Dispatches
from Iraq
blog from a blasted
country | posted Feb. 13 - March 7, 2006
by Neil Shea
(these
blog dispatches originally appeared on National Geographic
Magazine's web
site.)
photo by
Neil Shea
February
12, 2006
Into
the Zone: No Simple Matter
AMMAN, JORDAN—The maze of military bureaucracy I've
been navigating for weeks dead-ended today in a puddle of
oil on a sand-swept runway. I'm trying to get to Baghdad,
meet up with photographer Jim Nachtwey, and head out into
the "sand box"—what U.S. troops sometimes
call Iraq—to report a story. I'd be there now if things
were perfect, preparing to push out to military bases north
of the city. But things aren't perfect.
Unless
you're a teenager from Florida, it seems there's no easy way
to get into Baghdad. Even if the chaotic waters of government
spread for you like the Red Sea did for Moses, there is still
the threat of rain, sandstorms, transport strikes, hostile
fire, and what we encountered today: engine leaks.
Some 20
of us are booked to fly to Baghdad on a C-130, workhorse of
the U.S. Air Force's cargo fleet. But the plane has busted
a valve or blown a seal. Oil oozes where it shouldn't. Crew
members take turns climbing a ladder and peering into the
engine. They descend shaking their heads. "It's a crapshoot,"
says the U.S. government employee who is coordinating the
flight. "Expect a delay of at least a couple of hours.
Worst-case scenario, we leave Wednesday." The worst case
seems awfully real.
The news
settles like fog over the crowd of British contractors, American
computer techs, State Department officials, and others. Some
groan, some grin. Some have been here for nearly a week, trying
hard as they can to get to the most dangerous city in the
world. For a moment, the strangeness of this crystallizes.
I'm reminded of something my grandfather, a World War II vet,
said before I left: "Why the hell would anyone who isn't
a soldier go to war?"
For most
of the people I'm sitting beside, the answer is obvious: There's
money in it. Or it's the experience of a lifetime. Or it's
one more stop on the diplomatic career path. Only one passenger,
a doctor who works with the World Health Organization, seems
a little out of place, tugging his bright-blue body armor
along like a heavy picnic basket. When I ask why he's going,
he says he can't really talk about it.
As the
wait slugs on, people fish out newspapers and books or stare
into space. The reading collection is eclectic: a German-language
textbook, a Star Wars novel, Jared Diamond's Collapse. The
British guys read war books. An American woman flips through
the Bible.
A contractor
hands me something called the "Iraq Visual Language Survival
Guide." It's a folded pamphlet—given or sold to
soldiers and contractors—containing Arabic, Kurdish,
and Farsi translations for such phrases as: "Form a line."
"Nuclear weapons?" "Surrender."
Also in
the guide is a collection of drawings of uncomfortable situations
one apparently might find oneself in. The illustrations are
sort of absurd, like bad comics. In theory, by pointing to
these drawings, you can tell someone to strip, remove a toupee,
direct you to the bomb-making facilities, help you identify
the difference between a camel and a motorcycle, or hand over
jewelry. Creative thieves must already have gotten hold of
this thing.
The most
ridiculous drawings depict an angry suicide bomber with neatly
parted hair and a mass grave packed with grinning skeletons.
"I saw it at the store and thought it might come in handy,"
the contractor said of the pamphlet. "I've never used
it."
Finally,
word comes that our flight isn't going anywhere. A second
plane is en route carrying mechanics to fix the first one,
but we probably can't get a lift for a few days. I head back
with some contractors through the city to a hotel, past the
dun-colored rocks and deep rubble of an ancient landscape.
We weave through the streets. The driver's window is open.
Desert dust coats my mouth. The contractors—all of whom
have been to Iraq before—swap stories about car bombs
or mortars or rockets that came a little too close. One man
was wounded by AK-47 fire, though he wasn't exactly shot;
the bullet fell out of the sky. "It was probably happy
shooting," he said, describing the custom in Iraq—and
many other countries—of firing into the sky during celebrations.
The sky
darkens. A huge plume of blue-black smoke curls like a thunderhead
across the horizon. The fire producing it is invisible. One
guy says it reminds him of Baghdad. Listening to these tales,
I think my grandfather was on to something. But I still want
to go to Iraq. The war is too important, too enormous. It
is the story of my generation. And it will be the story of
many others. Let's hope we fly tomorrow.
top
February
13, 2006
Scenes
From Another World, Visions of the Same Old Thing
BAGHDAD, IRAQ—The Iraqi immigration officials think
I've just handed them porn. They howl and blush and toss the
magazine back and forth. It's the February issue of National
Geographic. But the word "Love" looms on the cover
over a red-tinged photo of a couple embracing. It's suggestive
enough—for these guys, anyway—and the magazine
quickly disappears into a drawer.
The man
in line beside me speaks English and explains all of this,
laughing. Welcome to Baghdad. You don't have a visa, the military
doesn't know you're here, and the authorities think you're
a pervert.
Two hours
earlier I boarded a civilian flight for Baghdad. The military
flight I'd planned to take broke down on Sunday, so I booked
passage on Royal Jordanian air. At Jordan's main airport,
one counter sold me a ticket. The next nearly refused to let
me get on the plane. The problem was that I didn't have an
Iraqi visa (I wasn't supposed to need one because I was traveling
with the military), and I wanted a one-way ticket (because
I'll leave the country later on a military flight). I seemed
suspicious. Only a few kinds of travelers buy one-way trips
to war.
Finally
the Jordanians let me board. The plane is packed with contractors
and U.S. State Department employees. We cruise over the Biblical
landscape, the green-brown stubble of Jordan giving way to
a denser desert. Soon we're above Baghdad International Airport,
known as BIAP. The plane banks and begins spinning downward,
as if caught in a drain. Below, canals and warehouses and
highways twirl in a brown haze. The pilot corkscrews on purpose—it
makes us a harder target for would-be shooters on the ground.
On the
runway, guards carrying AK-47s greet us. The air is cool.
It smells of spring rain. A confused official directs me to
a tiny office, where I explain why I should be let into the
country. The flap doesn't last long. After a few minutes,
the visa man is smiling. "For you, sir, visa only one
dollar."
The next
step involves getting from BIAP to the Green Zone, or International
Zone (IZ), which is a species of competitive sport. The IZ
is the heart and brain of the occupation, and it's only about
six miles (ten kilometers) away. But the road is deadly territory.
Nicknamed "Route Irish" by luck-starved troops,
insurgents have attacked traffic along it since the war began.
