Some interesting items scrolled by me as I was flipping back and forth from the Jays-Yankees game a couple nights ago. Just one-liners rolling by on the screen, but they got my attention.

Iraqi police took up collection to buy food for American POWs. (Hmm, I think we could use some ranking police officers in Baghdad.) Doctors treated American POWs well because "they wanted to demonstrate humanity of Iraqis". That sort of thing.

Of course, I did a bit of digging. The Washington Post's "Days of Darkness, With Death Outside the Door" is far and away the best source on these story, confirming some details and placing other in context. Great first-hand details on the 507th Maintenance Company's firefight, too (ended it seems by sand-jammed weapons - pity they didn't have Galil SAR rifles instead), and the Apache pilots' attempted escape. I'll let you go read that story. It certainly wasn't all sweetness and light over there.

That said, this paragraph stuck with me:

"More than once, a doctor said that they wanted to take good care of me to show that the Iraqi people had humanity," Johnson said. Asked what she thought of that now, she said: "I appreciate the care that I was given. But I also know that there was a reason behind it. They didn't give me care just for the humanity of it."

Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe it's my distance from events speaking, too, but I'm inclined to believe the doctors just might have been for real. Not because of any general belief in the goodness of humanity, but because of some of the other things we've seen in Iraq.

Who would have guessed that the James Bond who would tip off the Americans and go back to gather information about PFC Lynch's captors would be an Iraqi lawyer? Or imagine residents of Baghdad protecting the city's few remaining Jews and their property, even at risk to themselves? Marines in Baghdad owe their lives to Iraqis who warned them about a suicide bomber.

My greatest debt of perspective, however, is owed to a human shield. Yes, you read that right. Recall the Assyrian minister who changed his mind. After his change of heart about the war, he was caught red-handed on the way out with videotapes he had taken about the reality of life in Iraq. By an Iraqi soldier. I'll let him take it from here:

"Suddenly the guard began to pat me down. 'Oh, no!' I thought. 'It's all over'. We had been told of what happened if you got caught with videotape, a cellular telephone or any kind of electronic equipment that had not been declared....

He immediately found the first videotape stuffed in my pocket and took it out. I could see the expression of terror on the driver as he stifled a scream.

The guard shook his head as he reached into my pocket and took out another tape and then from pocket after pocket began to take out tape after tape, cellular telephone, computer camera - all the wrong things.

We all stood there in sheer terror - for a brief moment experiencing the feeling that beginning with my precious family members every Iraqi feels not for a moment but day and night, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That terrible feeling that your life is not yours that its fate rests in someone else's hands that simply by the whim of the moment they can determine.

For one born free a terrifying feeling if but for an instant.

As the guard slowly laid out the precious video tape on the desk we all waited in silent terror for the word to be taken back to Baghdad and the beginning of the nightmare.

Suddenly he laid the last videotape down and looked up. His face is frozen in my memory but it was to me the look of sadness, anger and then a final look of quiet satisfaction as he clinically shook his head and quietly without a word handed all the precious videotape - the cry of those without a voice - to me.

He didn't have to say a word. I had learned the language of the imprisoned Iraqi. Forbidden to speak by sheer terror they used the one language they had left - human kindness."

Resistance takes many forms. Under the right circumstances, kindness is a weapon too.

As the POWs head back for treatment and "decompression," and the allies lay the foundations for a new Iraq, these stories need to be told. In a region awash in hate, they offer kindness. In a region awash in bluster, they offer an example of quiet courage that ties to deeper cultural stories of hospitality and kindness. In a region where pride is purchased with death, they offer a kind of pride purchased instead with grace and decency under pressure.

May their stories, too, be told.