{"id":25,"date":"2003-10-14T00:41:30","date_gmt":"2003-10-14T00:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/wp\/?p=25"},"modified":"2013-03-07T18:06:48","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T02:06:48","slug":"guarding_the_ho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/guarding_the_ho\/","title":{"rendered":"Guarding the hotel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Four US soldiers pose for camera\" src=\"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/images\/gallery\/16-14.jpg\" width=\"540\" height=\"305\" title=\"Canon compact camera, Kodak Royal Gold 400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nCrawling with soldiers, media and Iraqi Police, I visited the two premiere hotels in downtown Baghdad, the Sheraton and this one, the Palestine. After a routine security check and frisking, I strolled around the inner drives of the two facing hotels, protected from outside traffic (and hopefully suicide bombers) by 3-metre-high concrete barrieres, razor wire, tanks, humvees and soldiers with guns.<br \/>\nAlthough not permitted to photograph US Army vehicle and tank positions within the make-shift compound, I managed to chat up and photograph a number of soldiers. Many were 18-19 years old, from every area of the US, on their first tour of duty and didn&#8217;t have much of an idea about what they were doing there, other than to stand around and guard the hotels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>US Soldiers guard the Palestine Hotel, Baghdad, Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1593,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/1593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffwerner.ca\/testa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}