Travelers have two options: catch a quick helicopter flight
from the airport to the IZ or take the Rhino, a heavily armored
slug of a vehicle. No one wants to wait for the Rhino, which
dashes to the IZ only in deep night. So it becomes a race
to sign up for the first-come, first-served seats aboard the
Blackhawk helicopters. People pull strings, invent priorities,
and beg.
I luck
out. I meet a contractor who's done this before. He helps
me through the process and gets me a lift to the heliport.
On the way, we drive through a war-waste of mud and trash
and rubble. Humvee convoys and machine gunners staring out
from rooftop turrets roll past. Hundreds of grumbling supply
trucks, with cargoes waiting for safety inspection, slither
through the treeless mush. Every surface has been flattened
by heavy vehicles. The canals are lined with plastic bags
and oil. The air smells of hot engines.
But soon
the scenery changes. Several military camps sprawl near the
airport, and hundreds of troops and contractors are housed
here in small white trailers. We pass a gym, a basketball
court, a Pizza Hut. Soldiers walk along the roadsides, talking,
laughing. A few jog. The atmosphere is relaxed; it almost
feels like a college campus—except that everyone is
armed and rockets sometimes fall from the sky.
The helicopter
flight is quick and loud. I call the army's public affairs
unit and wait for a ride near a sign that warns "Deadly
Force Authorized." A sergeant arrives in an armored SUV
and we head to the press center where I'll spend a few days
before heading out into the country. We stop at a makeshift
video store. The selection of DVDs is thin, some of it pirated.
The sergeant chooses several. I ask if he's planning to watch
them all in one night. "There's nothing else to do here,"
he says. "It's the only way to fight boredom."
We pass
through checkpoints guarded by security contractors from Peru
or soldiers from the nation of Georgia. The men lean heavily
against concrete barriers, frowning, rifles slung over their
shoulders. Most of these men work 12-hour shifts, stopping
cars and inspecting IDs over and over. Then they eat and go
to bed. In the morning they return to their posts. The sergeant
tells me it's the same for U.S. soldiers in the IZ, many of
whom have nothing to do with combat.
In a few
hours I've entered a blasted world, skim-coated with homey
conveniences like Pizza Hut and dry-cleaning service. The
other major U.S. import appears to be tedium. Technically,
it's dangerous here. Gunfire crackles in the distance, car
bombs go off in the city, mortars fall. There's even bird-flu.
But there's also nothing to do. Almost everyone I talk to
on my first day in Baghdad is bored. The worry is how tonight
will be any different from the featureless ones that preceded
it, and those that will soon follow.
top
February
16, 2006
Justice,
Reality, and Beer
BAGHDAD—A beautiful 28-year-old Iraqi woman escorts
me down the steps and into jail. Behind the bars, several
prisoners lean against a wall in blue uniforms. Half-interested
security men watch them. The bars of the cell do not quite
reach all the way to the ceiling. I mention this and ask if
the prisoners might escape by climbing over the bars. The
woman smiles widely and waves her small, graceful hand as
if to say, "Of course not."
We're
in the basement of the new Baghdad courthouse—or what
will soon become a court. When it's finished, it will be the
city's highest criminal court, one of 12 in the country. This
isn't the place where Saddam Hussein defiantly sputters and
raves as his former subjects try him. But his presence looms.
Before the war this hulking structure and its tall clock tower
served as a museum. Its subject was Saddam.
My guide's
name is Hanan. She is lead engineer on the effort to transform
this vanity monument into a hall of justice. She speaks English
fluently, and her clothes would not be out of style in New
York City. Hanan whisks me through the building, pointing
out new courtrooms and a cafeteria, offices for judges, and
cells for prisoners awaiting trial.
She unlocks
a recently finished courtroom. Three judges' chairs rise at
the front of the room, with a dock for the accused and spots
for lawyers. Benches for the audience are in back. There's
new carpet, even a new carpet smell. On the wall the scales
of justice hang beneath wisdom written in Arabic taken from
the Koran. Hanan translates: "In the name of God the
most gracious, the most merciful, if you judge between people
be fair and be just." God is in these new courtrooms.
The project
is supposed to be completed in a few months, though Hanan
suspects it'll take longer. The U.S. Department of Justice,
which hopes to provide a safe and secure courtroom for judges
and Iraqi citizens, is paying about $2.3 million for the retrofit.
Hanan
is excited to see the project come together. She enjoys helping
rebuild her country. But she's candid about the reality of
wartime living and the future.
"Everything
has good and bad aspects," she says. "Are things
worse after Saddam's gone? Yes. But we hope.
"I'm
not happy with what's going on in Iraq. Sometimes you lose
your patience. We just hope for the best. Nothing can stay
bad forever. Do I see a light at the end of the tunnel? Sometimes
yes, sometimes no."
The court
sits in the Red Zone, which is essentially any part of Iraq
that is not inside the Green Zone—that portion of Baghdad
that newspapers always describe as "heavily fortified,"
as if it were a kind of milk or wine. Most Iraqis, Hanan included,
live in the Red Zone. Most violence occurs here. As a reminder
of the danger, a U.S. Marshall follows us as we wander, cradling
his assault rifle and alert for danger.
Hanan
says she doesn't worry that her Western dress might attract
attention from Muslim extremists or kidnappers eager to snatch
hostages for ransom. She says, "I'm very secular. It's
just what I do."
To hear
this is refreshing. I think in the U.S. we've envisioned Iraq
closing or collapsing in on itself under the weight of the
insurgency and the supposed rise of extreme Islam. That Hanan
is young and unafraid, even hopeful, strikes me as a good
sign.
Of course,
Hanan is educated. She went to Baghdad University at a time
when it wasn't something most Iraqis could afford. She is
privileged and probably protected. But that doesn't discount
her feelings. Hope is available to us all.
On the
way out we meet the court's chief judge, a thin man with badly
dyed brown hair and a nose that was likely broken long ago.
He is gracious, but we can barely communicate. He takes my
card, pats his pockets looking for one of his own. He apologizes
when he realizes he doesn't have any. "Thank you for
coming," he manages to say, shaking my hand. Then he
disappears down the stairs into a thicket of workers, to watch
his court come to life.
Later,
back inside the Green Zone, I visit a restaurant with a friend.
The Blue Star is one of the few restaurants here. It also
serves alcohol, which instantly gives it mythical status.
A common
soldierly gripe in the Green Zone is that there is no alcohol.
If you're in the military, you're simply not allowed to have
any. The dining halls offer O'Douls, a watery, non-alcoholic
beer. But it's not popular. Many people consider it an insult.
