukrainian troops stationed there. RT is the first to publish his observations of daily life in the Middle Eastern country in English. (Part VIII)
Not the right desert (Part II)
Americans happy to sleep with bugs (Part III)
Building the future: brick-by-brick (Part IV)
Don’t worry, they won’t shoot! (Part V)
The vampire gets stung (Part VI)
Every soldier’s fundamental – messing (Part VII)
In the PX army shop, devices like TV sets, cameras, and notebooks are priced at the same level as in Kiev. Lots of souvenirs are available, such as ceramic plates with palm trees and the word ‘Iraq’ painted on them, and ceramic statuettes of camels and Arabs. Interestingly, all of them are made in China.
With Iraq’s economy stagnating, the market is being filled by other countries. Even small mats for salah, the traditional Muslim prayer, come from Saudi Arabia.
Taking home a G.I. T-shirt with ‘ARMY’ written across the chest is a must. The only problem is that American sales people are strictly ordered not to sell anything related to army uniform or insignia to foreigners. Anyway, Ukrainians manage to talk the Afro-American girls into selling them everything, and who could turn down a smart Ukrainian guy?!
However, such ‘negotiating’ may well get you into trouble. Of course, being away from home and deprived of communication with the fairer sex, our guys are quite sensible to the presence of women nearby.
And women are numerous here, I should say: while Ukrainian females are very few, there is a U.S. Army company stationed in Delta, and almost 20% of the personnel are females.
Then, again, there are the PX ladies. Everybody in the camp, though, knows only too well the story of an affair between a young Pole and American Betty, who worked at a store in Delta. The guy had been actively courting the American blonde, and she seemed quite favourably disposed towards him.
However, after the Pole attempted to hug Betty, she didn’t think long before filing a report to her superiors. The outcome for the hapless lover was a $6,000 fine for sexual harassment, which put an end to this truly Shakespearean love story.
Local commerce
There are also Arabs trading on the “Delta” territory in their own small store. There are a variety of goods, but – as has been mentioned earlier – not those made in Iraq.
Unlike American PX, there are a lot of cold steel arms: rescue knives, daggers, knives-bayonets, even cavalry swords and sabres. You would have no problem buying even a samurai sword, though it is a mystery how this Japanese weapon gets here.
Moreover, everything is quite affordable; a good knife costs no more than 15 US dollars. However there is no point in buying weapons, they will not let you past the Ukrainian border anyway.
Arabs sell weapons at much lower prices than the Americans do, besides they always ask for a sum a quarter higher than the one they are really ready to sell their goods for, so the initial price is never the same as the final one.
The Iraqis also sell home appliances, moreover, they always cost a third of what the Americans want at PX. But there is one nuance. The Arabs have been known for their hoaxing skills since the old days, and they are not going to miss the mark. Once our guys bought six TV-sets from them, and only two of them were in working condition.
The Arabs are very responsive to demand. It is a big problem to find one of the main souvenirs that friends from the Ukraine ask to bring – banknotes with Saddam Hussein’s portrait.
Local people say that after the victory of the coalition forces, almost all the banknotes with his portrait were burnt. But it is possible to find some. What the locals offer to the foreign military here though are mainly just colour copies of high quality.
It is also possible to find coins that were used in the country before the war. There are no coins in circulation in Iraq now because of the hyper inflation, similar to the one we faced in the mid-90s.
The current exchange rate of Iraqi dinars is approximately 1500 to 1 US dollar, and the smallest banknote is 50 dinars. However the Arabs may sell you Egyptian or Lebanese coins as their own, so it is very easy to be cheated if you are not clued-up.
It could be worse. Our officer, a numismatist, was looking for ancient coins of Mesopotamia. When an Arab understood what the officer needed he offered him a coin of unknown origin with the date ‘1963’ on it.
The officer asked: “And you call that an ancient rarity?”
“Yes,” the Arab confirmed, “this is a very ancient coin, and the date signifies B.C.!”
The officer took it as a joke, but next time he was offered a coin with an image of an ancient Babylonian tsar. It turned out to be a metallic Soviet rouble with the image of Lenin!
Do the laundry yourself
As for everyday life, washing plays a very important role – in this climate you have to wash the uniform, which gets soaked with sweat under the body armour, every day.
There is a laundry service in the “Delta” camp just like in all others, but only newcomers go there, and, as a rule, they do that only once. While there were people from Malaysia or the Philippines working at the laundry, everything was alright.
But later they were replaced everywhere with the local personnel. After that the main problem for a military man who brought his uniform here was to tell when it was dirtier: before or after the washing.
So it is better to do the laundry yourself than to experiment. The Polish in Babylon did the following: they put a tent with automatic washing machines next to the laundry, and now every person can help himself. Our military wash their clothes mainly in the shower. But there is a huge advantage: it takes the uniform only 20 minutes (we checked with the stop-watch) to dry here in the sun!
