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Kuwait in a civilian car unscathed. We might be mad or stupid, but at least we were serious.
    However, our main attraction as far as he was concerned was
that we were taking a major hassle off his hands. The zoo and its pitiful inhabitants were in his zone of command, and it was a nonmilitary problem he needed like a hole in the head.
    â€œYou sure you gonna take charge of these animals?” he asked me again.
    I nodded.
    â€œThe coalition guys in Kuwait told you to do that?”
    I continued nodding and tapped my authorization papers.
    He beamed and shook my hand once more. It was the first time since I had arrived in Iraq that I felt really welcome. It seemed that all the banging on bureaucratic doors, from South Africa to Kuwait, to get here could even have been worthwhile after all.
    â€œWe’ll help all we can, but there’s still a war on,” he said.
    â€œThanks. We’re going to need it.”
    Brian Szydlik was a professional soldier and damn proud of it. Like all good commanders, he held the safety of his men paramount. He had done what he could to keep the zoo’s creatures alive, but in a combat zone this was a distraction he could ill afford in case it endangered the lives of his troops.
    As we were speaking, a stocky middle-aged Iraqi man approached us. His hair was ash gray and his face crumpled with exhaustion. But when he smiled you could see humor light up his eyes.
    Szydlik waved him over. “This is Husham Hussan, the deputy director of the Baghdad Zoo—or what’s left of it.”
    Dr. Husham Mohamed Hussan’s face was a portrait of slack-jawed disbelief as we shook hands and I explained my mission. He could not believe a foreigner had come all the way from the far end of Africa to help his humble zoo. How the hell had I even known about them?
    When I opened the trunk of my rental car and showed him the medicines we had brought from across the border, courtesy of the Kuwait City zoo, he grabbed my hand and wept.
    I wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Has it been bad, my friend?”
    He nodded. “Come. I show.”

    This was what my trip had been all about; at last I would have the truth. I would see it for myself. But nothing could have steeled me for what I was about to witness.
    The first thing I noticed was the entrance. Well, I couldn’t really miss it—the massive, ornate black-and-gold-painted gates, engraved with lions baring their fangs at each other, had been blasted open and now lurched at drunken angles.
    But those were merely the portals to Hades. For once I was inside, the true horror hit me.
    The animal cages were foul beyond belief; they had not been cleaned for God knows how long. Evaporated, ammonia-reeking urine formed salty white patches on the ground, while piles of excrement, black and putrid, had hardened in the scorching sun. The stench was pungent enough to turn the strongest stomach.
    Black swarms of flies, so dense you couldn’t see through them, hovered over the gnawed skeletons of the dead animals that had been tossed into the dens to feed the live ones; the bilious-ripe malodor of death and decay clogged the air like a soiled cloud.
    The wall of the lions’ enclosure had a gaping hole from a direct hit from a mortar shell, which the Americans had crudely plugged with rubble and wire. If the lions were healthy, that wouldn’t hold them for five minutes, I thought, making a mental note to seal the break properly as soon as possible.
    Inside the enclosure, the giant cats stared at us listlessly, some barely able to lift their heads. I looked carefully; they were African lions. I was expecting the rarer and slightly smaller Asian subspecies, Panthero leo persica .
    In another cage a rare Bengal tiger feebly bared his fangs, his once magnificently striped pelt as faded as old string. At the back of the adjacent enclosure, camouflaged in the shade, was another younger male Bengal as scrawny and listless as the