White Baboon

When my parents arrived at our Peace Corps apartment in Bulgaria last spring, I warned them about the door. Covered in a somewhat convincing wood-grain peel with a massive gold knob, it had no less than six bolts–four in the middle, one in the ceiling and one which shot into the floor. Seeing this door causes two potential reactions: 1) Wow, Sofia must be a dangerous city or 2) Wow, someone’s paranoid.

But it’s tough to say if the reason we never had a theft was because Sofia doesn’t have a lot of crime or because we had a very secure door.

Kurdistan was crawling with security. Perhaps that’s why it was so safe.

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It was dark, but the stars and the moon across the twelve to fifteen white, armored Suburbans we passed allowed me to read the logo and tagline across their doors. On the left, a skull and crossbones in black. On the right, this cryptic tagline: “Saves Lives. Builds Futures.”

We walked, six of us abreast, our passports tucked away in the pocket of some guard’s fatigues after a signing in at the high security entrance. Me, Michael, an American-Turkish political science professor, a Anglo-Australian wandering traveler and some British guy named Neil. It was 10:00 but it felt much later. We’d been at the University of Kurdistan’s International Women’s Day Celebration this afternoon, a disorganized, but A-for-effort debacle of dance, drama, purple ribbons, visiting dignitaries, detailed Power Point slides and disrespectful audience participation. We’d then taxied to a happy hour at Café de Paris, where we’d been drinking until now. After a particularly long line at the checkpoint, our taxi had just had a minor scuffle with a drunk driver.

Now we were headed to Andy’s house inside what our friends call “New City” or “The Compound” a place which houses contractors who had jobs with Blackwater, DinaCorps USAID, UN and other acronyms. People there to support Western influence, whatever that might be.

Andy was Scottish. He was the kind of guy who understood the importance of candles at a party, wore a blazer with ease and kept his bathroom clean. Even after Michael’s bottle of MGD somehow cracked his sink basin, he still let us try on his bulletproof vest and hold his Glock while we took photos of each other looking mean.

He even kissed our feet when we told him we were tourists.

Andy was a PSD. Private Security Detail. One of many beefy, goatee-sporting, beer-bottle-holding men who were paid obscene amounts of money plus benefits, accommodation and flights back home so they would work in Iraq and protect others. Some were drivers, guards, secret service. Others helped de-mine fields.

In Andy’s backyard was the Edge, the only bar in the compound, a twenty by twenty hole with forty men and four women which blasted Shakira and Fity Cent. He ’d even built a ladder which escorted friends across his back wall and into the bar and pool next door. We talked to a lot of people who went to Baghdad once a month in armored vehicles but were not allowed to get groceries outside the compound gates in Erbil, Kurdistan. When we expressed surprise, they said without disdain: Well, you just never know.

But we did know. We’d researched Kurdish Iraq. We’d read websites and blogs. We watched then news as often as the devout Muslims prayed. We’d been hanging out with University teachers, contractors who had lived here for up to two years with no armed guards and no issues besides unreliable electricity.

But maybe when all you see in your community are guns, tanks, armored cars and security forces, maybe you start to fear the outside world. Without this fear, job justification might be weaker. You might feel guilty about the danger pay deposited into your bank account every month. You might find it difficult to stay trapped here another day if it didn’t all make some kind of sense.

What do you think?