Hitting the road

We benefit when the trip doesn’t turn out quite as planned | Mindy Belz

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

The first time I traveled to Iraq, I stepped into an outboard motorboat and, with a suitcase wedged awkwardly beside me, crossed the Tigris River. To get into the boat I had to present a number, which I wrote on the palm of my hand so I would not lose it. I read it off to a Syrian security officer sitting inside a hut made of plywood at a checkpoint baking in the late morning sun. He had an oversized leather ledger and wrote down my number in pen beside my name, which he already had. It was the only border open to Westerners apart from checkpoints posted by Saddam's Republican Guard just downstream. It had taken months of phone calls, meetings, and networking to step into that boat.

The next time I traveled to Iraq, I took a humanitarian flight from Jordan to Baghdad. I sat up by the cockpit to talk with the two South African pilots, who'd landed planes in Angola and Afghanistan and weren't bothered by the corkscrew they had to fly over Iraq's newly liberated capital to land safely while avoiding the surface-to-air missiles. Baathist holdouts and others were firing at flights in and out of Baghdad International in those early months of war. Circling into the airport permitted a truly dizzying view of all of Saddam's palaces that ringed the capital, at least six of them, moats, man-made lakes, swimming pools, and all.