PAPIER-MÂCHÉ SAVES THE DAY

The life I had been living and loving was coming to an end. I was always going be their dad, but the kids were flapping their wings and leaving the nest and didn’t need me in the same way anymore. I had a turn being a movie star and television star and had prepared financially for the time when the parts and the money no longer came easily. So now I needed to figure out satisfying things to do with the leftover time, although I guess I had already decided what this new Daniel Stern’s life was going to look like. He was going to be an artist, a public servant, and a rancher.

I had only seen our new ranch just that one time, when the realtor took me around and I met the cattle rancher who owned it. Laure had gone up, met everyone, and took care of all the real estate closing stuff while I was consumed with Barbra’s Wedding and Regular Joe. She had made a deal with a local cowboy, Will, to lease the pastureland and run his cows on our property, not only giving us a little income but also having someone there every day to keep an eye on the place. Our lifelong fantasy of owning a farm in the country had come true on paper, but now we had to figure out what the reality of that actually was. When we finally got our first chance to go up there, it was like a movie. Specifically, City Slickers. We drove up with a bed, a table and chairs, and some food packed into our Chevy Suburban. (That’s another plug for a GMC car, and I want it known that I am wide open for an endorsement deal.) The drive was gorgeous and easy, and the land was just as beautiful as I remembered, maybe more so. We drove by the barn and the pump house and on up to the wood cabin, cruising by the cows and their adorable babies behind the fences. We unloaded the furniture, set up the kitchen and bedroom, and got the wood-burning stove going. It was simple and romantic and just as we had dreamed. We ventured out to see our land, heading up one of the dirt roads in the Suburban into the pastureland. I drove along the rutted road in four-wheel drive for half a mile or so when we got out to marvel at the feeling of being in such a perfectly natural setting, in the middle of nowhere, green hills surrounding this beautiful little valley. Laure hiked up one side while I strolled in the open pasture.

The sight of her on that mountainside is something I will never forget, but not because of how beautiful she was. It is the memory of those fifteen or twenty cows that suddenly appeared on the edge of the mountain above her. It didn’t make a lot of sense, because cows are nervous around people and aren’t really that curious. I didn’t start to feel uneasy until I looked up at the ridge of the opposite hill and saw another large group of cows congregating. What the fuck was going on? I had been around enough cows on those City Slickers films to know they are afraid of everything, completely non-aggressive animals. That’s how you herd them, by chasing them in the direction you want them to go. These cows looked different. They looked like they wanted to come after us. When another herd of fifteen or so came up the road and blocked our way back, I started to get a very, very bad feeling. Laure was about a hundred yards up the hill when I yelled to her to get back to the truck. At first, she poo-pooed me, saying I was being ridiculous. But she started to run once she noticed the cows moving in on us, slowly surrounding us like a pack of wolves. I hopped into the truck, which was facing the wrong way on the tiny dirt road, and performed a brilliant nine-point U-turn. But moving the truck only served to rev up the cows, and they went from walking toward us to running toward us. Laure was still ten yards from the truck and the cows were about to catch up with us, so I started driving, slowly, trying to get the cows blocking the road to back the fuck up. Laure still swears I was leaving her there, which I wasn’t, but she did have to jump into the truck while it was moving pretty quickly. Once I busted through the cows on the road, I drove a little faster, which only spurred them on, and suddenly Laure and I were in a fucking cattle stampede, our first time on the land! Does it get any more City Slickers than that? It was as surreal a moment as I have ever experienced. The cows were running close to the truck. One’s huge head was parallel with my driver’s window and another with Laure’s window, then dropped off as the terrain forced them away, only to be replaced by another stampeding cow. When we got to the gate in the fence, I got out and waved and yelled at them while Laure opened the gate and drove the truck through, then I scurried through and locked it behind us. We could not understand what the fuck happened until a few days later when we saw Will drive into the pasture in his Chevy Suburban, same color as ours, and unload bales of hay for the cows and their babies. We still laugh about that perfect beginning to our ranch life. We learned that we had so much to learn, and how fun it was going to be.

