Playing Atari with Saddam Hussein Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Basra, Iraq, 1991

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Middle Grade Mania!

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Roy and Ali Fadhil

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Title page art © 2018 by Patrick Leger

  Map art © 2018 by Lucy Banaji

  Cover illustration © 2018 by Patrick Leger

  Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Roy, Jennifer Rozines, 1967– author. | Fadhil, Ali, joint author.

  Title: Playing Atari with Saddam Hussein : based on a real life story / Jennifer Roy and Ali Fadhil

  Description : Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2018] | Summary: For forty-two days in 1991, eleven-year-old Ali Fadhil and his family struggle to survive as Basra, Iraq, is bombed by the United States and its allies.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016057657 | ISBN 9780544785076

  Subjects: LCSH: Persian Gulf War, 1991​—​Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Persian Gulf War, 1991​—​Fiction. | Family Life​—​Iraq​—​Fiction. | Hussein, Saddam, 1937–2006​—​Fiction. | Iraq​—​History​—​20th century​—​Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.R812185 PI 2018 |DDC [Fic]​—​dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057657

  eISBN 978-1-328-83024-1

  v1.0118

  To the good people of Iraq.

  ​—​J.R.

  To the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces: THANK YOU!

  ​—​A.F.

  Basra, Iraq,

  1991

  One

  Wednesday, January 16, 1991—Day 1

  THE AFTERNOON THE BOMBS START FALLING, I GET MY highest score ever on my favorite video game.

  “Boys!” Mama yells. “It’s time!”

  I ignore her, too busy taunting my brother Shirzad.

  “I am the champion of the universe!” I tell him. Shirzad reaches out, trying to grab the controller from my hand. But I don’t let him have it. Not yet. First I need to put my name up as the high score.

  A-L-I. I maneuver the stick and buttons and then hit Enter. My brother’s initials drop down to second place.

  “Give me that,” Shirzad grumbles. “It’s my turn and I’m going to take you down.”

  “Boys! What is wrong with you?” Mother appears in the doorway. “Put that garbage away and get to the safe room. It’s almost time for the war.” She turns and is gone.

  The war. It’s really here. The adults have been talking about it for weeks and weeks. It had seemed about as real as the virtual war I was just playing onscreen.

  Until now. The United Nations deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait has expired. It’s time for war.

  I throw the controller into the box that holds all our game stuff. Shirzad shuts down the Atari console.

  “Race you,” he says, and takes off running. I’m right behind him. It’s hard to run on the tile floor when I’m just wearing socks, and just before we reach the “safe room” I slip and slide. I crash into my brother and we land in a heap on the floor.

  Right at the feet of our father.

  “What kind of example are you setting for your younger brother and sister?” he says. “Stand up and stop acting like animals.”

  “Yes, Baba,” we say together.

  Shirzad and I get up. At the last moment, Shirzad stretches his longer legs and steps ahead of me into the room.

  “I win,” he whispers to me. But it’s a hollow victory, because the first person in the safe room is the first person Mama puts to work. She tells Shirzad to help Baba move the bed away from the window.

  I’m tasked to shut the remaining windows and close the curtains. I go over to a window that looks over the side yard. Baba has already removed the metal air conditioner from the window. If a bomb hits nearby, flying glass will be bad enough, but a flying air conditioner would be worse. A warm breeze is blowing in. Even in January, the weather is mild.

  The sun has set. I can still discern the outlines of the date and palm trees in the yard and the gray stone privacy wall that surrounds our house. Beyond the wall is our city of Basra, wrapped in an eerie silence, waiting.

  “Mama!” My younger sister, Shireen, bursts into the room. “When will the war start?”

  “They said on the radio it will start sometime during the night,” Mama says. “Where is Ahmed? He was just here.”

  “I’m back,” my younger brother says, careening into the room. “Shireen made me go get this heavy basket. What’s in here, anyway—​rocks?”

  “No, it’s a picnic,” Shireen says. “Flatbread, tomatoes, olives, hummus, and Coca-Colas. And date cookies for dessert.”

  A picnic for a war? Shireen is only six. She doesn’t really remember what war is like. I’m eleven, and I know all too well. This is already my second war.

  I go around shutting the windows. Normally, at this hour we kids would be getting ready for bed. It should be a school night, not a war night.

  “Ahmed,” says Mama. “Stop fooling around.” Ahmed is clutching a small rolled-up rug, running into the wall and bouncing off. Run! Bash! Fall! He comes to a halt and walks over to a pile of small rugs stacked against the wall.

  My job is done, so I go over and help Ahmed lay the rugs around the room. Five rugs for Mama and four kids. One bed for my father.

  “I still can’t believe that we are at war with the United States of America,” Ahmed says. “What could Saddam be thinking?”

  “For sure he is not thinking about his own people,” I say.

