Watching the Fight

I drank Coors Light when I watched the fight on a t.v. set up outside a garage-lined backstreet off Front Street, Philadelphia. Felix "Tito" Trinidad versus William Joppy at Madison Square Garden. Men got off work to see El Gran Campeon. Men who worked under the hoods of cars with their hands and had hard greasy stubs as fingers. Men with suntanned arms who drove trucks and cranked gears. Men who were detectives who carried guns under their shirts. Men who knew someone that had got shot. Men who married their ex-girlfriend's sister's cousin at Edison High School and when things didn't go well, they went back and married their ex's. Everyone met at baby showers. I cried and looked at my own hands. Soft, smooth, the only thing that they worked on was my jagged nails. I rotated between standing outside the periphery of the men's huddle and swaying off to piss beer water behind the garage. These men were real, what I wanted; I could never belong here, but I could try, pretend to, and drink Coors Light.

-by David Ocasio

Cyros Amiri #66: Bye Bye Uncle Saddam

When I came to the U.S. priority number one was getting a job. My family told me to ask my uncle. I didn’t want to, though. I didn’t want to rely on family, especially my uncle. He knew all about my situation, but I never got the sense he was all that interested, so I sure did not want to ask. He’d been here in the States for thirty years and was pretty successful. He was second in command of a large, respected, national company with many employees. I sure did not want to ask him for help, though. No way.

Then the U.S. attacked Iraq. Shortly after my return, America's military attacked to Iraq. That brought back memories of the Iran-Iraq war I fought in. We didn’t win that war. But Uncle Saddam lost, too, that’s for sure. A lot of my friends were killed in that war. Saddam Hussein was a monster. He committed crimes against us, the Iranian people, but also against the Iraqi people, too. Anyway I tried to volunteer to join the American army and resume my fight against Uncle Saddam. I talked with my friend, Sami, about my decision, and asked that he find out how I could join up. Sami was a good friend. I lived with him for a while. Sami promised that he would find that how I can join the army. A few days later he told me that because I didn’t have my green card yet, I couldn’t join. That seemed weird because I knew that a lot of people joined up in order to get their green card. I thought maybe it was different for me because I was Iranian. I tried to join up two more times. The second time was after I got my green card. Some NGO worker I asked told me I was too old, so I couldn’t join. The third time I tried to be hired as a translator as for an Army contractor. But in the end I decided that I didn’t want to work for a contractor, so quit that process. Anyway, no one loves war, and people die in war all the time.

But to me, the American attitude towards this war seemed really strange. There was a lot of talk about Iraqi freedom, but that was all talk. I didn’t hear anybody talking about U.S. national interest. That seemed really weird. On the other hand, when I talked with people who opposed the war, they said that because U.S. Army did not find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war was obviously a big mistake. To me this argument was ridiculous! From the time the war started it was clear to me that they would not find this particular type of “WMD” in Iraq because Iraq never produced this particular type of weapon.

But with respect to chemical or biological weapons, it was no secret that the Iraqi army used them. I saw it with my own eyes, used against me. I had lost many friends because of those weapons. Large number of Iranian troops, due to inhalation of toxic gases used by Iraq, were hospitalized in many European countries. It seems that genocide in Hallabcha by Saddam was not enough for people; they still whined about why the U.S. army did not find weapons in Saddam's storage closets, as some kind of evidence for the “mistake” made by the Bush administration. In the meantime, nobody, neither those who supported or opposed the war even bothered to discuss the U.S. national interest. And those who were against the war on humanitarian grounds totally ignored the atrocities committed by Uncle Saddam. The whole debate was nonsense.

Anyway, I was convinced that my world be a better place without Saddam Hussein. I thank the American military and their families for what they did. I wish I’d participated, my own self. I didn’t, though. I asked my uncle for a job as a bartender. Being a bartender was a pretty fun way to waste three years of my life.

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