It was after the two shots of layered sugar, coffee, and tea were finshed. We gathered up our gear in a front room of a sprawling mansion in Baghdad.
I noticed a grandmotherly looking woman was standing near me. She had a young boy around 12 years old in front of her looking up at me.
She gave him a lil push and said “Go ahead. Ask him.” The boy took a deep breath.
He looked me in the eye and said n English: “Deez thing, called the intranets… Is it a real thing?”
I said “The internet? You mean with computers?” I looked down and saw a sheet of graph paper taped to the screen of a broken monitor. There was also a mouse and a keyboard, both with cut cables. It was a make believe computer. ‘”Yea, the internet is a real thing.”
The boy’s face lit up. He started jumping up and down saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
There was an explosion of cheering applause behind me. I spun my head around and saw about 30 family members standing on a huge main staircase. Two guys at the top back corner gave me a dirty look, but the entire family rejoiced. The boy’s grandma looked me in the eye and gave me a fist pump.
They were a wealthy family, and had heard of an internet. This was 2003. Saddam Hussein had kept the internet a secret from his population.
I got to be one of the first Americans to confirm to Baghdad, and all of Iraq that there was a thing called the internet. I feel good about that.
I know that boy, now in his 30s, had to have been a pioneer in Iraqi internet after the war. I never got his name.