I loved doing chores up there and man, does it get hot in the summer. But I loved that too. I painted the whole house and worked with Will and his family when he branded the cows and gave them shots. He was an amazing rancher—fixing fences, birthing cows. Sometimes he rode his horse and sometimes he rode his Quad all-terrain vehicle. I bought a Quad and started shadowing him but also exploring the property on my own. I was probably the only Jew, the only Democrat, and the only actor within a hundred miles of the place, and I had never felt so at home. Ranching is about fixing problems with the tools that you have at hand, and I loved the practical creativity I discovered in myself. I learned how to take care of the plumbing, irrigation, fencing, retaining walls, landscaping, and pest control. I bought my first shotgun, pistol, and rifle and learned how to use them. There was no cell phone reception. Sometimes I had to climb the pole and jiggle the phone wires to make the landline work, which was just like the guy in the Green Acres TV show I watched as a kid. We bought a couple of recliners and looked out the window for hours at hawks flying, the pond glistening, the sun setting. Our neighbors were great and helpful and respectful of our privacy too. We had always hoped to have a place like this, but we never knew if the reality of it would match the fantasy. Now Laure and I began to discover that farm life was even more fulfilling than we could have ever dreamed.

I think getting my hands dirty at the ranch made me want to get my hands dirty back in Malibu too, because I had a dream one night that would change my life forever. I was in my kindergarten class and my teacher, Miss Burton, was showing me how to do papier-mâché—taking strips of paper, sinking them into the mixture of flour and warm water, sliding the paper through your fingers to get off the excess liquid, and then laying the paper onto a bowl to make a mask. It was such a sweet dream. I loved that teacher, and the art felt so fun, warm, and creative. The next morning, I got some flour, a bucket of water, and the Los Angeles Times and went out to the garage. I got some chicken wire and made a big ball and started laying papier-mâché on it, and by the end of the day, I had a huge, funny-looking head. The next day I painted it. Then, I made a body out of irrigation pipe, covered it in my old clothes and shoes, and stuffed it with newspaper. When I attached the huge papier-mâché head to it, it was bigger than me and made me laugh. And it made Laure laugh too. So I made another one, and then another one after that. I loved creating art when I was a kid, but I had forgotten about it in the chaos of my life, marriage, family, and career. I had been putting all my creative energy into acting, directing, and writing, but all of those projects need funding and other people. This papier-mâché dream had awakened me to a whole new direction to channel my creativity, which I could control completely and would always give me work to do, because I am a man who needs to work.

Although there was plenty of work to do for the Boys & Girls Club. We were expanding by the day and our foundation needed as much attention as Laure and I could give it—fundraising, overseeing the board and the staff, and trying to lay the groundwork for a strong future that didn’t require us to run or manage it. Mel Gibson and I did another gala fundraising show for the celebrities in Malibu. It was incredibly successful, but kind of obscene in the amount of ego and money that filled up the banquet tent. Where else could you have Kenny G performing an annoying breathing trick of playing a single note indefinitely on his sax, and then get a bidding war going among the audience to get him to stop? We made ten thousand dollars on that alone. But I was getting a little tired of being the pitch man for the Malibu Foundation. I believed in building and sustaining something so vital to the community, but the begging for money by throwing parties and golf tournaments was starting to wear me down.

Even though I was living in a wonderful bubble, I was still very aware of how ugly the real world had gotten. Bush and Cheney had led us into an unnecessary war, and their Mission Accomplished theatrics disgusted me. Henry got a job on John Kerry’s campaign and of course, being Henry, became friends with Senator Kerry’s daughter. He introduced me to the family, and I ended up not only campaigning for Kerry, but shooting a great little film that his daughter directed. Senator Kerry would have been an incredible president, but he was not a great public speaker. He and I met on two occasions, for me to give him “acting advice” on how to loosen up and be more emotional in front of the camera to fight back against the Swift boat lies that Bush was encouraging. The poor man had so many bigger things on his mind than to listen to my advice, but he was very kind and receptive. He was such a humble and funny person, and how America picked Bush again is beyond my comprehension. I thought there wasn’t much I could do about any of it except stay informed, work for change, give money, and raise my voice. But there was one thing I hadn’t thought of.

