Books In Iraq

Here's a thread that Nicholas Basbanes recently posted to the exlibris
group:


Herewith a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times that members of the
list might find interesting. Nick Basbanes

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...pr24,0,2568872
..story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Bibliophiles inside the wire

At an Iraq camp nicknamed Mortaritaville, American warriors young and
old install a library near book lovers' sacred ground. By Nicholas A.
Basbanes
April 24, 2006
AMERICAN TROOPS assigned to Camp Anaconda, 42 miles north of Baghdad in
the Iraqi desert, call the sprawling encampment Mortaritaville — a
place, they wryly say, where every hour is happy hour. On the evening I
arrived aboard an Air Force C-17, a smattering of shells lobbed from
"outside the wire" kept my aircraft idling on the outer tarmac for half
an hour, our helmets and flak jackets in place until the all-clear
sounded. The next day, my escort on what was the unlikeliest of
bibliophilic adventures, Lt. Col. Brian C. McNerney, took me to a
recreation center in which a new library was about to open its doors to
eager readers. The freshly installed wooden shelves had been stocked
through the efforts of octogenarian Army veterans in the United States,
the same men who 61 years earlier had helped organize the first
libraries to be established in Germany after the cessation of
hostilities in World War II — an interesting circumstance for a writer
who has said on more than one occasion that he will go anywhere in
pursuit of a good book story. A few weeks earlier, about 3,000 volumes
had been shipped out of Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, with
7,000 more following shortly thereafter. The two loads made up the core
collection of a library intended for use by the 25,000 service
personnel and civilian workers stationed at Camp Anaconda, and later,
when they leave, by Iraqis in the nearby city of Balad, who have
expressed a keen interest in acquiring whatever reading material is
available to them. I am a collector of details like this, as my five
books about books readily attest. That's why McNerney, public affairs
officer for the 3rd Corps Support Command, sent me an e-mail in
February telling me about the new "library initiative" he had just
organized in the combat zone. He extended what must have been a
semi-serious invitation to attend the dedication ceremony. To the shock
of everyone, I accepted, on one condition. Would the Army help me visit
Ur, the Sumerian city in lower Mesopotamia where the Old Testament
tells us the prophet Abraham was born, where writing as we know it began
to take shape about 5,000 years ago, where humanity's first literary
text, the "Epic of Gilgamesh," may have been composed, and where some
of the world's first libraries were located? Yes, came the answer. But
before there could be any magical trips to archeological sites, there
was the new library to consecrate. A career Army officer with a master's
in English from Michigan State University, McNerney had mentioned the
idea last year to a group of World War II veterans from the 65th and
71st Infantry divisions, who in 1946 had set up what today is the
municipal library in Passau, Germany.
Point man for the effort was Robert Patton, an 84-year-old resident of
Chapel Hill, N.C., who was among the first American soldiers to liberate
the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in 1945. "My imagination
went out of control," Patton told me. "I felt that regardless of
whatever political views anyone had about the war in Iraq, books give
all of us common ground."
Patton mobilized dozens of volunteers, including staffers at the Chapel
Hill Public Library and Boy Scouts from Troop 39, who boxed books and
loaded them onto trucks for transfer to Pope Air Force Base and then to
Iraq. The 10,000 volumes they gathered included fiction and nonfiction,
"a pretty solid critical mass of material to get us started," McNerney
said as he walked me through the acquisitions. The first book to be
signed out? Toni Morrison's "Beloved," borrowed by Pfc. Stephanie
Richardson, who said she had seen the movie and was eager to read the
original. Until McNerney's library became operational, there was no
library on the Balad base at all. There were two swimming pools, a gym,
a movie theater and dozens of computer terminals with high-speed access
to the Internet, but no place for books. McNerney said the omission was
partly because of priorities young people have today for their leisure
activities but also because of uncertainty over the time the Americans
would remain in Iraq. "Nobody knows how long this base is supposed to
exist, so there were infrastructure issues," he told me. "But when we
leave, all of these books will go over to the Iraqis, and some well
before that." In fact, phase two of the project, which will be directed
by the son of a veteran of the 71st Division in Virginia, will send
books to Balad that have specific appeal to Iraqis: richly visual
children's books, for instance, or titles that bridge language
barriers, or professional monographs such as medical texts, for which
there is an immediate need. McNerney laughed when I suggested that he
might be a modern-day Don Quixote embarked on a book mission that
others might find fanciful in the extreme. But he agrees with the
observation I made at the dedication ceremony — that where there are
books, there is always hope. The next morning, we left Balad aboard a
C-23 Sherpa bound for Tallil air base to the south. Within two hours of
landing, I was walking about the ruins of
Ur with Dhief Muhsen, a third-generation Iraqi caretaker whose
grandfather helped excavate the site in the 1930s. He pointed out some
bricks in the royal
tombs, many of them bearing tracings of cuneiform characters. He said
we were standing on ground that harbors thousands of buried artifacts,
many of them, he is certain, bearing texts of extraordinary cultural
importance. Just 11 days later, Italian archeologists would report
stumbling across "a trove of ancient stone tablets from the fabled
civilization of Ur," dating from the 3rd millennium BC. "The place
where the tablets were found, not far from the surface, leads one to
suppose they contain information from a library," one scholar said.
"There could be thousands of them down there." NICHOLAS A. BASBANES is
the author most recently of "Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the
Printed Word to Stir the World."

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