Patriot Acts - A View from the Back Seat by Steven Bradley

A View from the Back Seat
Iraq, 1991

Fisher Harrison appraised the land of Iraq that was rushing past him as he peeked out from beneath a blanket shielding him from view in the back seat of the taxi that had brought him into the interior of the besieged land. Here, in what was, unofficially deemed, one of the capitals of Kurdistan, he sensed how grueling a life the oil-rich country had imposed upon its impoverished people.
“Just getting here and finding a “safe” way into the country was a challenge all its own.” Harrison thought. “Getting out will be no less stimulating.”
Harrison recalled how it all started when he had landed in Izmir on the Turkish West coast and made his way to Istanbul both by train and ferry boat. He didn’t have a friend between here and Paris where he had boarded his plane and not a word of Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic to help him in any dangerous situation that would most certainly present itself. That was okay. He liked it that way. He had his comrades over the border though, only he and his commanders back home knew it all...why he had forged his way into Saddam’s Iraq. All he knew was that, at the moment, he was lying down in the backseat of a taxi, covered with a blanket and peering out from under it at the mountainous and brown landscape rushing past his hidden eyes through the window above his covered head.
The image in his mind of traveling inland into a country that was currently at war with his own made him both shiver slightly with fear and revel with excitement. The second emotion far outweighed the first, as it always did. It was what drove him…the exhilaration kept him alive. It was what he was trained for, programmed…scripted to do. It didn’t matter how you titled it, his was one of stealth, intrigue and death. His French went through his mind.
“C’est mon raison d’être!” he thought it and almost spoke it out loud.
He had been speaking French a lot since he had come this far eastward.
“It’s safer to be thought of as French than American, at the moment” he thought. “At any moment, for that matter!” he confirmed for himself.
“The cowardly French never met a war they couldn’t manage to lose or capitulate in.” Harrison grumbled. “History full of wine, beds full of sex and guns stuffed with roses!” he declared in a whisper.
Still, French appeasement was serving him well just now including the fake French passport. From the beginning to the present, this voyage into peril had captivated him, but it was the beginning of the journey that was flooding his soul and vividly replaying in his mind, just now.
Fisher Harrison had arrived in the Turkish capitol of Ankara, just weeks before. He had not known a soul and was unaware of the surroundings, rendering him ignorant in speech, and though no novice in culture, he was void of friend and encompassed about by foes. The apparent lack of opponents seemed to always resolve itself quite efficiently along the way in each such excursion into chaotic knowledge that he had previously taken. He was sure this one, potentially more chaotic than most, would not disappoint his baser survival instincts.
He knew a lot about Turkey, since knowing was just what he did. This sensible and peaceful nation of forward looking, moderately western-thinking Muslims had been the former Roman province of Asia Minor; the place where the followers of the way had first been called Christians. It was the home of the seven churches of the book of the Revelation. The other thing he discerned was that it was a major center of Islam. In fact, it had been the Caliphate, with the Turkish Sultan serving as the Muslim equivalent of the Catholic Pope in the largest Empire that has ever ruled. That was until Mustapha Kemal Ataturk led his people into the modern world after World War I when he disassembled the dissolving, largest empire the world had ever known.
Harrison was armed with several letters of introduction written by his Kurdish friends, in their own tongue, when he had ended up living at the Besh Yildiz Hotel, which meant to Fisher Harrison that it had to mean the Five Star Hotel, by virture of the five stars next to the name. Harrison stayed there for more than a month before his trudge into the land of Babylon. It had seemed to Harrison that three of the stars had fizzled out of this insect-ridden, human dump some time ago and had never been replaced. It was a dark, dingy place, in the older part of Ankara called Ulus, where most of the radicals made their home and plotted their jihad.
This hotel was filled up with Kurdish refugees who had managed to escape out of Iraq and had somehow helped the US military, in a significant manner, during its fight with Saddam. They had been placed there and told to await permission to come to the States for a new life, as a recompense for their service to the military cause. In the meantime, their lives were abhorrent, but still better than what they had endured in their home land. Though the hotel was infested with roaches, lizards, flies and stunned, frightened people, they were happy and thankful to be out of Saddam’s Iraq; the very place where Fisher Harrison would end up in what would certainly be a trip into the unknown.
During his month-long sojourn, Fisher Harrison had gotten to know three families, in particular, surviving in this hotel. Each of these three families had been from the infamous village of Halabcha on Iraq’s Eastern border with Iran and were amongst the few who had been able to shield themselves from the poison gas that Saddam had exploded in their village during the Iraq/Iran war before invading and annexing his other neighbor, Kuwait. Like human guinea pigs, Saddam had seen how effective his new weapons of mass destruction were by using them on his own Kurdish population. One of the three families had been expecting a child when Saddam committed this evil form quality control and crime against Humanity.
“I saw their child.” Harrison reflected as he lay on the backseat of the dust-filled taxi that was barreling down the dirt road, while he remembered his bed in the dark, musty room in the hotel in Ankara while a fourth star burned-out of the neon light that should illuminate but only flickered. The outside kept his thoughts alive.