I got a fan letter one day from Captain Sandra Chavez, stationed in Baghdad, Iraq, asking if I could send her an autographed picture for her celebrity wall. She also mentioned in passing if I would ever consider coming over on a USO tour. The USO, I thought—is that still around? The last I heard of it, Bob Hope was doing shows for the troops in Vietnam. Anyway, how the hell would an anti-war activist go to the war zone and talk to soldiers without the subject of how fucking stupid and reckless the war is coming up? That didn’t seem like a real morale booster. But I certainly couldn’t pretend like I believed in this “holy war” Bush was forcing on the world. Also, I didn’t have “an act” or anything I could fit into a USO show, so what would I do there? I wrote back to Captain Chavez, asking her a lot of questions, along with an autographed picture. I was also trying to get some on-the-ground reconnaissance about security there because the General in Charge of the T.N.T.D. Branch of my brain (Try Not To Die) was demanding a lot of information about entering an active war zone. Captain Chavez replied, excited I was considering it. She made a compelling case on what it would mean to her and the troops for me to make the trip. She said I would not be expected to perform and told me about the USO Handshake Tour, where I could go to different bases, say hello to the soldiers, take pictures, and sign autographs. Yes, it was a dangerous place but there would be tight security around me and their record of protecting USO folks was perfect so far. She said she understood my anti-war stance but this had nothing to do with that—there were people of all political opinions fighting the war. This was about assuring the people serving in Iraq that Americans back home remembered them and respected their sacrifice, especially around the holidays. She told me how much they loved my movies, especially Home Alone, and if I were to make the effort to go there and say “Merry Christmas” to them, it would mean more than I could imagine. I talked it over with Laure, and she was as moved as I was. For all those reasons, as well as my need to see what was going on with my own eyes, I said yes.

The USO is an amazing organization, devoted to keeping alive the human connection of our warriors and our citizens, a way for both the soldier and the person from “back home” to say a love-filled “thank you” to each other and give a ray of understanding to the madness of war. My Handshake Tour was set for December 18–26, 2003. I would fly to Baghdad and then to various bases throughout Iraq, depending on the security situation at the time. I was allowed to bring another person with me and asked Henry if he wanted to be my assistant, and he jumped at the chance. This seemed like an incredible teaching opportunity to take him to see the reality of war. “You want to be in politics? Well, let’s see what war is really like.”

I had to wait a couple of months to ship out, and at first, it felt great. Saying “I’m going to Iraq” held a power I hadn’t felt before, a certain street-cred that comes with actually putting your ass on the line. I even started getting calls to appear on cable news shows but declined. As departure day got closer, my knees started to turn to Jell-O and the reality of what I had agreed to became terrifying. George Bush had predicted we would be met with parades and flowers for “freeing” Iraq but had no real plan for how to occupy an entire country after chasing away Saddam Hussein. Reading the paper every day about improvised explosive device explosions killing our soldiers, bombings throughout the country, helicopters being shot down, and all of the other horrors of war brought a real personal panic now, not just a political one. I was mad at myself, questioning my motives for going into this chaos, and guilt-ridden that I would be risking my son’s life as well. I got the smallest taste of what it is like for a family to have a member “go off to war,” and it is traumatizing. To be brave is not only to face your fears but to stare them down, and force optimism to overwhelm your pessimism, if for no other reason than to help your family stay strong.

My mission was to be a bridge between our soldiers and citizens, and I would be there at Christmastime, so it seemed appropriate to bring the gifts of love and laughter along with me. I reached out to the schools in Malibu, and they had the kids write letters and holiday cards to the soldiers for me to give out. And I reached out to my funny friends—Crystal, Cheech, Gibson, and Reiser—for some jokes to tell in case I needed to be entertaining at some point. I was still wrestling with my courage and feared my comedy act would be less Bob Hope and more Bob Hopeless.

“Hey everybody, I don’t know what the fuck we are doing here, there’s no way we can win, and we are all going to die. Good night!” Here are a couple of the best of the jokes my friends gave me:

“What’s so special about the stealth bomber? They say it flies in undetected, bombs, and then flies away. Hell, I’ve been doing that my whole life.”

“I was really nervous about coming to a war zone, but the captain was very supportive. He promised to keep a supply of my blood type on hand, even if he had to kill the chicken himself.”

