Dear Saddam,
You don’t know who I am, nor do you have any reason to. I’m a 24 year old American woman who can’t exactly point out your regime on a map. I first learned about you back in the summer of 1990. I was rifling (pun intended) through a local New York newspaper, sweating my ass off in my grandmother’s Bronx efficiency apartment, and noticed the headline, “Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.” Immediately two thoughts came to mind: 1 – “Who the fuck is Saddam Hussein?” and 2 – “What the fuck is Kuwait?” (Only I had to say the “f-word” silently to myself, because I was an 11 year old Christian girl, and good Christian girls aren’t supposed to say bad words like, “fuck.”)
Soon I learned from bingeing on too many hours of Wolf Blitzer and that song that seemed to play on every radio station once the American occupation started – Bette Midler’s “From a Distance.” Did you ever hear it? Maybe the American troops blasted it from their tanks when we started the ground war, and that’s why your troops were so quick to surrender. That song gets old fast.
Any-hoo, the reason I’m writing is because, while you don’t know me, you are seriously impacting my life right now, and I thought you should know. You see, I’m an Army Lieutenant, assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, which is waiting ever so patiently in Kuwait, ready to kick the ever living shit out of you. We’ve been told that you’re a monster; you torture your people, and you have weapons of mass destruction that you intend to use, and you’re not cooperating with the UN weapons inspectors.
Dude, stop dicking around! You’re in a lose-lose situation, and I’m bored out of my mind waiting to see if we’re going to war or not. My brain is literally rotting as we sit here, justifying our deployment, which probably cost my government billions of dollars, and for that reason alone, I bet we’re coming after you.
I have no idea what war is going to be like. We’re told that your people hate you so much, they’re all going to surrender the second we cross the border.
I didn’t train for this. Not that I really paid attention to my West Point military training. Everything was about killing the \”fucking Commies,” which seemed pretty irrelevant to me, now that Gorbachev is our friend. But I’m not scared. Our firepower is ridiculous. Hopefully I won’t die. I have so much of life yet to live. Besides, I’m still a virgin.
So please, get it together Saddam!
Respectfully,
Laura
1LT, AG
United States Army