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I used to be a sort of superhero in the tiny universe of my Baghdad. My civilian name was Jeff, but my mythical alter ego was known alternately as Mr. Jeef, Mr. Joff or just Jack. I was an anomaly: an American in Iraq. I was mystery and possibility.

Between 1998 and 2001, I visited every couple of months with a humanitarian organization. In those days Iraq had two problems: a dictator, and a draconian trade embargo enforced by the United Nations and intended to punish the dictator. Iraqis called it “the siege.”

I always packed a box of aspirin and children’s vitamins for the staff at Al-Fanar hotel, my Baghdad home. These kinds of things were hard to find—and once found, even harder to afford—thanks to the siege.
I’d barely be settled into my room and it would begin. Such quiet and polite knocks. I would open the door and there would stand one or maybe two of the hotel staff. “Aspareen? Veetameen?” they would whisper, with eyebrows lifted. A quick handoff and a thank you and it was over.

One afternoon Abu Hasan from housekeeping was at the door knocking. I opened the door and he pushed his way past me. I shut the door. “Mr. Joff!” He gestured for me to have a seat.

For years Abu Hasan and I made conversation out of broken English and Arabic. More complex thoughts and feelings we communicated with gestures and facial contortions.

I sat down on the edge of my bed. “What is it?”

Hurriedly, Abu Hasan unfastened his belt and dropped his pants. Splattered on his right thigh, just below briefs, was a rash the size of a dinner plate. When my eyes met the rash, he made a face (loose translation: “Yikes!”) and mimed frantic scratching. There was silence. Me staring at the rash and him staring at me. Then he spoke slowly: “Oint-ment?”

This is what I mean when I say I was sort of a superhero. Of course I could get him some ointment. I did not fly halfway across the world merely to eat falafel and drink warm Pepsi. There was work to be done.

I took a taxi to a pharmacy in a wealthy neighborhood. I paid about ten U.S. dollars. It would have been impossible for Abu Hasan to scrape together that kind of money. I stuck the ointment in my pocket, fastened my cape snug around my neck, and flew back to the hotel.

Every day in Baghdad presented a new challenge. A friend’s mother needed thyroid medicine. A medical student needed medical journals. The hotel’s desk manager needed to get a letter to a friend in Detroit. Done, done, and done. A superhero loves to be useful.

Abu Hasan was cured—or at least on his way—before I left town. It was all thumbs up every time we passed in the hall or lobby. On the eve of my departure, he presented me with three sticky swaths of goat pelt. Of course he did.

***

My tiny Al-Fanar hotel was dwarfed by the nearby Hotel Palestine. There were no journalists at the Palestine then—not like now. There were times when the once-luxurious hotel seemed to have more staff than guests.

The top floor of the Palestine was all windows around a bar that served soda, non-alcoholic beer, and cake. The floor-to-ceiling windows framed a panorama of the city and the Tigris River that snaked through it.

Young lovers who could afford the drinks and desserts would steal away to the Palestine’s remarkably private top-floor booths for cake and sunset. I caught every sunset I could there.  As the sun neared the horizon, the thick city smog would transform it into a giant and wet yellow-orange ball that seemed to melt into the square houses and date palms at the outer edges of endless Baghdad.

If you stood right up against the windows and looked straight down, there was a tree-filled park. It stretched along the eastern bank of the Tigris for as long as you could see.

The park was the ghost of what Baghdad once was—before sanctions and the war in 1991 and the war with Iran before that. The park’s vegetation—once lush enough to swallow up picnics, domino games, and barbecues—looked thin and grey from above. Crumbling statues listed like lost children. I have never loved a city the way I loved Baghdad.

***

The day Saddam Hussein and his sons were given forty eight hours to leave Iraq (or face what most at that point believed to be the inevitable), I called the Al-Fanar. “Hello Mr. Joff!” came the booming voice of Abu Hasan at the other end. A volley of enthusiastic greetings commenced which Abu Hasan eventually interrupted abruptly with two words, delivered with full stops, like a telegram from last century’s wars:

“Baghdad. Finished.”

“I know, I know,” was all I could muster. We returned to variations on “how are you” in Arabic and stretched the conversation by a few more minutes. Neither of us wanted to end it. Finally there was silence. No goodbye.

***

I have been to Baghdad once since the invasion. I arrived a couple of weeks after CNN showed me bungling Marines pulling down a statue of the tyrant.

I wasn’t there on a humanitarian mission and I sure as hell wasn’t any kind of superhero. I was there to report for a small newspaper out of Kansas. I suppose you could say I was a war correspondent.

The Fanar was my first stop. It was all hellos, hugs, and kisses from every direction. Sa’ad was there, the genius waiter who had trained the hotel’s African Grey parrot to engage in mock gun battles and ring like a phone, then answer it. Mehedi, who lost his sister to a kerosene lamp fire during a siege-era blackout, was there too. And, of course, there was Abu Hasan. I didn’t stay long. My one-time home was all journalists and soldiers bustling about and I couldn’t afford the new room rate.

On the roof of my new hotel I tried to call the States on a satellite phone to report my safe arrival in the city I had thought I wanted to be in more than any on Earth. It was night and I was scared. Every place and face I knew in Baghdad was broken or burned. I had the flashlight my dad gave me. I could hear gunshots and cars and voices and I could hear nothing at all. I stood on that roof staring down at the satellite phone glowing in my hand and wondering how to work the damn thing. My face was green light.

The Iraqi men on the roof across the street were prowling silhouettes with machine guns. I dropped down and tried to crawl out of view. What if they thought I was a military man with my glowing gadget? I didn’t want to die pretending to be a war correspondent. I am not a war correspondent.

***

I lasted a week and a half in post-invasion Baghdad. I got sick immediately. Really sick. It was the undercooked chicken at my favorite restaurant on Saudoon Street. I’m usually careful with meat but I couldn’t stop staring at the American soldiers two tables over (their Humvee took up three parking spaces out front).

The soldiers stared back. “This is their country now,” an Iraqi friend told me that day with tears and a trembling voice. I was no longer mystery or possibility and I wasn’t an anomaly. I was just another American in Baghdad.

***

I visited a hospital before I left town.

“I am going to need a stool sample,” the doctor told me.

“It’s blood. No stool,” I replied.

“Still,” the doctor said, handing me a tiny blue cup.

I took the cup down the hall and around the corner to a filthy bathroom with a hole in the floor. I pulled down my pants, squatted with one stabilizing hand on the wall, and filled the cup with blood.

“Here you go doc,” I said, holding out the cup.

He stared into the cup but did not take it: “This is blood.”

The doctor walked me and my cup to the lab. He introduced me to the technician and left. Before taking the cup the technician looked right and then left. He held two thumbs up close to his belly, locked his wild eyes to mine, and whispered:

“Bush! Good!”

“I had nothing to do with it,” is all I said. And I handed him the cup.

This story originally appeared on our content partner Cellstories.