It was no big surprise to discover that the head of the Baghdad School of Flyfishing is a soft-spoken Kentuckian who is more comfortable lobbing lures at bass and bluegills with a spincasting rod than presenting a #16 dryfly with a 5-weight flyrod. The big surprise was discovering that the Baghdad School of Flyfishing existed at all. After that, nothing could faze me, not even the fact that there’s a large sort-of hotel here at Camp Victory that caters to visiting dignitaries, operated by the Joint Visitors Bureau, where Major Chris Curtis works as Battle Captain, coordinating the movements of guests ranging from congressional delegations to rap stars. What do we who dwell in tents know of such things? Chris has just made major, but it’s a good bet that if he minds his military manners he’ll be a U.S. Army colonel some day. A Kentucky colonel, for real.

The building that houses the guest quarters is part of the Al Faw Palace complex that Saddam Hussein had constructed to commemorate a battle with Iran that occurred during their long, bloody, and eventually stalemated war. Many of the guest rooms overlook the blue-green lagoon that surrounds the huge central palace, a monument to a tyrant’s megalomania and lousy taste. Before this current war, I was told, the palace and its lesser mansions, and its lagoons, ponds and canals were the glittering centerpieces of a lush game preserve, where African antelope dodged African lions, jackals, and bullets fired by Saddam and his guests for their amusement. Saddam also liked to blast away at the ducks that mistook the ponds for safe havens. The American army doesn’t much care for vegetation – too easy for bad guys to hide in – so the word “lush” no longer applies, and the landscape is now scraped land, bare and dusty in the summer's stunning heat. Most of the animals were collateral damage, though a pack of jackals survives and can be heard sometimes in the night, complaining of the heat.

But the fish survived. And they thrive.

There are carp, and catfish, and barbels, and a fish called Saddam’s Bass which was reputedly the product of genetic engineering by the dictator’s mad scientists, and there are asps, which look like some species of freshwater herring or alewife. They’re all in there, and doing fine, having survived even the “shock and awe” bombing that destroyed the palace’s vehicle bridge, which now lies crumpled in the water providing, incidentally, excellent cover for fish. Now, one can’t believe every story one hears about the cruelty of Saddam and his boys, Uday and Qusay, but in three trips to Iraq I have learned from Iraqis that it’s pretty hard to exaggerate the depravity of the Hussein gang. So the stories about the fish ponds, stories that will curdle your blood, may be true. There are fish in the lagoons and canals that are as big as a 12-year-old boy. I’ve seen ‘em in pictures and I’ve seen their gaping snouts rise up out of the water to snatch at food thrown by soldiers from the footbridge that connects the palace to the mainland. And the stories I have heard go a long way toward explaining how those fish got that big, stories about what the homicidal Uday would feed those fish…

But I digress. Major Chris and I outfitted ourselves from the collection of flyrods, reels, flies and other gear that has been thoughtfully donated by folks in the U.S. who understand a soldier’s basic need to flyfish. I took a 4-piece, 9-foot 5-weight rod, and a reel wound with floating line and a 9-foot 4X tapered leader, to which I tied a Woolly Bugger. Yep, the Woolly Bugger is a universal fish-catcher, from the trout streams of Maine to the lagoons of Baghdad. And I did in fact catch a fish on a flyrod in Baghdad, an asp, all of 12 inches long. For me, I think that’s quite enough. Frankly, I don’t care to catch a 60-pound carp that might have fattened up on…well, I don’t want to go into details here. Just think of the lakeside scene that Officer Marge Gunderson stumbles onto in “Fargo.”