This wasn't a Brian Reed trash burger. That would've been a gourmet meal in comparison. This wasn't a $5 spoonful of Tabasco. Or even a Nelson swallowed worm to get out of PT for the day. This was Haji food, and the worst of it all.
Tonight select individuals from my platoon were invited by an Iraqi colonel to have some dinner with him. So far I have eaten very little Iraqi food, but the food I have consumed has been good. I had a kiwi-banana smoothie from a hookah shop. I've had samoon, a bomb ass bread. And the general chi that you can get from any household or business.
As I sit with my LT and a few others from the platoon, a couple of plates are brought out with all kinds of fixings. Cucumber tomato mixed as some kind of salad. A cucumber sauce, potatoes covered in some kind of curri, baba ghanouj, and some kabob cooked mutton, and sheep liver. All looks and smells good. I make myself a sandwich with some of the meat and just about every topping I could find. I ate it down, and though the mutton was a little chewy all was very tasty.
I wasn't really hungry for a second sandwich, but I had another piece of samoon, and so I decided that I would make myself another. That was probably mistake number one. Mistake number two, was that I had already finished my 7up and didn't have anything with flavor in it, for that just in case scenario.
The first bite I took into sandwhich number two I immediately regretted. I didn't not want to be rude, and so I continued to chew on a cold, rubbery, and most of all nasty piece of meat. Let me digress for a moment, and talk about what I have seen here for the last month, just to give you a little insight on what started to run through my head.
We are in a fairly urban area. There is trash and raw sewage in the streets. In our area I have seen these "sheep lots" we'll call them. It's basically a sheep herder/salesman that brings his sheep from the outskirts of the city, or from his front yard, to a corner and sells his sheep to anyone who wants a meal for the night. You can smell these sheep a mile away, and they are dirty and grungy, untrimmed, and definitely not happy as they would be if they were in California. Food is scarce for these animals, and I often times see them picking at piles of trash that I'm unsure even has anything edible in them. The water they drink is polluted with car oil, gasoline, and shit or piss. The water here could kill superman it's so green.
So as I'm three to four chews into this bite, I start to picture all of the times I've seen a dirty sheep drinking some of this water. All of a sudden the taste is too much for me to handle. I begin to gag, and the smell that comes into my nose through the back of my throat begins to suffocate me. I dismiss myself from the room with the bread and sheep meat deep in the back of my mouth. I cleared the door way as my fingers scrambled to get the meat out of my mouth. I launched it as far as I could and managed not to let my stomach turn inside out.
I would rather a sharp stick in the eye then have taken another chew of that mutton. Drinking a dip spitter would've probably been a better alternative. The lessons this story have taught me have been many. Always carry gum. No Iraqi meat. And most importantly RSVP NO on dinner with foreigners.
If you live in a foreign place long enough, eventually you have to try the food. I resisted as long as possible in China. I actually thought at one point that I would lose weight because I couldn't eat the food. Two occasions of food poisoning later, I stuck with plain noodles and the only American restaurant I could find. I might not have lost weight, but I also didn't die, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
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