The child was beautiful and strong with only one striking result of the chemical attack.
“No eyes! My God, she was born without eyes!” Fisher remembered, having had a tough time exclaiming it silently so as to not make the parents’ sorrow deeper than it already was. He felt angry and embarrassed to think that the Americans had really helped Saddam develop the very chemicals that had destroyed their beautiful daughter’s future. He had been unable to respond in his own language to such a travesty of trust and was glad to have not known their language at that disconcerting moment. America was now trying to redeem herself, though Fisher Harrison knew that the UN coalition would not finish the job. Fisher Harrison’s mind finally left that putrid moment and under the cover of the blanket that now barely covered him at all now he dug his mental fangs into his recollection of that next day’s events.
***
Morning seemed to have arrived early, as fast as his eyes had closed. Harrison was glad, since his eyelids had not cooperated with the exhaustion that his brain must have felt, and keeping him wide awake the night before. The sounds and smells told him he was not in Kansas anymore, but he loved it! It was a wild-west experience to sit on the floor, huddled around a large bowl of rice, tomatoes, zucchinis, peppers and grape leaves all stuffed with Middle-Eastern delicacies. Those poor, lost families were amongst the most pleasant people he had ever met. They welcomed him and let him know that they were grateful for what America had done for them. Yet, there was a sadness that the Americans had not gone all the way to Baghdad to rid them of Saddam, so that those who wished to, could return home to their families. There was one young Iraqi who sat quietly directly in front of Fisher. His name was Hassan and he was 21 years old, exactly the same number of years since Fisher had snuck himself into and out of the land of terrified people inside Saddam’s Iraq.
Hassan was a strong, young, somehow elusive, man. Fisher was instantly drawn to him and could see the pain and loneliness and something else he couldn’t make out shrouded behind the young Iraqi’s smile and his attempts at being a strong Muslim man before the only people he now knew and with whom he now ate and slept and cried. Fisher struck up a limited conversation with Hassan, who mostly just listened.
“They forced me! I not care they kill me. I be better that way! But what I am to do if it is to join or my mother die?” Hassan sought to explain that he had been a member of Saddam’s Republican Guard.
“In the Iraq of Saddam, academic skills and my size are not the, what is you say, the assets they are in America.”
Though Hassan remained polite and silent about his plight during the communal meal, after he and Fisher found time to talk, Hassan revealed how his decision to defect and to help the Americans had so drastically changed his life, both positively and negatively, mostly the latter and how he was sure that the lack of information to his family had surely broken his mother’s heart.
“I know my mother think I dead, Allah Koruson. My choice to leave the land of my birth was simple and very painful, but I was forced to defend this…this tyrant that separate my family. So, the Iraqi military intelligence thinks I am dead. I need die and my parents have to know I dead. If Saddam learn of my treachery, they would kill my parents and my brothers and sister. Saddam’s army cannot be seen now anywhere, but please do not think my people are so naïve as to believe Saddam is gone or that he cannot come back when your country is gone.”
Yet, a true friendship developed between the Fisher and Hassan. It was after meeting him and living with all of them for two weeks that Fisher Harrison revealed to Hassan that he had to go to Iraq about a situation that he could not elaborate on. Harrison made Hassan a promise.
“Listen my friend. I hate the name, but you can call me Fish. It will be a distinguishing demarcation for us as brothers in a war against tyranny and evil!”
“Fish? Okay, my friend, I think you are a good man. My training is screaming at me that you have, let us say, um…some special services of some kind to provide inside my country.”
“Well,” Fisher responded. “You are perceptive, but only partially right. I truly don’t know about all that ‘good man’ stuff.”
“Well, I decided that you are a good man.” Hassan continued. “I have not seen many inside Saddam’s Iraq. Yet, I still believe there are many good people there, and there are many even inside the Republican Guard. I lived not so bad a life serving him. Saddam is poison to have as an enemy, but he take care his own. He’s so careful with those who keep him alive and in power. I am not the only perceptive one here, my friend. I feel you are not just a lost traveler out to lose himself in fields of the fearful people.”
Fisher did not respond and Hassan picked up his tea and sipped it with his eyes still glued to Fisher’s face.
Fisher stared back at Hassan. “What is it?”
“What do you mean?” Hassan asked
“That look in your eye; it’s different, hard, pained…too many words come to mind to describe it, and not only kind, friendly words. I’ve only seen that look on a few faces. None of those faces lived very long, because they were locked up and died, killed themselves or were killed…by me! That does not make your odds so good, my friend. I know you are headed to America and you think it is a premature paradise, but believe me, it is not all that. America is a great place if you have money, but hell on Earth if you are without! You have to heal that look before you go or it will kill you!”
Hassan dropped his gaze and looked into his teacup.
“Thank you for your concern. I will not forget your words and take them into my heart.” Hassan gulped down the last sip of tea. He and Fisher both stood up and shook hands.
Fisher stared at Hassan for a moment or two and the spoke to him. “You need to write letters and find all the pictures you can and whatever else you want to give your family and I will make sure they receive them.” Fisher promised. The next day would begin what would prove to be one of the most moving and lethal challenges of Fisher Harrison’s life.

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