So the Blue Star, well-stocked with liquor, has become a kind
of Shangri-La, where the last forbidden comfort of home flows
freely.
To get
there we bump through three checkpoints manned by armed contractors
from three different countries. It's crowded: soldiers carrying
rifles, contractors packing pistols, embassy officials in
jackets and ties. The furniture is white and plastic, like
something stolen from a New England clam chowder shack. Beer
bottles clink at the tables. People whisper and laugh.
Outside,
thickly armored SUVs are this evening's limousines, delivering
Baghdad's dinner crowd. The bullet-proof glass and steel plates
seem unnecessary in the warm glow of the Blue Star. We drift
on an island of booze in a country where extremists bomb liquor
stores and kill their owners.
Helicopters
overhead drown out conversation at our table. The sound jogs
a memory. Two days ago I watched an Iraqi policeman sell pieces
of his uniform to a U.S. soldier as souvenirs. The scene sticks
with me as the clatter recedes, replaced by laughter and the
hollow plunk of someone uncorking a bottle.
top
February
17, 2006
Blackhawk
to the Rescue
CAMP ANACONDA, IRAQ—I didn't think it would be possible
to fall asleep in the back of a rattling helicopter. But I
do, wedged between soldiers, duffel bags, and assault rifles
on the way north to Balad.
Helicopters—Blackhawk helicopters—are the preferred
method of travel in Iraq. The roads are dangerous, so no one
wants to drive. And Blackhawks offer the fastest path. Lifting
off from Baghdad, I had no thoughts of sleep. Below, the huge,
brown city fades quickly into palm groves and green fields.
Grids of modern houses change to scattered mud-brick huts.
It isn't a gentle ride, but I'm exhausted. And the rocking
of the machine, the regular beat of its blades, and the snug
embrace of the harness lull me into a nap. Later, a pilot
tells me, "Oh man, whenever I sit in the back, I'm out
like a light. Happens all the time."
We arrive at Logistic Support Area Anaconda outside the city
of Balad in the Sunni Triangle. Anaconda is home to several
Army units and a large Air Force base and hospital, where
the critically wounded are ferried for treatment. A sergeant
describes the enormity of the base: Its perimeter is about
12 miles (19 kilometers). It takes almost half an hour to
drive around it. The airstrip handles fighters as well as
cargo ships, some of the world's largest military aircraft.
The sergeant drives us to a back corner of the base, where
the 57th Medical Company, an air ambulance unit, has carved
out a niche among leftover bunkers. Its Blackhawk medevac
crews pluck injured soldiers, civilians, and even insurgents
from the battlefield and rush them to hospitals like the one
at Balad.
On the taxiway of one of Saddam's airfields, the 57th's Blackhawks
squat in the sun. The crews rest in their shipping-containers-turned-bunkhouses
or hang out in the flight-operations building. Flight ops
is where the emergency calls roll in, the rush of static that
precedes the adrenaline rush of a mission. For now, all is
quiet, and the rule of thumb is sleep while you can; the call
might come at 2 a.m.
At dinner in the mess tent, artillery rounds boom somewhere
near the perimeter. After, some of the pilots and crew build
a fire in half an oil drum and sit by it, relaxing. They smoke
and make technical jokes about flying. Suddenly a pair of
F-16s screams up from the air base, their engines flaring
in the dark, their noise tearing open the night. I'm told
this is normal. "Welcome to Balad," one of the guys
says. "It'll wake you up every night for sure."
Around midnight, I'm checking email in flight ops when a medevac
call comes in. A suicidal soldier at a small base south of
here must be brought up to the Air Force hospital. The soldier
needs to be restrained. He needs sedatives. And the outpost
doesn't have the necessary stuff.
It's not clear why the man wants to die. He might have seen
too much here. Or maybe his girlfriend dumped him via email.
The reason never floats over the airwaves, but in minutes
the on-duty sergeant sets the wheels of rescue in motion.
Soon the crew is awake and running up the engines in the cold
darkness. The air and the ground shudder, and help is on the
way.
top
February
18, 2006
Bloody
Country
CAMP ANACONDA, IRAQ—An Iraqi man has been shot in the
neck, chest, and shoulder. Everything is red. I see his hairy
chest through a tangle of doctors' arms as they try to plug
him up with gauze. It doesn't seem to be working.
Photographer Jim Nachtwey and I are in the trauma room of
an Army aid station outside Balad. The man was shot near here,
so friends brought him in. If the doctors and medics can stabilize
him, the Blackhawk medevac crew will fly him to the Air Force
hospital at LSA Anaconda. But stable is not the word I think
of, looking at him. The word is ruined.
A swamp of blood and gauze congeal on the floor beneath the
table where he lays. Everyone steps in it. Bloody instruments
are tossed to the floor, leaving smears. The doctors' voices
rise. A medic runs here and there, grabbing gauze or instruments.
Others lift IV bags full of fluids. They've already pumped
four units of blood into this man. His body is a sieve.
I learn that his carotid artery was nicked, either by a bullet
or as doctors tried to force a tube down his throat so he
could breathe. "He's not going to make it," someone
says.
I can't recall how long we stood and watched. I remember colors,
odors, movement. Trauma blurs time. My guess is that the doctors
worked for 20 minutes or more until finally, somehow, they
stabilized him. The medevac crew straps him into their Blackhawk
for the ride to the hospital. There, doctors and surgeons
with more equipment will take over. Onboard, the flight medic
and crew chief (members of the four-person crew) "bag"
the man—breathe for him with a hand pump—and press
on the hole in his shoulder, trying to stop the bleeding.
At first we hear the patient is a policeman. Insurgents commonly
target cops in Iraq; almost every day murdered policemen make
the news. We all agree it seems an insane career choice, but
enlistments continue. One of the flight crew is moved by such
dedication, sort of. "Man, you gotta give 'em credit,
though, for what they do, going to work each day. The life
expectancy of an Iraqi cop is what, 15 days?"
Later we discover the man is a soldier in the Iraqi Army.
Their lifespan, apparently, is a little longer.
top
February
20, 2006
The
Stuff of War
CAMP ANACONDA, IRAQ—Bunkers and hangars dot the base.
They rise from the flatness like giant tortoises, their bellies
filled with American aircraft.
Inside one of them, a maintenance crew strips a medevac bird
down to its frame. The rotor blades have been plucked, the
doors and litters yanked off, even the seats ripped out. Men
with tools scramble over the exoskeleton and root around inside
it. This Blackhawk will not fly for days. It's part of the
price of flight.