“How do you know when it’s bedtime at the Neverland Ranch? When the big hand is on the little hand.”

Five days before we were supposed to leave, Saddam Hussein was captured in a “spider hole” on a farm somewhere near Tikrit, Iraq. The still-terrified part of me wondered, “Does this mean I don’t have to go? I mean we got him, what do they need me for? I’m just going to be in the way of them packing their bags to get the fuck home.” But there was no turning back, and so I embraced my role of ambassador. When I picked up letters from schools, I realized how much people were investing me with their messages of love and thanks, and that felt great. Laure and Ella and I read the letters and cried at the kids sending letters of love, thanks, hope, news, humility, commitment, and honor. I read a letter from a high schooler that started with, “What is bravery?” and it made me tremble. The day came to leave. The letters took up a whole duffle bag and a half, and the football I thought was necessary ate up some prime suitcase real estate too, so I did not have room for too many clothes, but that was okay. I was cautiously optimistic that we were going to survive. They would never let anything happen to a celeb, not even Bob Hopeless. Real soldiers and their loved ones have been saying goodbye since the beginning of the time, and I got a small taste of those countless heartbreaks. The lead-up to leaving is a slow-motion goodbye, but the goodbye itself is so short. You have to make your body walk away. Legs moving feet, one in front of the other, taking you toward chaos and the unknown.

I flew to London and then to Kuwait, in first-class filled with drunken men in robes. I was met by Tracy, who was my USO escort for the trip. The airport access road was lined with soldiers posted every twenty yards on both sides, and when we got to the Marriott Hotel where we were staying, it was surrounded by tanks and barbed wire. It turned out that the Marriott was the home of the International Arab Conference. The presidents and sheiks of at least twelve large Arab countries were staying in the same building as us. The king of Jordan was there. All roads within two hundred yards of the hotel were blocked off to any car that didn’t have a particular piece of paper that we didn’t have. I was carrying two enormous duffel bags, my backpack, winter coat, and camera bag. Dragging the hopes and underwear of Malibu, Tracy and I made our way through the guns, dogs, ID checks, baggage screening, personal screening, and intrusive wand screening, into the lobby, which was another world completely. The lobby was filled with more robes. Damn, that is a good look! And so comfortable! Tracy took me to the twelfth floor to meet the butler.

“Butler?” I said.

“The twelfth floor has a butler. He will run your bath, unpack your clothes, whatever you need.”

My room was nice, with a view of a vast desert of dirt and sand that came right up to the hotel, with a random tent every few hundred yards in the distance. Ding-dong. Guess who was there? Henry! Who flew in from Boston. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and Jesus Christ, was he big and beautiful. We called home to say that we were okay and stuffed our faces on potatoes, salmon, eggs, croissants, and coffee that the butler kept bringing. Just crazy to think where we were and where we were going.

IRAQ AND BACK

The military staged the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, the central hub for the supply line of goods and services needed for the huge undertaking of invading a country. Soldiers leaving the battlefield came to Kuwait to decompress and be physically and mentally assessed before being either sent home or back to another deployment. We spent our first day there, driving to the different camps where our soldiers were deployed. I met hundreds and hundreds of people that first day and felt an immediate connection, drawn to each other by a common curiosity. Soldiers came toward me taking off their sunglasses and gloves, and I took off my sunglasses too so we could really see each other, all of us thinking the same thoughts about each other—“What the fuck are you doing here? I’ve seen your picture on TV, I’ve read about you in the newspaper. You look just like I imagined, but who are you really?” I chatted with each new person for a few minutes, shook hands, signed autographs, and posed for pictures. Henry turned out to be the perfect person to bring. He was the same age as the soldiers, so when I had to move onto the next person, he continued the conversation with people who wanted to talk a little longer. The troops were happy to see me and were the politest Americans you would ever hope to meet, but mostly, they were tired and burnt-out from their twelve-month rotations. They were exhausted from the anxiety of the mortar attacks and Humvee explosions. One kid came up to me and caught me off guard. His dialogue was so hokey it felt like he was reading a script, but he wasn’t. “We’ve been catching a lot of terrorists and it’s true what they say. ‘It’s really scary to see your first dead guy but after that, you kind of get used to it.’”

