Baghdad duty free

I had a strange, almost bittersweet feeling leaving Baghdad on Tuesday. I'm blaming it on the sand in my lungs. The winds were especially gusty in the morning, and as we proceeded down the airport road, stopping several times for checkpoints and screaming convoys of American military vehicles, the air seemed to get hazier and hazier. It was a sandstorm, though a light one by Iraqi standards.

Kevin, our security adviser, predicted that my flight to Amman, Jordan -- the launching and landing pad of most civilian trips into Iraq -- wouldn't take off on time. "I never think I'm leaving Baghdad until I'm in Amman," Kevin said.

He was right. My flight was delayed more than five hours, which gave me ample time to survey the concourse at Baghdad International Airport. For a start, it was full of people: Iraqi families probably trying to flee the country, employees of the huge military contractors like DynCorp and KBR, journalists, diplomats and smartly dressed Iraqi businessmen. The sandstorm had delayed all flights, so you could barely find a space on the dumpy gray couches that constituted the waiting area.

I killed a few minutes in the duty free, which was better stocked than most duty free shops in Africa. Women in abayas and 20-something American contractors listening to iPods shopped side-by-side for colognes, backpacks and a huge assortment of candy. I noticed that this was the place where unsold 1980s American surfwear came to die. There were BodyGlove t-shirts and boardshorts in every imaginable color, and in another place and time, I might have bought a few.

There was also a drawing for a Harley-Davidson bike. Given that a large proportion of people came to the airport in armored cars -- an airport trip for hire costs $4,500, Kevin told me -- the Harley raffle seemed awfully ambitious. Quite a few people had entered anyway. What the hell -- I filled out a ticket. I'd spent just four weeks in Iraq, so maybe I was still optimistic.

The journey back to Nairobi was a long one. To pass the time, I eavesdropped on a novelistic conversation between two fifty-something DynCorp contractors from the South who alternately swapped Bible worship books and tales of women they'd been with in central Europe (many of them seemed to be Albanian). I inhaled a lot of cigarette smoke in Amman as I studied an Iraqi couple who'd just fled their country and seemed to have trouble convincing the immigration folks to give them a visa.

I slept on the floor of the airport in Dubai and, via GameChannel and IM, followed the end of a disappointing Dodger game with my brother. Finally, after what seemed like three weeks of airplanes and airports, I landed in a drizzly Nairobi and headed home for a few hours, just enough time to unpack and repack a suitcase for another long journey, this time home to the U.S. for a much awaited vacation.

I'm now sitting in Detroit, my sixth airport in my sixth country in less than 72 hours. I just got an email from a friend who hosts a radio show in Kansas City, wanting to interview me next week about my short time in Iraq. I'm sure my family and friends will have questions too. I feel like I haven't processed any of the experience yet, and I don't think I will have by next week or maybe even next month. Right now, that Harley raffle seems like a long, long time ago.