The captain in charge of this job tells me that for every
hour medevac crews spend in the air, their machines must endure
five to seven hours of maintenance. The investment is costly.
Mechanics work long hours under constant pressure. Without
them, the birds would be seven-million-dollar lawn ornaments.
These men—there are no female mechanics here—are
the lifesavers of the lifesavers.
The hangar is crammed with parts and tools. Rivet guns pound.
The sweet smell of WD-40, or something like it, hangs in the
air. Assault rifles are mounted on a plywood sheet, just more
tools in this enormous shed. Out back, shipping containers
hold thousands of spare parts. "Yep, we've essentially
got our own Home Depot of hardware out here," the captain
says.
The monumental effort of war astounds me. For as fast as the
invasion was—and as quickly as we declared the mission
accomplished—the war was no easy thing to begin. Now
that it's alive and moving, perhaps even in middle-age, it's
clear that stopping will be extraordinarily difficult. War
is an engine, but there is no "off" switch. There
can only be a gradual grinding down.
Today I notice the shuddering process of war not in the gunfire
but in the millions of bottles of water stacked around each
base, each office, each hangar. It appears in the boxes of
food, the pallets of Gatorade, the oil drums and pirated DVDs,
the strawberry-flavored milk, portable toilets, Power Bars,
and the neighborhoods of shipping containers in which the
soldiers live.
It's as if whole American cities migrated across the sea to
Iraq. This isn't to say that life during wartime is easy.
Remove the violence, the constant stress and fear, and some
units still live very roughly, with cold showers and bad food.
But the sheer volumes of stuff—that's peculiarly American.
We have much, and when we visit, we haul it along.
After the war ends, as we are told it will, much of this stuff
will probably remain in Iraq. Larger things, salvageable things,
will be a boon for the Iraqis, masters of recycling old junk.
But there will be mounds of waste. I think again of the water
bottles. Each day garbage bags on bases across the country
swallow endless streams of them. Temples of plastic could
be built with it all. I don't know where it ends up. Much
trash is burned in great fire pits, but tons of it will be
badly buried, or dumped in fields or canals. The environment
will suffer, is suffering. It is impossible to expect an army
on the move to stop and consider its ecological footprint.
But if victory is one of our legacies, garbage is too.
top
February
23, 2006
A
Monument Mourned
CAMP ANACONDA, IRAQ—The country is tearing at itself,
ripping open new wounds. Yesterday unidentified men blew up
the Al Askariya shrine, a major Shiite mosque in the town
of Samarra. Now fury infects the population, and predictions
of civil war abound. You can read about this in almost any
newspaper.
Just three
days ago I was in Samarra, and I saw Al Askariya, its famous
golden dome sparkling in the sun. Now it is gone, a heap of
rubble. What was once a center of faith is reduced to a rallying
point for hatred. It is hard to believe how fast the landscape
changes here.
I traveled
to the outskirts of Samarra aboard a helicopter sent to evacuate
U.S. soldiers wounded in an IED (improvised explosive devices)
attack. As we approached the landing zone, the mosque floated
above the dirty buildings, a jewel on the mud-colored skyline.
My eyes drifted instantly to it. In another time, I would've
visited the mosque. But I couldn't do much more than write
a few lines about it in a notebook.
Today
I learned from the papers that the shrine was a hundred years
old. Two famous imams, both descendents of the Prophet Muhammad,
are buried there. For the faithful, the shrine's destruction
leaves a gaping hole. For the country, who knows what this
latest attack will bring. It is a form of mental terrorism.
No one was injured, but all across Iraq people are weary and
angry. Now they have lost one of the few fixed points in the
landscape of their belief.
I'm from
Massachusetts and remember how Catholics suffered when the
Archdiocese of Boston closed churches around the city a few
years ago. Parishioners felt joined to their churches, vaults
of ritual and memory. The Shiites' sense of grief is mirrored
in Boston, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and in
Alabama, where arsonists are torching churches.
I cannot
grasp what the loss of the Al Askariya shrine means. But I
am sorry for those who revered it. Churches, mosques, temples,
they are among the most vulnerable human-made places, and
the most feverishly loved.
top
February
24, 2006
The
Curfew
CAMP ANACONDA, IRAQ—The streets of Baghdad are dead.
No cars wind through the city. There is no one outside, and
no tracer bullets spin into the sky. Six-hundred feet (180
meters) above, I scan with night-vision goggles and see only
the flashing lights of a single police car sitting on an empty
road.
Today we expected civil war. It's been a long day of waiting.
Two days ago, the Al Askariya shrine, a sacred Shiite mosque,
was bombed, its golden dome ripped apart. Angry Shiites flooded
Baghdad's streets on Thursday, blaming Sunnis and American
forces for the dome's destruction. Fears of civil war raced
around the media. This morning, U.S. soldiers here in the
Sunni Triangle waited to see what would happen.
None of the soldiers I talked with were nervous. They were
curious. The Iraqi government laid a curfew over certain parts
of the country. It was supposed to last until 4 p.m. After
that, one man joked, "It's open season on Sunnis."
For soldiers in the 57th Medical Company, the threat of civil
war brings two possible problems. The first is that while
the fighting would mostly involve Iraqis, the military medical
system would probably be swamped anyway. Iraqis often carry
their wounded to Army aid stations. Sometimes they merely
dump them outside. Civil war would mean more wounded, and
medevac crews would be called up to ferry them between hospitals,
boosting stress on people and machines.
The other concern is that civil war might extend their tours.
If the country cracks and burns anew, many soldiers could
be ordered to remain in Iraq longer than their one-year hitch.
No one wants that.
Of course, as one pilot says, so-called experts have been
warning of civil war every day for the last three years. And
it still hasn't quite come true.
By midnight, not much has happened. There's been some violence.
This afternoon, in the hospital, I watched as doctors worked
on two Iraqi army soldiers, the apparent victims of an IED.
Now, I'm aboard a mission bringing other seriously wounded
Iraqis from the Air Force hospital at Balad to the Army hospital
in Baghdad. From there they'll be turned over to Iraqi hospitals.
These missions fly at night so the patients can be transferred
to the civilian hospitals in the morning. The Iraqis wait
till morning, I'm told, because insurgents shoot at ambulances
traveling the streets after dark.
Cruising over Baghdad, scanning with the night-vision goggles,
everything is splashed with green. A gas flare glows in the
distance. Constellations of stars hang clear and bright over
the city.
