http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5346.htm
Life in battened-down Baghdad :Self-preservation U.S. soldiers' goal
MITCH POTTER
12/04/03: (Toronto Star) BAGHDAD?The grimaces on these young American faces speak volumes, however monosyllabic their words may be. Turkey Day has come and gone, and that whisper of a visit from President George W. Bush barely echoes now in the ears of his troops in Iraq.
A young corporal named Bourgeois corrected a reporter yesterday when asked whether the president's dramatic night-time foray brought any kind of levity to his personal slog in Baghdad, now a stale seven months old.
The first answer, an embittered, dirty look. Then, grudgingly, to fill the dragging silence: "They said he came to Baghdad, but it was really only BIAP." (Translation: Baghdad International Airport, in army-speak.)
Bourgeois' final thought on the matter: Neither he nor anyone else in his unit would have gone anywhere near Bush had they known of his visit, which they didn't, and had they been enjoying a rare day off, which they weren't.
"I would have been somewhere else," he said. "Sounds like a pretty high-profile target to me."
More telling, perhaps, the surprising ambivalence of a PAO (more army-speak for Public Affairs Officer), the very sort paid by the Pentagon to make nice for the media. He, too, managed few words on the presidential foray: "I'm indifferent. I'm just a soldier, sir."
...
Maybe he would have been a three term president.
