THE CATS OF WAR: IN BEIRUT (TOP) AND BAGHDADBy JOHN F. BURNS
The New York TimesIt was a bitterly cold night in the Baghdad winter of 2005, somewhere in the predawn hours before the staccato of suicide bombs and mortars and gunfire that are the daily orchestration of the war. Alone in my office in The Times's compound beside the Tigris River, I was awaiting the telephoned "goodnight" from The Times foreign desk, eight time zones west, signaling that my work for the next day’s paper was done.
That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness, calling for its mother somewhere inside the compound. By an animal lover’s anthropomorphic logic, those desperate calls, three nights running, had come to seem more than the appeal of a tiny creature doomed to a cold and lonely death. Deep in the winter night, they seemed like a dismal tocsin for all who suffer in a time of war.
With others working for The Times in Baghdad, I took solace in the battalion of cats that had found their way past the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that guard our compound. With their survival instincts, the cats of our neighborhood learned in the first winter of the war that food and shelter and human kindness lay within the walls. Outside, among the garbage heaps and sinuous alleyways, human beings were struggling for their own survival, and a cat’s life was likely to be meager, embattled and short.
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Top photo by AFP, bottom photo by Joao Silva/N.Y. Times
1 comment:
John F. Burns - New York Times
--letting the cat out of the bag--
If you listen to John Burns publicly speak, his bird's nest hairdo dominating the visual, you arrive at the conclusion that to him history's best friend, unemotional time, will say that America did what the world needed and placed it's military boots in the Middle East.
When I heard him, he disclosed in his speech that his Dad was a NATO Officer, a uniformed political operative so to speak. He humorously alluded that perhaps it wasn't best to disclose to the audience that he came from a military-solution background because it hung in the air that his "meddle-away-America" conclusions seemed to derive, slantedly, from his personal background.
He may well be spot on with his political historical conclusions.
But, perhaps his bias towards the acceptability of invading the brown oil rich hordes had more to do with his admission that the Brits as a nation as well as the dons of Oxford and Cambridge, whilst Mister Burns was youthfully entering the halls of higher learning, had not yet become aware that the days of Empire were actually finished.
Notes from JF Burns speech, Williams College, MA, Sept.'07
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