  Two

  SADDAM HUSSEIN IS THE PRESIDENT OF IRAQ. George Bush is the president of the United States. The United States of America is the most powerful country in the world. Iraq, my country, is the most foolish.

  Last August, five months ago, Saddam ordered our army to invade a neighboring country, Kuwait. Everyone knows you can’t just go and take over someone else’s country. But my president did it anyway.

  So President George Bush and a bunch of other world leaders have formed a coalition to stop Saddam and take back Kuwait. Iraq is an ant compared to this coalition. They will crush us like a bug.

  “I hate Saddam,” my sister, Shireen, says loudly. “He’s ruining my life.”

  “Shhh . . .” My parents shush her. What Shireen said would be amusing if it weren�
�t so important to be cautious. Yes, we are inside our house, among family. But we were taught to never speak against Saddam Hussein.

  He is evil. If he heard what my little sister just said about him, he would probably cut out her tongue. Or his henchmen would do it for him.

  Saddam’s people are everywhere. One of the members of his government lives on our street. We have to be extra careful. A cloud of paranoia hangs over our neighborhood games.

  “Children,” Baba says. “Find a place away from the windows and settle down.”

  I claim an orange and brown striped rug and lay it out next to Shirzad’s gray one. The younger kids sit closer to my parents. I have two brothers and a sister. It goes: Shirzad, me, Ahmed, Shireen.

  We all have dark hair, olive skin, and big brown eyes. My siblings look like a mix of both sides of our family. But me? I am a copy of my mother. I look like my mother in boy form.

  People remark on the resemblance all the time. “Your son,” they’ll say to Mama, “he’s exactly like you!”

  “On the outside, yes,” my mother will respond. Serious and stoic, she is a respected professor of mathematics.

  I hate math. And school in general.

  We went to school most days during the last war. This war? School has been canceled! At least something good has come from the mess Saddam has created.

  “Hey!” I’ve been hit by a rolled-up sock. A smelly sock. I throw it back at Ahmed, who is laughing like a lunatic. Normally, I’d jump him and wrestle him to the ground, but I see my father’s frown.

  Baba is almost as strict as Mama—​his patients love him, but they only see the pleasant, easygoing professional who takes care of their teeth. During the day, my father works his mandatory government job as a dentist. In the evening, he does orthodontics at his own clinic for private clients. He fills cavities for the poor and puts braces on the wealthy.

  Baba left his small rural town in northern Iraq and worked his way through university and dental school.

  “I came from nothing and made myself into something,” he tells us over and over. He calls us kids lazy and spoiled and soft. It’s true, we don’t have to work like he did. Until recently we had nannies and a gardener and a cook to do all the work for us.

  Except for schoolwork. It makes my parents crazy. They expect us to get all As. None of us are A students, but I’m the worst.

  My attitude is, why spend time memorizing dates and doing math problems when the world is crumbling around us?

  My attitude is not appreciated.

  There is one class, however, in which I do get As. English.

  My English teachers think it’s because of them that I’m so good with the language. But really, my best English teacher is the television.

  I’m obsessed with American TV shows. We have one channel that shows them, with Arabic subtitles. Turn that channel on and I’m like a sponge, absorbing American English. My favorite programs are the westerns, but I like the detective shows nearly as much. Everything about America fascinates me—​the food, the celebrities, the freedom.

  “Enough!” My father is breaking up a kicking fight between Ahmed and Shireen. Only Ahmed gets yelled at, as usual. Shireen is spoiled, just as Baba says, and she gets away with everything.

  I look around at my family and feel the walls closing in. Oh, how I wish I had been born in a different place, where people are happy and carefree.

  Where families are not in hiding, hoping to live through the night. For no other reason except their leader is a madman.

  I go to my rug and sit down.

  I could be brave. After all, this isn’t my first war. I survived that one, didn’t I? But I am not stupid. Luck can run out at any time; worlds can be destroyed in an instant. I am scared. I am powerless and I feel betrayed.

  Soon, America—​the land that I love—​is going to try to kill me. I’ll try not to take it personally.

  Three

  Thursday, January 17, 1991—Day 2

  HOURS PASS. BABA IS RESTLESS. HE FIDDLES WITH THE RADIO, trying to get the latest news. Finally he settles on one station.

  The younger kids have dozed off, with Mama sitting silently near them.

  Shirzad is humming to himself. I pick at a stray thread on my rug.

  “This is the Voice of America!” a newscaster blares from the battery-powered radio, waking up Ahmed and Shireen and making me jump. “The air campaign is under way. Coalition planes have reached Baghdad.”

  Shireen lets out a wail. “They said Baghdad,” Ahmed retorts scornfully. “We’re in Basra. Dummy.”

  “I know that, dummy.” Shireen kicks Ahmed.

  Mama comforts Shireen and scolds Ahmed.

