Soap opera?

Well, we've been here a while, and the novelty of it all is wearing off. Actually, it's long gone. But the good news is that the weather is cooling down, and time is passing. Slowly.

The story of the day is about an Iraqi man who is in the Iraqi National Guard. His wife is in the same unit. As I was exiting the laundry facility today, he came up to me and tried to tell me something, but without an interpreter, we got nowhere. So he called over a boy who speaks about 5 words of English and I heard this exact phrase from the young man: "Durka Durka man work Durka Durka Sgt. Major No Good Durka Durka work here Durka Jihad." In other words I understood NOTHING.

Fortunately (or very unfortunately) a real interpreter was walking by at the time and we waved him over. The man spoke rapidly to the interpreter for about 10 minutes without pausing to breathe. When the interpreter finally stopped him, he explained to me that the man had beaten his wife (acceptable by Arab culture, shocking to me) and was very upset that a high ranking officer was interfering with his personal life. This particular Iraqi Colonel had seen her bruises, and used them as an opportunity to start an affair with his wife. When the upset husband had gone to his office to tell him to stop, he was confronted by his wife and the Colonel. His wife told him that she wants a divorce (presumably to be with the Colonel) and the Colonel told him that he must give her the divorce and never tell anyone about the incident or he'll throw the man in jail on charges of being a terrorist, or have him killed in an operation.

Now how do you explain to a man who's just told you all of this information that you're just a Private. You can't make anyone do anything, and you're lucky if you get your own work done without getting yelled at? So I dutifully wrote all the names down on a sheet of paper and presented them to my Section Sgt. He laughed and said that he was NOT the man for the problem, because his solution would be to shoot the Colonel. I don't need to tell you in which part of the body he planned to shoot the man, but I can assure you that the Sergeant was more that willing to do it. And I can't really say that he's wrong. He sent me to our Captain that advises the Iraqi National Guard, and hopefully everything will get resolved. Strange story about abuse of power. A strange thing to get involved in while dropping off laundry. But the real question is if a man will abuse power for sex, what will he do for money or for more power? Is this a passionate mistake, or just a piece of a life of corruption? And the guy is supposedly our ally.

Later
Trey