Dry closets are everywhere in the camps. Even near a distant survey point you will find a typical booth. Cleaning and disinfection take place regularly: it is much cleaner here than in a similar paid “institution” in the centre of Kiev.
However it turned out that not all our people know how to use them. Once I heard an officer instructing his personnel on how to use a dry closet: “Next to the toilet bowl there is a stand-wash,” – he was saying very seriously, – “and please do not use it as an ash tray when you are relaxing here with a cigarette in your mouth!”
‘Ukrainian Arab’
I’ve known Sasha Kholyava ever since we were cadets at military school. Due to his “not-so-Slavic” looks, this dark-skinned guy from Vinitchina had always had many nicknames at school – despite his usual counter-argument of his ‘Gogol’ last name (in one of stories by Gogol – “Viy” – there is a character with that a similar last name – Kholyava). And now, destiny had brought me together with Major Kholyava in Iraq.
In An-Numani, our column, which arrived at the Iraqi Security Training Centre, was greeted by the head of the local police, IP. When Sasha got out of the APC, a welcoming smile on the face of the policeman gives way to astonishment. Pointing his finger at the Major, he asks:
“Is he Arab?”
Our guys tried to convince him that Sasha was one of the peacekeepers.
“He is Arab!” concluded the Iraqi, still staring at Sasha in astonishment.
“No, he is Ukrainian,” our soldiers made another attempt to explain.
«Аh!» it finally dawns upon the policeman. “He is a Ukrainian Arab!”
Although, we do have native Arabs in our contingent. Abud Khamid Khadyr came to the Vasit province with the first Ukrainian brigade in Iraq – the 5th Brigade. He still works without military men.
Abud was born in Iraq, served in Hussein’s army and even rose to the rank of general. Then he was disgraced and, finally, had to flee his native country. After a while, he got to Kiev and received Ukrainian citizenship several years later. Right now, he is on a contract basis with our Defence Ministry and is considered to be serving with the Ukrainian Armed Services.
To give our military leadership their due, having someone who thoroughly knows the mentality and traditions of the locals in our contingent greatly assisted in establishing the Ukrainian presence in Iraq.
According to our soldiers from the 5th Brigade, it was Abud who helped them solve so many problems without bloodshed at times when Ukrainians and Iraqis just couldn’t find common ground. Up till now, this aged man of few words plays a great role in establishing rapport with sheikhs.
His methods of communication with the leaders of local communities (the local elders here play a more important role than the representatives of the state authorities) are drastically different from what we are used to. For our ‘businessmen’, time is money and negotiations are won by those who strictly stick to business.
It’s not like that in the East. When you come to a sheikh to solve some issue or a problem, an Iraqi, even if he is serving with the Coalition forces, will never act in a rush. A normal conversation in this case will take about two or three hours, with the obligatory tea ritual.
The conversation flows around neutral topics – the weather, crops, etc. And only the last five minutes of the meeting are given to the solution of a problem, as such. That’s the only way to achieve any kind of success here. Traditions need to be honoured.
Warning – woman!
But it’s impossible to foresee and take into account all the specifics of local traditions when you prepare a Ukrainian contingent for Iraq. As we’ve noted before, there are quite a few women within the Coalition Forces, especially among American troops.
There are also several women with the Ukrainian contingent. We all know though about how Muslims regard women. Female soldiers and officers don’t really communicate with the locals. But it does raise certain issues for those of them who need to engage with the locals due to their job description.
For example, during some negotiations between the Ukrainian Command and local leaders, there was a female military interpreter. At first, the sheikh simply ignored her monologues addressed to him (of course, he couldn’t even think about talking to a woman at such an important meeting!!). It took a while to convince him that there was no other way to continue the communication, since no one else of the Ukrainian delegation knew Arabic.
It’s interesting to observe the streets in Iraqi towns – the head of the family goes first, following him is the line of wives, all placed according to their rating. Everything seems to be turned upside down, if we compared it with our way of life.
A young man is looked at as the main manpower in the family up until the age of 24 – then comes the time to get married. The girls though don’t do anything about the house until they get married – it is not their time yet.
But after the wedding – and girls get married here at the age of 14 – she becomes a silent “always working” creature. A married man though can relax now and provide instructions, mainly.
Our people are often left with some negative impressions from local traditions. I saw the eyes of our soldiers from the 7th brigade, who just got here and took up the duty, when an Arab family passed through the check point on the Basra-Baghdad route.
For them, it’s shocking to see that there is only the head of the family driving the car, and his young son in the spacious pick-up cabin. The mother and little girls, though, are placed in the dirty open machine bed (actually, if Iraqis bred pigs, then one could have thought that it’s used for transporting pigs – that’s how dirty it is), under the scorching sun.
“How can they treat little girls like that?” asks a young soldier, in a voice that’s filled with bitterness.
Story courtesy of Dmitri Timchuk
Leaflets for the illiterate (Part IX)
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