I’ve been here for just more than two months now… I feel like I’ve settled into the job and my living arrangements. For the most part, the days seem to tick by pretty quickly, although I wake up every morning with a very clear understanding that I still have a long time to go.
Last week, a friend of mine left after a six-month tour. During his time here, he did a weekly radio interview with a news/talk station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which I ended up taking over for him. While I’ve spoken to hundreds of reporters during my career, I’ve never done a live radio interview so I was a little nervous. I prepared for the 20-minute conversation by creating a cheat sheet with all sorts of statistics and talking points and by thinking through some of the key points I wanted to make sure I covered.
When the interview started, the host, Pat Campbell, introduced me to his audience by asking me to talk briefly about where I was from and how I had been deployed to Iraq. After that, he asked me what about Iraq was most surprising to me when I arrived here. I smiled when he asked the question because I knew immediately what the answer was. The thing that surprised me the most about Iraq was how normal it was when I arrived here. Normal is a relative term of course. Things are still very different here than they are in the U.S., but I do believe that most Americans would be surprised if they saw what life was like here.
The media tends to focus on bad news. I’m speaking generally of course and I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I’ve had the opportunity to meet an amazing and talented group of reporters here. Yet, in these days of the 24/7 news cycle, bad news is what makes the headlines, particularly on the all-news television channels. While I’m based at the Embassy and don’t get to leave very often, I have been out a couple of times and life is pretty normal. Take a look at the picture below for instance. This is a photo captured by a Reuters reporter of Iraqis hanging out at Lake Habbaniya, which is a huge lake about 50 miles west of the center of Baghdad. The jet skiing, in particular, made me chuckle because it’s simply not what you envision when you think about life in Iraq. News like this is being captured, but it’s not often reported by the mainstream media.
I’m going to go off on a tangent for a second and provide a quick thought about the media environment in the U.S. I have encountered so many people over the years that gather their news from a single source, often times this source is television news. My grandfather was a lifetime newspaper man and he always used to tell me as a child that you can never get the whole story from the TV, he said, “you need to read the newspaper if you want to know what really happened.” What I’ve realized in my career, which on many days has comprised reading through hundreds of media clips, is that the more sources of news you follow, the more likely you are to understand any given story. Yet, I’ve also realized that no matter how many news sources you read, you’ll probably never know what really happened. Any event that occurs in the world is shaped by so many hidden actors and factors, backdoor conversations and PR people like me, that you’ll be lucky if you get 75% of the real story.
Going back to life in Iraq, I shared an almost surreal experience with a group of people at the Embassy earlier this week. It started when a colleague and good friend of mine, Russell Newell, read a story about the Iraqi Symphony in the New York Times a few months ago. Russell decided that he wanted to invite the Symphony to perform here at the Embassy. Through his endless connections and hard work, he organized the performance and for that I’d like to thank him.
For the hour that this small group from the Symphony performed here, I forgot that I was in Iraq. Other than the fact that I was sitting in my camo uniform, it wouldn’t have been different than watching a musical performance in Florida, Atlanta, New York or anywhere else in the world. It was a magical experience and the Symphony put on an unbelievable performance. It started with a group of performances by the young children that the Symphony is currently training. They were adorable, which you can see for yourself from the photos below. They were followed by a group of four of the regular Symphony musicians who performed almost a dozen pieces.
The performances were incredible and as I listened to the music, the thing that kept going through my mind was how incredible it was this group has organized itself in a war torn country and is performing classical music at a level that was nothing less than perfect. While the mainstream media in the U.S. often focuses on the bombings and other violent acts that do continue to occur here, the changes that have simultaneously occurred in this country are simply awe inspiring. While I’m here on the tail end of our military presence in this country, I couldn’t help but feel extremely proud of our efforts and the progress that has been made by the Iraqi people because of their willingness to embrace positive change. I only wish I could have shared this experience with all of you.
