Thursday, January 18, 2007

Waking up in Baghdad

The snooze alarm Baghdad-style.

The mosque loudspeakers usually begin blaring well before daylight. It's a sound you become so accustomed to you hear it for weeks after leaving Iraq.

If that doesn't wake you up (and it nearly always does), the packs of dogs begin their own morning ritual of meeting and greeting and attacking one another. Barking loudly, they tend to congregate in large numbers.

And then, if you're still asleep, there's always the first explosion of the day.

It was timed this morning at about 7:20.

No one could have slept through that.

But just in case you thought about it...another followed exactly one hour later.

2 comments:

GG said...

Maybe they could capture some of those feral dogs and train them to sniff out IEDs and date-scented insurgents.

Moonpie said...

I've been working on that but the trainers at this point don't accept Iraqi dogs. It's a shame to let such a huge resource go to waste. All of these dogs with absolutely nothing to do but attack one another and howl at the Baghdad moon.