The next morning, we went to the airport to fly into Baghdad, and while we waited to be issued our sleeping bags, helmets, and bulletproof vests, we played basketball with the Air Force soldiers in an airplane hangar with a huge hole blown in the roof by a missile. Our ride into Baghdad was on a Lockheed C-130 Hercules—a huge, cavernous warplane, the kind you see in old war movies, that can carry tanks and Jeeps and hundreds of soldiers. The flight crew invited Henry and me to fly in the cockpit, and the two of us collapsed ourselves into the tiny bucket seats in back, trying to stay out of the way. They gave us headphones so we could talk and listen to each other as well as hear the tower. The tower was operated by Kuwaitis, which is only as it should be, but the communication was not confidence-instilling.

“This is Air Force 346920. Tower, could you please repeat that? Did you say Saleed?”

“Saleesh.”

“Saleesh?”

“Saleech.”

“Saleech?”

“Saleed.”

“So is that, Simon-Alpha-Largo-Edgar-Edgar-Dollar?”

“Could you repeat?”

There is such a thing as too much information, and I was definitely hearing things I didn’t need to know. The copilot then informed the captain there was black smoke coming out of the “left sidebar,” but they decided it was probably some minor oil burn-off and we were on our way to Baghdad. “You can’t over-think these things. Sometimes you just have take your best shot,” said Captain Hale after taking off, a great philosophy for anyone. He was a reservist who flew in the first Gulf War, as well as for Trans World Airlines, and was called up unexpectedly. I spent the flight standing over his shoulder chatting, a lot of it commiserating about how hard it is for a dad to find a way into his fifteen-year-old daughter’s life. When we started to descend into Baghdad he told us, “We are going to be doing a tactical approach and landing. I am going to descend very rapidly and in a slightly unconventional manner. I am going to be coming in right over Saddam’s Water Palace. We are going to be really low, so you are going to have a great view of it. The tile on the roof is amazing. We have to go in as fast as we possibly can. The speed gives us options in case we need to take emergency evasive action.” Henry and I started to head back to our seats to get out of the way, but the captain stopped us. “Actually, it would be better if you could stay up here with us. We can use the extra sets of eyes. Keep looking out the window. If you see anything like a trail of smoke, or something that looks like a fence post flying at us, let me know.”

“Oh . . . Okay.” The radio man and navigator left their stations in back to scrunch up in the front with the rest of us to get a better vantage point—seven of us with our noses pressed to the window of the cockpit, watching for flying fence posts. Henry and I were, in the tiniest way, in the battle.

Dive-bombing into Baghdad was an E-Ticket ride. This C-130 is a big old machine. They have been using the same model since the 1930s, with some technical upgrades, so it really felt like being in a Jimmy Stewart movie—the headphones crackled, seven large faces pressed to the windshield, the plane rumbling and creaking, as Old Reliable Captain Hale tried to create an impossible-to-hit moving target. The mechanized voice from the computer blared the message over and over, “You are too close to the ground! You are too close to the ground! You are too close to the ground!” He skimmed just above the ground in this flying eighteen-wheeler, approaching the airport. He pointed out the Water Palace and he was right, the tiles were magnificent, especially at a 180-degree angle. Right above the runway, he pulled into a straight-up climb. I mean, straight up! He circled back to the airport to land on the second pass and, just like that, we were safely in a war zone.

The Air Force had set up a huge camp at the airport and Henry, Tracy, and I dumped our stuff in a tent which was going to be our home for the next few days. We felt relatively safe, but it was a dangerous and fluid situation, with bombs going off in the distance, helicopters landing, fighting equipment parked everywhere, and ammunition being loaded and unloaded. The USO and the military handled me like the entertainment cargo that I was, expertly shipping me from place to place according to an itinerary I had no control over. It was an emotional rollercoaster, laughing and joking with one group of warriors, tearing up with others who shared their fears and losses with me, and in stunned silence looking at a refrigerated tractor-trailer, filled with dead Iraqis who had yet to be identified. I steeled myself in a way I never had before and learned things about this side of the Human Experiment that I had very little understanding of. The Bush military brain trust had no real plan on how to best engage in urban warfare, and it was left to these soldiers to figure out how to deal with the local populations, to tell good guys from bad guys, all while trying to gain the trust of a city they were invading. The soldiers we met were incredibly smart and well-trained, but what was even more impressive was their understanding of the importance of the human interactions that would be needed to really win this war.

