How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Baghdad is a trip. It's a beautiful city with wide, clean streets and modern cars zipping down the highways. The sky is low and huge and so blue it's almost purple. The Tigris River has a mix of vessels, some large, some small with one or two people. There is a feeling of peace about the place most of the time, but then there is the distant chatter of an automatic weapon or a dark silhouette of one of our planes streaking across the sky and once again you're reminded that there is a war going on. (6.8)
Birdy's observations aren't just visions of Iraq. They're of a very specific time in Iraq—Iraq during wartime.
Quote #5
Ba'qubah looked like Greek villages I had seen on National Geographic TV. The people were thin, old-looking. That was a funny thing in Iraq. You could tell who the important people were by how fat they were. Most people were thin, but all the muck-a-mucks looked heavy. (6.186)
Makes sense, in a way. The people who are well-off have more food.
Quote #6
I didn't know how anybody could live in such a desolate area. Signs of war were everywhere: burned-out vehicles, spent shells, tress that had been hit by bombs and now seemed to twist their way out of the pockmarked earth. The most impressive thing around was a huge terraced mound that looked like something from another world. We stopped to take a closer look at it. I heard Ahmed calling it a ziggurat; the redbrick mound seemed almost to shimmer in the bright sunlight.
"The ancient Mesopotamians built shrines on top of them," Ahmed said. "Read that in the guidebook." (8.42-43)
This area is definitely the opposite of Birdy's description of Baghdad earlier. In Iraq, there are places that seem untouched by the war, and places where it feels like the war touches everything.