Farm family, Marines share coffee and respite from war


By Scott Bernard Nelson, Globe Staff, 4/4/2003

ZUBAYDIYAH, IRAQ - Not all the contacts between Americans and Iraqis on the front lines along the Tigris River yesterday took place at the point of a gun.

Along the eastern bank of the river, tanks and infantry moved from the city of Kut toward Baghdad to the northwest, sweeping towns and villages looking for elements of Iraq's Republican Guard. They met pockets of resistance and drew mortar fire from inside some of the towns. Plumes of black smoke could be seen as the tanks returned fire.

But the day was quieter on the western side of the Tigris, where thousands of Marines moved steadily northwest to secure key bridges and blow up others they couldn't use. They moved to within 40 miles of Baghdad without firing a shot.

At one farmhouse about 60 miles from the capital, an Iraqi family spread carpets in the grass and invited a dozen Marines to sip Indian coffee and get out of the hot sun. Temperatures soared to nearly 100 degrees on the hottest day yet of the two-week-old campaign, making the offer of coffee especially welcome.

''I tell you what, they're great people,'' Corporal Brandon Roy of Coventry, R.I., said of the civilians. ''If I knew their address, I'd write them [after the war]. They showed us a lot of hospitality.''

The Marines had approached the farmhouse cautiously, pointing M-16 rifles through windows and doors while checking the grounds for militia members and Iraqi soldiers. They found nothing threatening, and eventually a teenage boy wearing Nike sweatpants emerged from the house and tried to communicate with the Marines in broken English.

The boy and some of the Marines shared a laugh when he produced a dog-eared copy of an Arabic-English dictionary, and they showed translation cards they had been given with key phrases in both languages. The Marines were especially eager to learn to ask ''what's up?'' in Arabic.

In the end, neither the book nor the card was especially useful, and communication became a game of charades.

Soon, the rest of the boy's extended family began to emerge from the house, and the invitation to sit for coffee was extended.

''That was just awesome,'' Corporal Corey Brown of Milwaukee said of the impromptu gathering. ''Most of the Marines have never spent that kind of time with anybody outside the US before. It was good for everybody.''

Before long, the Marines were trading dollar bills for Iraqi dinar notes featuring the face of Saddam Hussein. While the women and children sat back, the Iraqi men handed out cigarettes to the Americans, who in turn showed their hosts how to use chewing tobacco.

Some of the Marines were soon pulling up their shirts to show off tattoos, patriotic and otherwise. The predominantly young Americans let the Iraqis see their handheld GPS units, compasses, and other high-tech gadgets.

For a few minutes, it was almost possible to forget there was a war on. Then, a jet flew overhead, and a couple of attack helicopters buzzed by on patrol a few hundred yards away. The Iraqis clearly tensed, and a 3-year-old girl put her arms around the neck of a Marine captain and refused to let go until the noises above had disappeared.

The patriarch of the family, who had been sitting on the edge of the gathering and keeping quiet, used universally understood sign language to show airplanes and bombs, and then he pointed at children.

In this way, he asked the senior Marine present not to bomb the nearby village.

The officer attempted to convey to the family that Republican Guard units in the area appeared to be firing mortars and artillery from inside villages and towns, using the citizens as human shields. He said he couldn't make any promises about when and where American forces would return fire.

With that, the two groups exchanged polite goodbyes. Before the Marines could leave, women in the house brought out flatbread as a parting gift. Then the Marines went back to their Humvees and 7-ton trucks and drove back north, and into the war.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/4/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

Sempers,

Roger