That first day we went from station to station across the entire base, seeing the cogs and gears of the war machinery and saying “Merry Christmas” to the warriors who make it all happen. I had seen pictures of war on TV, of soldiers patrolling, fighting, wounded, and dead. But I had failed to realize the city of people behind those pictures, like the unsung movie crews I worked with. You never see pictures of our brave young women and men doing laundry or sanitation work or serving food. But their asses are on the line too, and nothing is going to happen if the troops don’t get fed. Each unit was so proud of their contribution, gave us a tour of their place, and had us try out their equipment. The fire department let me drive a “war fire engine,” a monster-sized, bullet-proof truck with huge water tanks and remote-control hoses that can send water a hundred yards. I was hosing down one of Saddam’s old Boeing 747s when Henry got out of the truck to take my picture, so I aimed the hoses at him and chased him around the runway. He hid behind the fire captain’s Jeep and I ended up soaking them both pretty good, which got a huge round of applause from the troops.

We met the soldiers who went on the streets of Baghdad to find and buy back weapons and bombs. The captain told me that a lot of the weapons they recovered were turned in by kids, and they could buy a mortar from a ten-year-old kid for a Tootsie Roll. He showed us a shed where they kept the confiscated weapons before they destroyed them, pulling out guns, bombs, a bucket of grenades, and a suicide vest. In a ridiculously dangerous slapstick moment, another soldier hurrying by accidentally kicked over the bucket of hand grenades, sending them flying around the shed, clanging off the cache of unstable weapons. The world stood still for a good five seconds, which is five years in “you’re a dead dog” time, but those guys thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Later in the day, we met the guys at EOD, Explosive Ordinance Destruction, whose job was to destroy the confiscated weapons. Henry and I took turns blowing up the bombs and mortars, remotely triggering explosions. I’ve been on movie sets with big stunts and big explosions, and this was a very different sound. It came through the ground as much as it came through the air. The sound waves had a real physical presence. You could almost see the sound waves pushing through the ground and the air.

We met Major Sugiyama, who led SFS, the Security Force Squadron responsible for the safety of the airport, who let me drive a gun-turreted Humvee that they used to chase down the people who were lobbing bombs into the base. I tried on the fifty pounds of equipment that each of them wore when they patrolled the vast perimeter. The soldiers got a good laugh at how awkward I was in it, and I made a mental note to get in touch with my chiropractor when I got home. When I asked if they were keeping Saddam captive on the base, he gave me a sly smile and said that was information that was above his pay-class. But I thought I smelled the rat.

We saw corruption as well, though we didn’t know we were seeing it. In the flight tower, we met an Australian pilot and his mate who had just flown in. They pointed out their plane, maybe a Boeing 727, and told me it was filled with money. They were flying in all the new money without the picture of Saddam on it from wherever it was printed. They didn’t know how much there was in value, only in weight. Two tons of fresh dinar, which we later found out disappeared. We only saw Abu Ghraib from the outside, later to discover that torture and war crimes were being committed inside while we were there. We saw private companies with political connections like Raytheon, Halliburton, and Bechtel setting up permanent shop on the bases, taking over energy fields and palaces, paying their American workers much more than the average soldier was making, and using cheap Bangladeshi workers for the physical labor. And everywhere we went, the food was shit. Fast food, junk food, corn dogs, and bad cafeteria food was all there was to eat for these poor people. How the fuck are you supposed to function at the level necessary in this life-and-death world when all they give you for fuel is fast-food crap?!

