‘If There’s a Boom and a Sudden Wail, and You See The Flashing Red Lights of Police Cars Headed in Your Direction, You Need to Wait Before Moving.’ The Art of Interpreting Deadly Sounds:
Letter From Iraq: Boom
By Stephen Franklin, The Chicago Tribune
BAGHDAD -- The first slivers of sunrise were crawling across the peaceful-seeming, palm tree horizon when a bone-rattling boom roared.
It seemed close. Everyone was out in the street in minutes.
Not all booms are alike in Baghdad, however, so you have to know the differences. There are booms that just rattle the windows and mean nothing because they were probably just bombs meant to terrorize.
There are booms that are so strong they almost throw you out of bed and send you staring breathlessly out of the window, looking for smoke in the sky and listening for terrifying howls of the injured and dazed. These booms you worry about, because they mean death and destruction.
And then there are booms that seem far, far off, but still you cannot miss them. Like earthquakes, they resonate through you. You worry about these booms, too, because of their power. Some Iraqis say they can block out the gunfire and the explosions, either because they’ve become used to them or they feel totally helpless about them.
“I get up in the morning and people ask me about the shooting, and I say I don’t hear the gunfire anymore. It’s remarkable. I’ve become inured to this,” said Feisal al Istrabadi, a Chicago lawyer who is now a legal adviser to a key member of the Iraqi Governing Council, the U.S.-selected interim Iraqi leadership.
Others react not to the booms themselves, but to the noises associated with them.
“I hate the sirens,” wrote one Iraqi on Christmas in an online blog or diary. “I can stand the explosions, the rattling windows, the slamming doors, the planes, the helicopters . . . but I feel like my heart is wailing when I hear the sirens.”
Every so often, the U.S. military tests its tanks’ firing abilities in fields far off from the center of Baghdad. They do it late at night, and the booms from the tanks firing into empty fields come quickly, so to the trained ear it is clear what is happening. It’s a mere military exercise; you don’t have to think what to do, or react at all to that sound.
But if there’s a boom and a sudden wail, and you see the flashing red lights of police cars headed in your direction, you need to wait before moving. You don’t run to where you think the boom came from. Bombers like to plant multiples so they can hit the onlookers, as well as the American soldiers and the Iraqi police, with second and third rounds of bombs.
Here’s another deadly sound: the precursor to a boom. If you are walking in a narrow street, and you hear the tinny rattle of metal bouncing on cement, that could be a hand grenade. One of the most popular ways to strike for those Iraqis who are fighting the U.S.-led forces is to trail the soldiers on rooftops, heave grenades over the top and then escape in the cloaked haven of a wounded city with little electricity.
You listen for a precursor when you are stuck in traffic, which is normal lately because of the influx of cars into Iraq and the lack of traffic police, and just up ahead is a trapped convoy of U.S. soldiers -- nervous young GIs perched on top of their Humvees, clutching their machine guns and scanning the stranded mass around you. You listen closely. You hope nothing goes wrong for them, for you, for everyone.
Always in traffic, you watch and listen and hope. If you are trailing close behind a large gasoline truck and the traffic has come to a halt, you search for ways to get away, far, far way and soon. Sometimes these trucks have been targets for attacks by the resistance. And sometimes attackers have simply set off their bombs by mistake, or somebody hits them in an accident and the bombs are triggered.
All this listening, all these sounds. At the military hospital in Baghdad, which treats most of the seriously wounded servicemen, people talk of the terrible physical wounds suffered by the soldiers and citizens from bombs. But they also count off the number of soldiers whose hearing has been markedly harmed.
One military police officer, exposed to a number of roadside bombs while driving around the city, was close to losing his hearing, they said. He finally was ordered off his job.
After listening here a while, you might become so expert that you can tell the difference between several rounds fired from a tank’s cannon, or a missile launcher. Baghdad is full of rifle-clutching security guards perched in front of homes and businesses who are experts on these sounds, showing off their knowledge like musicians in an auditorium. They always seem to know which direction the booms have come from.
Guards run gamut
These guards range from teenagers who look as if they’ve never held a gun before to fearsome, heavily armed types in flak jackets, to easy-smiling old men who probably would be happier guarding sheep.
But sometimes nobody has to tell you where the boom came from. Not too long ago, a terrible blast ripped through a restaurant several blocks away, and when it did, you watched the anti-shatter plastic coating on the windows sway back and forth. The blast filled the air with a tall plume of white smoke. It tore through the restaurant, collapsing several walls on a room full of people beginning an evening out. It threw glass and metal and pieces of bodies into the air, and they lay on the street in piles, terrifying markers of mayhem. Neighbors and restaurant workers stunned by the blast wandered in a haze.
Blood stained the street and your shoes.
The boom that shattered the quiet a few mornings ago was not like that earlier one. It was even bigger, and it was not two blocks away, but farther off. So we raced downtown, rushing past streets with piles of garbage and war debris heaped high up, past ghostlike buildings destroyed in the fighting months ago and seemingly abandoned to homeless squatters, past empty stores where old-seeming men sat dully staring out, and finally into the embrace of a mazelike traffic jam.
Along the way, everyone said they had heard the loud boom, but they didn’t know where it was, and then they went back to what they were doing.
Twenty-four people died and 56 were injured from that blast, a suicide bomb that went off outside of the U.S. military headquarters here. Many Iraqis and Americans were stunned and overwhelmed by the deadly force of the blast.
It was not a big bomb, a U.S. Army colonel said. He had seen and heard bigger ones in Iraq.