  “Shush!” Baba says. The Voice of America drones on about the planes that are cutting a swath through western Iraq to get to Baghdad, our capital city.

  Our relatives live in Baghdad—​aunts, uncles, cousins. We visit them a couple times a year. I think Baghdad is too big and too dirty, crowded and unsafe.

  My city, Basra, is smaller and farther south. It’s in the desert, so it’s hot, but the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers meet and flow through it, adding a stripe of blue to the tans and browns of the desert. Basra is edged by swamps, so when my cousins visit they complain about the ‘swamp stink.’ I’m so used to it, I don’t notice any smell. I think my cousins are jealous because Baghdad’s such a pit. Still, I hope it isn’t damaged too badly. I hope my relatives are okay.

  Right now, Basra’s biggest problem is not its swamps. It’s that our city is only thirty miles from Kuwait’s border.

  Kuwait is a country that borders us to the south. The main route from Baghdad to Kuwait runs right through Basra.

  “Who cares about Kuwait, anyway?” I whisper to Shirzad. “It’s a tiny speck on the globe.”

  “A speck full of oil,” Shirzad replies.

  “Yeah.” I sigh. Saddam wants to take Kuwait’s oil, worth billions of dollars. The money likely won’t be used to feed our people, but to feed his ego. He wants the world to think he’s the greatest, the most powerful. Sometimes I think our president is like Shireen, always trying to get attention from the big kids.

  In my lifetime, we have barely had any peace. Our last war was with Iran, and it dragged on for eight years. Eight years! It began when I was one year old and ended when I was nine. And nobody even won.

  So now what does Saddam Hussein do? He sends our army to invade Kuwait.

  Which is against all international rules, and the reason that group of countries has formed an alliance to get Saddam out of Kuwait and to punish him. Not just any group of countries. The United States of America plus Britain, Syria, Canada, France, Italy, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, plus a bunch more. The news said thirty-four countries, the largest coalition since World War Two. All teamed up against us. And Saddam still thinks this was a good idea?

  We’re doomed, I think to myself, for perhaps the thousandth time. We regular Iraqis are here just trying to live our lives, but now we could be bombed?

  A voice on the radio is saying something about American “smart bombs,” with technology for “pinpoint accuracy” in taking out military targets. These smart bombs are designed to reduce “collateral casualties,” which means the Americans will do their best not to kill innocent people. At least this is what American radio says.

  I look at Shirzad, and say the last words either of us will be able to hear for a while.

  “I hope those bombs are as smart as they claim.”

  My brother nods. I know we are thinking the same thing. The more accurate the bombs, the less likely we are to die.

  And then we hear it. A spooky whistling sound in the distance, followed by a boom.

  It is zero hour.

  The war has arrived.

  Four

  IMAGINE AN EARTHQUAKE. IT RATTLES YOUR HOUSE, and things fall off shelves.

  That would be like the war with Iran.

  Now imagine another e
arthquake. The ground beneath you shakes violently, knocking you off your feet. You lie helpless on the floor as the world roars and rages around you.

  That would be like our first night at war with America.

  Bombs.

  Many, many bombs.

  Raining down on our city.

  My ears are clogged with the sounds of explosions and sirens and my mother’s prayers: “God, please protect my family,” over and over.

  I think I am most frightened about my mother, because she does not even believe in God. I flatten myself on the floor and hope our safe room is really safe, considering it’s just my brother Shirzad’s bedroom.

  “Why my room?” Shirzad had protested when my parents first told him about its new use.

  “Don’t be selfish,” Baba said. “Your room is farthest away from the high school.” That shut Shirzad up.

  One might wonder what a high school has to do with war. But that is how President Saddam’s twisted mind works. He places weapons on the roofs of school buildings, hospitals . . . anywhere innocent civilians may be, so he can use them as human shields. When the enemy tries to destroy military capabilities, including these improvised ones, like schools and hospitals, well, that’s when Saddam goes on TV and says, “Look how evil our enemies are—​killing children and sick people!”

  The military has put an antiaircraft weapon on the roof of our local high school. Which is only two blocks from our house. The weapon can shoot at enemy fighter jets overhead. Of course those planes can fire back. And drop bombs. So, this antiaircraft weapon on top of the high school makes our neighborhood a target. Our street might as well have a bull’s-eye with Saddam Hussein’s face on it.

  War is no joke, and the coalition that’s attacking us is not kidding. The bombs and guns and sirens are relentless. Our house is shaking so hard that I’m scared it might collapse. And then—​

  The power goes out. It’s so dark, I can’t even see Shirzad. In a room filled with family, I feel alone.

  Terror. Noise. Both keep me awake, frozen flat on the floor. Thoughts of death poke at the corners of my brain, but I won’t let them in. Instead I start to make a list in my head of things that I like.