We saw glimpses of the horror of war as well. Rescue Ops’ job was to helicopter into a “situation,” get the wounded and dead onto the helicopter, and bring them back to the hospital. They had to be able to parachute, scuba-dive, fly helicopters, shoot guns from a helicopter, and, oh yeah, be doctors! They had just gotten back from a mission. A Humvee with two soldiers had rolled into a river. Another soldier driving by jumped in and saved them both but drowned. Rescue Ops soldiers jumped out of their helicopter into the water, rescued the two soldiers and recovered the body of the other, and their exhaustion and sadness were palpable. Lt. Col. DeLorenzo oversaw the large grouping of tents housing triage centers at CASF, the medical facility housing x-ray machines, recovery areas, administration desks, and operating rooms. He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, getting twenty-five injured soldiers flown in every few hours, stabilizing them, operating if they had to, and getting them on a transport plane to Germany as fast as they could. “We are the best because we have to be. We owe our best to our warriors,” he said. The kids who worked at the morgue did their work under a huge American flag, which was so moving to see. I visited the hospital and had to hide my shock at how gruesome the injuries were to these young men, chatting about my movies and signing autographs while my heart broke for them. And frankly, it must have been slightly surreal for them, dealing with their own fears and sadness and pain only to have Marv from Home Alone standing by their bedside.

I hosted Bingo Night, with three to four hundred men and women who took the game seriously. The final game of the night got crazy with the whole place cheering and chanting. But most fun for me was a chance to give out the letters I had brought from the schools in Malibu. For an hour after the game, hundreds of soldiers hung out and read letters, and we laughed and felt a connection between us and home. One letter from a second grader said simply, “Dear Soldier, I hope you don’t die. I like carrots.” We laughed for five minutes about that one. Beat that, Bob Hope.

I thought sleeping would be tough, but it wasn’t. The war does not stop at night; it actually accelerates, because the enemy likes to attack at night. Outgoing mortar fire was muffled by the sounds of planes and helicopters taking off and landing, transporting more guns, more wounded women and men to the hospital in Germany, and more corn dogs to keep the troops fed. I slept differently than I had ever slept before, restful but aware. I had to pee in the middle of the night, walking the two hundred yards to the latrine through a very different kind of “City That Never Sleeps.” When I got back on the cot, I felt good—alive even while sleeping. Weirdly peaceful.

The third day we were supposed to fly out in the morning to Kirkuk, then into Tallil, where we would spend the night. But for security reasons, they wanted us to stay in Baghdad for the moment. I was relieved to not have to take as many dangerous flights, and there were enough soldiers to meet in Baghdad to keep me busy for a year. We visited the other side of the airport, now escorted by a new military officer, a rather flamboyant man who we will call Major Fun. He asked us if we would like to go into downtown Baghdad to the Haji Market and “maybe buy some jewelry for your wife.” We loaded into an armed convoy of Humvees and Jeeps and drove into the city. A husband and wife owned the jewelry store. Evidently Major Fun spent a lot of money there, and they were very glad to see him. He assured them that we were okay and said that I was a movie actor. The woman let out a little squeak and said, “Home Alone?” She got out her camera. They hugged me and Henry and showed us all the jewelry and paintings and boxes. By the time we finished shopping and headed for a restaurant across the plaza, word had gotten out that the Home Alone actor was in town. I will never forget the group of kids who had been playing soccer in the road, surrounding me, chanting, “Marv! Marv! Marv!” The power of the movies crosses all boundaries and cultures, and the Power of Marv to bring these kids, who were living their childhood in a war zone, a smile humbled me to my core. But Major Fun had a lot more tricks up his sleeve.

On our way back to the airport base camp, he took us to Saddam Hussein’s Water Palace, the one we had caught a glimpse of as we rocketed into town. He spent the entire thirty-minute drive telling us of all the “fabulous” marble that Saddam had used to build the palace and a critique of what he would have done with the place if it was his. Saddam’s palaces were actually a series of palaces inside enormous compounds, and one of the palaces at the Water Palace was his son Udai’s, of the famed boy band Udai and Qusay. (Udai was a horrible person. At a party for Mrs. Mubarak, the First Lady of Egypt, he beat a man to death in front of everyone. No charges, no arrest.) The palace had been bombed, the “fabulous” marble turned to rubble. Major Fun said, “You should take some home. Everyone takes some. You can ship it. If you send it from the base, it goes straight through and no one checks it. I’ve sent all kinds of stuff home. My mom is keeping it at the ranch. Here, take something like this.” He picked up an hourglass piece of gray-and-white speckled smooth stone, about two feet high and eight inches around, which had been part of the marble railing at Udai’s bachelor pad. It weighed, I found out when I shipped it home, fifty-five pounds. It was beautiful, and I was overcome with greed. “How fucking cool would it be to have a big-ass piece of Udai’s palace at my house? And free shipping!” Henry wasn’t sure it was cool, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I took it. I put it in the back of the Jeep, and we rode away with it. I was officially a looter.