Over the
last few nights, helicopter crews returning from the Baghdad
run have told of small-arms fire bursting into the sky. Insurgents
often shoot into the blackness, hoping to hit the machines
they can only hear. But there is nothing. The only traffic
blinks along inside the Green Zone. The streets of the city
never looked safer.
top
February
25, 2006
Too
Cold for Hajji
CAMP ANACONDA, IRAQ—Nights, a deep cold sinks over the
desert. Soldiers wear gloves and fleece caps. They bump the
heaters up in their containers. The sky, black and flawless
and full of stars, sucks the heat from the Earth. There aren't
many medevac missions now. The vicious bombings and firefights
have slowed with the weather, at least in central Iraq.
"Why the lull?" I ask.
"It's too cold for Hajji," someone says.
In the Muslim world, a hajji is a person who has made the
hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. In Iraq, hajji is used to refer
to locals in general and insurgents in particular. It's a
catchall born on the battlefield and hitched to all sorts
of words. Video shops or convenience stores become hajji marts,
for example. Hajji is also the enemy's nickname.
Nicknaming the enemy is old as war. It would be naïve
to think that every soldier uses the term lightly, but it
would be a mistake to read too deeply into it. For most soldiers,
hajji was something they stumbled upon when they arrived in
the desert. It was already deeply embedded in the slang of
combat. And it's everywhere.
When talking about Hajji the enemy, soldiers describe him
as temperature-dependent. "Would you want to be out tonight
setting an IED in this weather?" one man asks. "Neither
would I."
I bury my hands in my pockets. Sometimes I'm colder here than
I was on a recent trip to the Arctic. I've already borrowed
a pair of gloves. Peasants in the countryside—paid by
Al Qaeda to take pot shots at coalition forces—and even
hardened insurgents must want to stay inside.
I haven't seen any surveys or studies that mathematically
mark out when violence occurs. In the United States, we tend
to believe it happens in Iraq all the time. The truth is more
complicated. It happens in some places all the time. In others,
sunrise seems to assure a calm day, where smoke on the horizon
curls up from farmers burning their fields, not from blasted
checkpoints or car bombs.
Then again, things could change any minute. And the days have
been warming up. Soon the nights will too.
top
February
28, 2006
Speed
Kills
CAMP ANACONDA—After it is too late and the mortars have
exploded, the warning comes. "Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!"
It reverberates across the base, bouncing off bunkers and
blast walls, losing itself along the way. I barely understand
it.
No one
seems worried. Conversations continue. The Internet connection
still works. A light rain is falling, and the smell of wet
concrete and dirt hangs in the air. A few more garbled messages
come over the loudspeakers. It seems safe enough, so I walk
to the 57th's flight ops office and listen to the radio.
About
five mortars landed on base; perhaps three of them blew up.
Far as we can tell, no one is hurt. On the airwaves, commanders
warn patrolling soldiers of small-arms fire or caution them
that they've entered hot zones: "You're in it now. Repeat,
you're in it right now." Tomorrow photographer Jim Nachtwey
and I head south to Baghdad, as long as the weather holds.
The mortars are something of a send-off.
During
the last few days—all of them mortar-free—we have
played Frisbee and soccer and football. Soldiers swatted badminton
birdies in the helicopter hanger, and a Blackhawk crew chief
smacked golf balls into a net his father sent from California.
At night, there were bonfires in an oil drum, fueled by leftover
wood scraps from hobby projects and camp construction. Stories
and gossip flowed.
Medevac
missions have slowed in the Sunni Triangle. Fewer American
soldiers are being wounded, at least in the area the 57th
covers. The respite lets the crews relax. On suddenly warm
days, it feels like summer camp. But occasionally, a mushroom
cloud from artillery fire rises in the distance, wrecking
the illusion.
The war
has not paused for everyone. Over the last several days, the
medevac missions we've seen have been launched to rescue Iraqis.
We'd land to find them shot in the face, legs, guts. Some
were killed in front of their families or friends. All were
shot by Americans.
They were
shot while traveling in cars. They were shot at checkpoints
and as they approached military convoys. They were wounded
or killed because the drivers didn't stop when they got close
to the soldiers. For whatever reason, they kept driving, after
warning signs and warning shots. They paid dearly for it.
In Iraq,
it's difficult to drive straight up to a checkpoint. Usually
a maze of concrete barriers looms, forcing cars to slow. Signs
posted ahead of checkpoints order drivers to reduce speed
and stop. Military convoys carry similar signs on their back
ends telling drivers—in Arabic and English—to
stay away and not to try to pass. Over a few bloody nights,
I have seen that the Iraqis aren't getting the message.
Soldiers
undoubtedly suffer too. In the past, troops who held their
fire were incinerated in car bombs. Nobody takes that chance
anymore. Nobody waits to see if the driver is suicidal or
simply confused. If a car doesn't stop, they blast it. Later
they might learn that the woman they shot while her children
watched from the back seat wasn't packing explosives. She
was simply trying to escape sniper fire up the road.
It's the
nature of this place that civilians routinely die by accident.
It's the nature of this war that young soldiers must choose
between the prospect of death and the probability of shooting
unarmed civilians. This is the worst kind of collateral damage,
and it roars on in great, sad quantities.
top
March
1, 2006
Comforting
the Enemy
IBN SINA HOSPITAL, BAGHDAD—He is old and white-haired,
shirtless, shoeless, and shackled to a bed. His eyes are hidden
behind goggles wrapped with white tape and made into a makeshift
blindfold. A potbelly droops over his belt.
The man is an Iraqi "SI", or security intern, a
prisoner. He was brought blindfolded to Ibn Sina, Baghdad's
military hospital. He'll remain that way for much of his treatment
so he can't gather info on the hospital or, more importantly,
identify any of the scores of Iraqis who scrub the bathrooms
and mop up the blood.
The man was captured a few hours ago. His name appeared on
a military blacklist. Soldiers dragged him out in a raid.
Then he complained of chest pains, and, because the Geneva
Convention requires the United States to treat its enemies,
he was flown to Ibn Sina. Nurses and medics care for him,
give him oxygen, try to speak a bit of Arabic to him. The
SI doesn't look like an insurgent, doesn't inspire fear. But
the blocky MP guarding him isn't convinced.
"It
doesn't take much to set off an IED," he says, thumbing
an imaginary trigger. "Or he could be a paymaster."
The MP is wide and tall with buzzed blonde hair. He stares
at the SI in disgust. "He can probably understand us,"
he says. "Probably knows what we're saying. Knows how
much I hate him."
