When most of the Iraqi RW pilots talk about “the war,” they’re referring to the Iran-Iraq dustup -- they call OIF “the fight.” Most of them do, anyway…

“So, they call us Saddam’s Soldiers. Feh. We did not fight for Saddam. American soldiers do not fight for Bush. Soldiers fight for the land, the country, the people! Not for the leader! The leader always changes and the land remains! But they call us ‘Saddam’s Soldiers and look down on us.

"They don’t know.

“They don’t know…

“I was stationed here during the war. You know that old hangar over there, with the shrine on it? A thousand-pound bomb hit it. There were five pilots inside. We didn’t even try to recover them, we just left them in there and put up a shrine. There would have been no point in digging them out. A thousand-pound bomb -- there would have been nothing to find. Nothing.

“So, we just put up the shrine. Then we went into hiding, because that night, the Iranians came, looking to kill pilots, looking to kill officers. They took the L-39 with them when they left. And we hid until the Americans came, and then we came out, because we knew the Americans wouldn’t kill us.”

The L-39 that was being turned into a UAV. It’s not the first time that I’ve been told the Iranians had come across the border into Iraq and snatched L-39s during the confusion, but it’s the first time I heard it from someone who’d seen it firsthand and who mentioned it so casually.

Every so often, one will seem hostile. He’ll raise his voice, a *lot*, and get pretty agitated. It didn’t take me long to realize it wasn’t directed at me, or Americans, or George Bush. And it wasn’t hostility at all -- it was something else...

“Can you imagine what some of us feel, that we fought for our land and then when the leader falls, we are insulted by the ones we thought we were defending?”

“I know that feeling. I flew in Vietnam.”

“Ah. I though you might have done that. You know, then.”

“Yes. I know.”

The Silence that usually follows isn’t uncomfortable. It’s a mutual recognition that each of us can see the other’s soul and recognize the similarities that transcend the differences. Even if a change in politics dictate that we may one day have to try to kill one another, the similarities won't change.

Put a couple of old soldiers together, get us to shut the hell up for a while and you’ll know when the Silence happens...

You'll know...