We drove further down the Water Palace road until we arrived at the big man’s house, Saddam’s Palace. Henry and I were blown away by the grandest ballroom imaginable, 150 yards long, fifty yards across and fifty feet high, like an arena football stadium. It had marble floors and columns, and grand balconies at either end, overlooking the lake and orchards and gardens. Except it was all smashed. It turns out bombs have real consequences. They are not just numbers and maps, they are concrete and rebar. They are life and limb. Piles of lumber and metal—and marble. Major Fun came up the staircase carrying a pristine piece of white marble, engraved in Arabic and with beautiful faces sculpted in relief. This thing must have weighed at least a hundred pounds and he was all aflutter with his home decorating find. His physical training paid off as he summoned his inner Arnold Schwarzenegger (and his inner Martha Stewart) to make it back to the Jeep with his ultimate living room accessory. He said he probably shouldn’t be doing it but “what the hell,” as he wrapped it gently in a blanket and laid it next to my ill-gotten gains.

Our last night in Iraq, we were invited to join the Special Forces Unit for dinner at their camp, which was in a different palace, Saddam Hussein’s Personal Palace. This one had not been bombed and had been taken over by our troops because it was so secure. When we arrived, our jaws dropped at the ornate rooms we walked through to get to the cavernous dining room, complete with the biggest marble table imaginable. (Major Fun was probably trying to figure out how to sneak it back home.) We mingled with fifty or sixty soldiers, athletic Young Turks, all Special Forces elite. We sat down for a dinner of boxes and boxes of Whoppers and Quarter Pounders and Hot Apple Pies, with Red Bull to wash it down. It was the perfect metaphor for the war, eating off the table of our enemy to prove we have won, but serving an American Shit Sandwich to our warriors, and with no seat at the table for the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam.

The commanders sent word from upstairs, asking if we would like to go say hello to them. The Young Turks selected to escort us were thrilled, as most of them had never been to the Command Center. They lived up the road in another palace, so we were all excited as we ascended the spectacular staircase into the inner sanctuary. Major Fun was overcome by the design of the staircase and started sashaying up the stairs like a glamorous movie actress saying, “If I had a staircase like this, I would glide up and down it every day,” which caused the macho Young Turks’ jaws to drop about a foot. So funny.

The Command Center was where they planned all of the raids, killings, capturings, and reconnaissance missions, which the Young Turks then carried out. The first commander I met was Mario, a handsome, incredibly strong-looking Latin man in his forties with an easy smile. Mario was discipline personified. While Mario showed me around, Henry and the Turks took off to explore, like kids at a haunted house. Mario was as surprised as anyone to be living in one of Saddam’s bedrooms and sleeping in his bed. The servants who worked there told him that Saddam used to have young girls, twelve or thirteen years old, one in this bedroom and one in another across the hall, and go back and forth between them, and Mario couldn’t get that out of his mind. He told me that before he was stationed here, he was in Afghanistan living in a cave for six months, and he seemed like he would be just as comfortable in either place. Talk about stories to tell.

Mario introduced me to John, the other commander, standing by a detailed set of maps on the wall with pins stuck in them. Also in his forties, he seemed like he might have gone to an Ivy League school or something: smart, doing something good but somewhat secretive. He gave me a tour which included the other bedroom in Mario’s nightmare Saddam story. John had a mattress on the floor and Saddam’s armoire up against the window as a shield against incoming shrapnel. He had rigged a clothesline running from the armoire to a nail on the wall, on which he was currently drying his socks. Henry and the Young Turks ran in excitedly, saying, “You got to come do this! It’s so cool.” Mario, John, and I followed them into the bathroom where they were taking turns having their picture taken sitting on Saddam’s gold toilet holding his gold AK-47. I knew it was a picture I would regret even before I took it. Talk about shitting on the guy.