In this hospital, the busiest trauma center in Iraq, there
is a small, dim room on the second floor where SIs convalesce
after being injured during raids or fragged—blown up—by
their own homemade bombs. It is the MP's job to watch over
them. It enrages him that the U.S. saves its enemies.
Soldiers, doctors, medics, and nurses here treat anyone, everyone,
who walks or wheels into their care. After treatment, many
SIs are transferred to Abu Ghraib prison, where another hospital
provides better care than many civilians receive. It is noble,
necessary work. But it isn't easy.
Some soldiers wish they didn't have to treat insurgents. They
consider it an insult, an affront to their comrades who died
in bomb attacks and battle. The MP tells me that upstairs
lies a man who blew up two U.S. soldiers with an IED. He is
recuperating. They are dead.
I ask
the MP how he knows the prisoner is guilty. "We have
this spray in our trucks," he says. "We spray it
on their hands, and we can see if they've been handling explosives.
This guy had been, and he was caught near the scene."
At Ibn
Sina, the artifacts of violence pile up each day: burnt flesh,
torn bodies, blackened uniforms. It affects everyone. Hatred
is easy to come by, hard to resist. But it isn't winning.
The MP has been friendly and helpful to me. I don't know how
I would feel in his place. But if it were up to him, the moral
problem of caring for insurgents would no longer be a problem.
It wouldn't be an issue at all.
top
March
2, 2006
Direct
Hit
IBN SINA HOSPITAL, BAGHDAD—Another SI is rolled—blindfolded—into
the ER. His wound yawns red from just above his ankle nearly
up to his knee. According to his paperwork, the man was captured
in a building where IEDs were made. His wound is the result
of a rocket attack. Soldiers—no one knows which soldiers—apparently
found AK-47s, explosives, and cell phones strewn about the
wreckage.
A medic tends to him. It's not easy to look at his wound,
but still I'm fascinated. The ER nurses and medics are rubbing
off on me. The x-ray shows shards of bone frozen in the red
cavity in his leg, like a photograph of an explosion. I wonder
how the doctors will fix it. One says they won't. "This
is pretty bad," he says. "He'll probably lose the
foot."
top
March 3, 2006
Ethics
101
IBN SINA HOSPITAL, BAGHDAD—When soldiers carried ABC
News anchor Bob Woodruff into the ER here, the nurses working
to save his life didn't recognize him. He was one more wounded
civilian. They remember he cussed before losing consciousness.
Woodruff, who was seriously wounded in an IED attack in January,
was stabilized at Ibn Sina. Then he was flown to the Air Force
hospital in Balad, his brain pierced by a piece of shrapnel.
Not many people know that Woodruff's life was saved here before
he went to Balad. The press never rooted out the detail, though
his story was splashed across American newspapers for days.
"The Air Force gets all the attention," someone
grumbles.
While it wasn't unusual, Woodruff's arc through the military
medical system—from Iraq to a hospital in Germany and
on to the United States—is remarkable. It reveals two
very different worlds. It exposes the ethical swamp of war.
Ibn Sina, run by the Army's 10th Combat Support Hospital,
is designed for quick hits: assess, stabilize, and transfer
the patient to more advanced hospitals. For American soldiers,
the 10th does this rapidly and constantly. For Iraqis, there
are no advanced hospitals. They are treated and sent to struggling
local ones. This can be a death sentence for the seriously
injured.
"We work on them and work on them, and then they get
transferred to a bad, almost nonexistent system," a frustrated
senior nurse says. "It might be more humane to give them
a little morphine and let them die here."
The Iraqi medical system is smashed. It crumbled before the
war, ruined by tyranny and sanctions. The current war merely
finished it off. The U.S. government is rebuilding the system,
but it's slow going. One doctor tells me it'll take a generation.
Meanwhile, Ibn Sina treats more Iraqis than American soldiers.
Westerners would not recognize post-emergency care in Iraq.
An ambulance driver is often just a guy with a van. One doctor
recalls an air-conditioning repairman loading a patient into
the back of his truck. Nursing arrangements are typically
left to families; nurses aren't part of normal hospital services.
Sometimes nurses steal their patient's food or medicine. Others
have no training.
This morning, an Iraqi man with Down's syndrome is littered
into the ER. Like Bob Woodruff, he was caught in an IED attack
and suffered a severe head wound. But he will travel an opposite
path. The Iraqi was transferred from the Air Force hospital
in Balad to Ibn Sina. Instead of Germany, he'll be sent back
to the battlefield when he is driven through the streets of
Baghdad to a civilian hospital.
Doctors removed much of the right side of the man's brain.
The left side of his body is limp, unplugged. He is heavily
sedated, intubated, a hissing ventilator breathes for him.
His face has been reconstructed. The doctors and nurses know
what will probably happen.
"There
isn't a person in this room who believes he'll be alive in
two days," a doctor says.
"This is the dark territory on the edge of our work,"
another adds.
It is the way things are. The hospital won't care for him
any longer. The doctors and nurses have heard the critics
who say this ethical dilemma wouldn't exist if the U.S. hadn't
started the war. "We're past that," a nurse told
me. "We're here." Out on the edge of darkness they
continue treating the doomed.
Taped to the Iraqi man's paperwork is a photograph. In it
he sits on a couch, smiling, sometime before the bomb struck.
He is soft and round and appears very happy. A nurse leans
over him, talking, as a medic yanks staples from his chest.
"It's OK," she says. "It's OK."
The man's right arm fidgets. The nurse says it is just reflex
movement. His hand jerks up, and his index finger curls, as
if to say, "Come closer."
top
March 6, 2006
Children and Prisoners
NEAR CAMP JUSTICE, BAGHDAD—Western Baghdad is a wasteland
of garbage, festering puddles, and smiling children. The children
are fearless. The rattle of Humvees lures them out of alleyways
and vacant lots. They swarm toward the heavy trucks, shouting
and giving thumbs-up. They hope for candy and soccer balls.
For now, they get waves from young soldiers and lungfuls of
dust.
Later,
when a mortar booms nearby, I crouch for cover. Soldiers duck.
The children do nothing. They worry only about their large,
scolding mothers.
These
are my last days in Iraq. I'm embedding with the 1st Squadron,
71st Cavalry, part of the 10th Mountain Division. The 10th
controls Baghdad from the Tigris River west to Abu Ghraib
province. Soldiers here train Iraqi units, preparing them
for the responsibility of defending their capital.
