Babylon by bus

This all-access, inside-out view of what the American occupation of Iraq really looks like on the ground is the story of two young Americans who went to Baghdad without any real plan and discovered they weren?t the only ones. Underqualified but ingenious, Ray and Jeff found work with the Coalition Provisional Authority providing humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people amid an appalling atmosphere of corruption, incompetence, and horror. Gritty and irreverent, this is a wild ride inside the Red Zone and a strikingly original portrait of the real Iraq."This delightful book is Innocents Abroad meets Fear and Loathing. The story of Jeff and Ray. two Valium-popping, hard-drinking, Red Sox-loving twenty-something do-gooders on their own buddy trip inside the mess of post-liberation Iraq is compulsively readable, hilariously irreverent, very sad, and very real all at once, and, for all the right reasons, it could well become a cult phenomenon." —Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Fall of Baghdad and Che Guevara"Weird, dumb, hilarious, wise—a book that makes you think, What the hell? And then you realize that's exactly the point. When the apocalypse comes, I want these guys to be my tour guides." —Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It AllA conversation with Ray LeMoine & Jeff Neumann, authors of Babylon by BusWhat motivated you to go to Iraq in the first place?RAY: The Red Sox 2003 American League Championship Series loss forced a few decisions about my future. At this point I had been selling YANKEES SUCK t-shirts at Fenway for five years—a long time to do something you never planned to do as a career. Jeff was my roommate at the time and the two of us decided to take a trip during baseball's off-season. Both of us had already done a fair bit of traveling, so going to the Middle East didn't seem too revolutionary. There was no set plan for Iraq, really. We went to Israel, and then to Jordan. In Amman, the peaceniks at our hostel gave us word that Baghdad was relatively safe and completely wild. There was a cheap bus; we took it. (Baghdad and its relative safety rocked us the morning after we got there with a car bombing that killed 26 and injured 100.)So you ended up taking a bus to Baghdad—is this where you got the title of your book?JEFF: We crossed into Iraq from Jordan on a Middle Eastern version of a Greyhound bus, only this one was decorated with a few bullet holes and full of women covered from head to toe in abayas and men wrapped in keffiyahs and wearing plastic sandals. We broke down several times in the heart of Anbar Province, quite possibly the worst place on earth for a couple of white guys to be hanging around. After sharing all this with our editor, he asked us if we liked Bob Marley, and he reminded us of the live record "Babylon by Bus" and suggested we borrow the name. Needless to say, it fit perfectly.Within 24 hours of arriving in Baghdad, you had a job with The Coalition Provisional Authority. Were you surprised that this happened so quickly?JEFF: We were really surprised that we found employment so quickly, and especially with the US government. With not so much as a background check or anything, we two schmoes walked into the Baghdad Convention Center and talked our way into jobs with the Coalition Provisional Authority. It just goes to show you how haphazard the CPA's operations were. It was disorderly and inefficient: all the way down to us receiving badges, mine giving permission to carry a weapon in the main palace. Soon after getting badges, we moved into bunks in a partially blocked off back hallway in the main Republican Palace (arguably the best piece of real estate in the whole country) where we were also given mess hall...