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Residue of Conflict: A bombed building in Baghdad

 He looked more than five years older, his face drawn and his once-considerable belly now barely noticeable. I think I was more thrilled to find him than he was to see me, there on the same street corner where we met in 2003 as American troops were pushing their way toward the capital from southern Iraq. But he did permit himself a crooked grin and to say, "I know you," in his stilted English as he turned toward me from the domino players on the little lip of sidewalk outside his small restaurant. The war years have been tough for Falah Hassan, and things are still too dangerous for an out-in-the-open talk with an American, so he led me back into his empty restaurant for a furtive chat.

The first time I met Hassan, I was talking to people on the street in central Baghdad about the approaching troops. He had joined in a group of men parroting the official line--that Iraq would turn back the invaders, that Saddam Hussein was a great patriot. I was with my Iraqi Ministry of Information minder at the time, and I remembered that Hassan had made a comment curiously open to double entendre, something like, "What else would we say?" About a week later, it was the morning of April 9, and U.S. troops were just outside the city, so close that the ubiquitous secret police were receding from the streets. I still had my minder but the minute Hassan saw me, he smiled and said he could finally speak freely. He told me that he had gone to jail years earlier for dodging the draft during the Iran-Iraq War and his brother had been killed by members of Saddam's extended family. The Marines hadn't set foot downtown yet, but it was at that moment that I knew the regime had truly fallen. I'd see him now and then as I passed his restaurant in my work. I ate there once or twice but then that got too dangerous for foreigners. I walked by one day and noticed him walking through his doorway with a Kalashnikov rifle--something that had become a fairly normal and legal tool of self defense for business owners.