The 10th
also patrols the sector's dense urban and sweeping rural terrain,
with its blend of Sunni and Shiite, its rich and brutally
poor families. The 1/71 has a dangerous job, but they're the
ones to ride with if you want to see beyond the odd bubble
of Army bases.
I catch
a ride to the 1/71's base in northwest Baghdad with a civil
affairs unit that's heading into city neighborhoods to "win
hearts and minds" and gather local intelligence. We leave
Camp Liberty, a sprawling troop city near Baghdad Airport,
in a convoy of four Humvees. Before going outside the wire,
the soldiers lock and load their weapons. Clips of ammo click
into place. Rounds rasp into chambers. I stuff in protective
earplugs and button the flak collar across my throat.
We roll
through a maze of concrete barriers and barbed wire, past
an American checkpoint and a few Iraqi ones. We emerge in
Baghdad. Dogs, goats, people, all weary and gaunt, weave between
the little pyramids of waste that line the streets.
Suddenly,
we're in traffic, dwarfing cars around us. Many sputter along,
their windshields webbed with cracks. On the opposite side
of the road, drivers wait to buy gas from a guy with a couple
plastic jugs and a funnel. Cars pull aside for us; they've
learned convoys attract violence.
Faces
blur past outside. They aren't smiling. The soldiers swerve
wide around the cars. When it gets too narrow, they simply
force a new path by bumping over the median into the oncoming
traffic lane. The soldiers try to avoid other cars, but the
vehicles press in. I've been looking at the bloody results
of car bombs and IEDs for the past few weeks, and the closeness
of the traffic doesn't make me feel good. I ask the soldier
beside me if he's nervous. Not anymore, he says. "The
reality of this place is that anything can happen at anytime.
The sooner you get used to it, the better."
We pass
shops and apartments. New satellite dishes sit on the sidewalk.
Bunches of bananas hang on strings above cases of oranges.
In a dense, low-roofed neighborhood, the trucks stop, and
we get out. A soldier pulls a stack of newspapers, written
in Arabic, from the back of his Humvee and drops them to the
sidewalk. Iraqi men slip a few from the stack. They look us
over cautiously, some smiling. Two soldiers carry out armfuls
of T-shirts and soccer balls and are mobbed instantly.
Kids and
adults jockey for the stuff. "For my baby," says
a man who wants four T-shirts. It's all gone in minutes. Meanwhile
a sergeant and interpreter speak with a cluster of men. The
sergeant asks them to complete a questionnaire about how things
are going in their neighborhood. It's strange, him standing
there armed and armored, asking men to answer questions like,
"Would you like to see more or less coalition patrols
in your neighborhood?"
Some of
the questions address sewage and trash pick-up. "Most
of the people are really receptive," the sergeant says.
"It's the security that's on everybody's mind."
The survey asks no questions about security.
We make
a few more stops, pulling down narrow alleys, past cafes,
metal shops, and variety stores. The streets are crowded.
So are the sidewalks. Brick and plaster buildings seem to
crumble in the sunlight. Trash gathers in the potholes and
gutters. But the local economy hustles along, and life looks
almost normal.
At one
stop, I talk with a couple of teenage boys. We trade the few
words we know of Arabic and English. The military interpreter,
an Iraqi woman, helps me get a little deeper. One boy is named
Jalal, just like Iraq's president, he explains. His hair is
neatly slicked back. He is short and slim, 19 years old. Jalal
says he likes the soldiers. Another young man, Riad, tells
me in English that he works at Baghdad Airport. But he can't
find the words to describe his job.
A crowd
grows around the interpreter and me. Older men push in. Everyone
begins talking at once. "We're suffering here, but we're
still happy," Jalal says. Other voices rise over him.
A man complains that summer is coming, and there's still no
electricity. He worries about the heat. The interpreter tries
to organize the flood of words, but she can't. I scribble
in my notebook. It's too much. Then the tall platoon sergeant
steps over. He waves his hand in a circle above his head.
It's a message to his men: Mount up. The Iraqis stop talking.
We duck
back into the Humvees and head out. A crowd of boys runs beside
us. They are dangerously close to the tires and very excited.
It is the joyful, effortless run of children. It is as if
they believe chasing the huge trucks might change everything.
If they run fast enough, they might just fly.
***
In the
evening, I travel with a medic and a military doctor to a
detainment facility in northwestern Baghdad. The place hardly
fits its name. It is temporary. There isn't a cell or iron
bar to be found. Guards wearing slippers sit in the courtyard
on plastic chairs.
The Iraqi
Ministry of the Interior, the MOI, runs the facility. It is
the medic's job to help care for the prisoners while the MOI
builds itself up from the ground with U.S. help. Because there
are not yet any real Iraqi medics, and because the nation's
healthcare system barely functions, this soldier provides
the only care for several hundred detainees.
The dangerous
men—insurgents, murderers, and thieves—occupy
at least one large, open room. The less dangerous criminals—and
some of them may not even be criminals—await their fate
in similar conditions, packed into a space that has the expansive
and generic feel of a cafeteria. The door to their quarters
is unlocked but barricaded with an old couch. A couple of
gym lockers and a coil of razor wire block the back door.
These guys don't try to escape, the medic says.
He slides
the couch away. A wave of heat and a heavy, wet stink pours
out. Mats cover the floor. Clothes hang from pipes on the
ceiling. Dozens of men inhabit the room, praying, chatting
in groups, laying with arms draped over their eyes. They know
the medic. He calls to them. They answer. Many stand and come
over. The medic brings possibilities.
A crowd
swallows us. The men touch us, their warmth and odor settling
like fog. They press in, hoping for attention. The medic tries
to focus on one man at a time, but he is constantly prodded.
Men prod me, too, saying "Mistah. Mistah." They
grimace, stick out their tongues, touch their throats, or
point to scars. They mime their ills, and I can do nothing.
Several
times the medic yells for the crowd to get back. They always
surge in again. The doctor, who joined us tonight to examine
one man in particular, ends up seeing several. He diagnoses:
"He's got scabies." "I think that's from some
kind of steroid." "Those scars shouldn't be on both
sides." "Who prescribed you this?"
One man,
who was severely beaten before landing in jail, pulls up his
shirt to reveal purple welts floating across his back. "Electrical
burns," the medic says. Puss surrounds weeping wounds
on the top of his feet. The doctor thinks he might have diabetes.
The crowd
grows. There are no guards. I sweat through my shirt. We finally
push out and roam the room. The medic points out cases to
the doctor, who says he'll try to get some antibiotics. As
the medical men pass, hands reach up from the floor in supplication,
hoping for miracles. Other Iraqis kneel in prayer, their palms
facing heaven, eyes closed. It is as if we were walking through
a scene from the Bible.
We visit
another room, this one smaller, about the size of a squash
court. Perhaps two-dozen men lie or sit inside it. All are
blindfolded. It is even hotter. To keep the door locked, the
guards simply remove its handle.
The detainees
react to the sound of our arrival. Their heads swivel, some
draw themselves into defensive balls. They wait. The medic
fishes one man out from the back of the room and leads him
into the hallway. His wrists are bound with a long strip of
gray cloth that was probably once a T-shirt.
Heart
trouble is this man's claim, and the medic has been working
to diagnose him. The doctor helps, but doesn't find anything
too unusual. As they examine him, the man seems to grow worse.
The two Americans think he's pretending because he has an
audience. They agree to see if his heart trouble is real.
The doctor tells an Iraqi official that the men here must
get vitamins. "Or at least oranges," he says. The
detainee returns blindfolded to his room.
The medic
is frustrated. He wants to do more. But he is only an advisor,
and this is an Iraqi operation. He is caught between helping
the Iraqis build their nation and trespassing on their sovereignty.
It's a persistent problem. In Iraq, it seems the desire to
do right often sinks beneath the priorities of war.
top
March
7, 2006
Exit
SHULLA, WESTERN BAGHDAD—The men of Shadow troop hang
around their Humvees in the cold, colorless dawn, checking
weapons, readying their gear. A few smoke, but it's early
even for that. Soon they'll start another patrol, another
12-hour shift.
Someone lowers the boom on the lead truck, a sign that it's
almost go time. The metal arm reaches out five or six feet
from the front bumper and at its tip a steel fin rises to
about roof height. The contraption looks like a big hockey
stick. It is designed to trip IEDs.
Other units build different booms. Some hang heavy chains
on the tip, dragging them through the dust. Some cut plastic
or rubber fins that scrape the ground. The point is to explode
bombs ahead of the Humvee and hope the blast isn't too big.
It's a way of stacking the odds. It doesn't always work.
About two weeks ago the platoon lost two soldiers to an IED.
The blast tore through the right rear door and gutted the
Humvee. The driver and the man behind him bled to death quickly.
The soldier in the passenger seat survived, with shrapnel
wounds in his back. The attack is fresh in the men's minds.
I'm traveling today with the platoon sergeant, a 33-year-old
West Virginian. He was on leave when his men died, and it
pains him. He tells me he can't wait to get out of Iraq. "I
hope I don't remember any of it," he says. But then,
he has pictures of them on his computer, he has a toy chicken
that belonged to one of them. They were his men. He will never
forget.
We'll ride in the third vehicle of a four piece convoy. "It's
usually the second or third one that gets hit," he says
as we climb in. IEDs sit high on the list of killing weapons
here. Sometimes they rank number one, sometimes they fall
into second place behind gunshot wounds. They embody the terror
and unpredictability of this war. IEDs can be anywhere, any
size. Some punch through tanks.
It seems sometimes like the patrols simply drive around waiting
to be hit. Of course, they have other functions. Constant
patrols rattle insurgents and soldiers often save the lives
of Iraqi civilians who have been wounded in attacks. But there
aren't enough patrols to stop IED warfare. At night insurgents
plant new crops of them.
We drive along the top of a canal embankment, the water gurgling
slow and foul in a concrete trough several feet below. To
the right, a mix of vacant, rubble-filled lots and houses.
To the left, a polluted marsh and piles of garbage. Dogs roam
the canal, packs of them chase the Humvees. In places, Iraqis
have laid makeshift bridges. We pass the carcass of a school
bus that has been dragged over the canal. Pedestrians heading
for the marsh side walk in through the backdoor and squeeze
out through the front. The bus is stripped of seats, wheels,
everything.
Nearby, three black and white puppies peer up over a lip of
dried mud. They are very small. They cock their heads as we
pass. The sergeant orders the patrol to stop. He watches them
through his window for a moment. At home, he has a German
shepherd. "Those were some cute puppies," he says
over the radio.
Minutes later we see something in the marsh: piles of artillery
shells. Rust covers them. None are live, far as we can tell.
They have been stripped of their explosives. There must be
a hundred or more, all shapes and sizes. We get out and examine
them carefully. A tall, red-haired lieutenant imagines all
the gunpowder they once contained. "Man, that would make
a lot of IEDs," he says. The jumble of shells spreads
along the marsh for several hundred feet. There's no telling
how long they've been here, or where they came from.
There's nothing to do about the shells. It's too late. Soon
after the discovery, the patrol is called off by commanders
higher up the chain. The platoon has been running on high
since the mosque bombing in Samarra in late February, and
the order comes as something of a relief. Instead of a12-hour
run through the gauntlet, they catch a break and head back
to Camp Justice.
American soldiers have a saying: "Everyday is Groundhog
Day." It refers to the Bill Murray movie in which Murray's
character, a selfish and depressed weatherman, wakes each
morning on Groundhog Day and lives through the same events,
with the same people, the same Sonny and Cher tune whining
into infinity on the clock radio.
Murray eventually escapes the cycle by becoming a better person.
In the year most troops spend here, escape is two weeks of
mid-tour leave and possibly a few days of in-theater leave,
when they fly to nearby Gulf countries like Qatar and are
allowed four beers per day. Then they return, and Groundhog
Day begins again.
But not for me. In the afternoon I catch a lift back through
the filthy streets to Camp Liberty. Tomorrow, I'll fly to
Jordan, then home. A soldier jokes with me about the fate
of Iraq as I wait. He wonders if we'll return one day, maybe
in 20 years, like Vietnam vets did long after their war ended.
He wonders what it'll look like, what the people will be doing.
"There will be golf courses beside the Wal-Marts,"
he says. This assumes Iraq will follow Vietnam to post-war
peace. But a closer comparison might be Afghanistan, where
foreign armies, ethnic hatred, and religious struggles fed
decades of war and tyranny.
I already know I want to return much sooner. Before I took
this assignment, it was easy to keep the war distant. In America
it is background noise. It lost urgency. We censor ourselves
and discuss only tallies of the day's dead, stories of bombings
or political struggles. None of it brings home the bright
red immediacy of blasted flesh and broken lives. This, and
what happens after, is the story.
The sky is orange now, the sun melting behind a film of dust
and smoke. The smell of burning trash scents the breeze, as
it always does, and soon the night will rumble with helicopters
carrying wounded across Iraq.
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