| |
IRAQ
NOTEBOOK
Soldiers of the new
front
By Paul Belden
BAGHDAD
- I didn't get the soldier's name, which I know is a
serious breach of journalistic convention. But he was
already in his own private hell, and to have pulled out
the notepad and added "Your name, sir, for the record?"
to his current state of misery would have been beyond
brutal. Journalist or no journalist, there's a measure
of humanity that you just shouldn't surrender.
Plus, I'm sure he would only have told me to go
to hell under the circumstances anyway, so what would
have been the point? He was already pissed off.
Mostly just for the fact of having to be here at
all. The marines had pulled out the week before, and
they had been cocky as anything about it. This wasn't
real fighting anymore; this was mere police work -
dangerous and necessary, certainly, yet something of a
stain for a man of war, and the marines had been all
swelled up and swaggering over their political victory
of having been allowed to pull out and leave the mess
for the army boys to clean up.
No more standing
around with their thumbs up their asses and their
fingers on their triggers for them, examining passports
at checkpoints and begging passing journalists for the
favor of the use of a real bathroom for the first time
in six weeks. No more teaching local kids the rudiments
of American gutter slang just to pass the time. ("Fuck
you, Joe!" shouted one kid after me when I wouldn't pay
his price for a bottle of scotch. Wonder where he
learned that.)
Now the army has this job, and
good luck, buddies. Have fun with it.
Which left
my poor soldier of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division
standing outside in the hot sun by the Palestine Hotel
in Baghdad with nothing to do but get verbally berated
from a distance by maybe a hundred irate Iraqis who had
gathered outside the concertina wire, and also from two
Western women who had somehow decided to single him out
for special harassment. And all of this with a
journalist standing by with his ear cocked. I truly
pitied the man.
One of the women was a short,
fat, loud grandmother-from-hell named Ruth. Ruth was a
peace activist, but the label didn't fit her as she had
one of the most gratingly unpeaceful personalities I had
encountered in Baghdad (which is saying something). She
worked for a group calling itself Voices in the
Wilderness (a label that did fit her), and when I
sidled up she was giving the soldier hell for the fact
that his compatriots had lately been out on the street
beating people up.
It was true - I had seen what
she was talking about myself. Probably every journalist
had. Especially after dark, when the scene around most
checkpoints in Baghdad brought to mind the parking lot
of a Deep South Harley bar at closing time: a drunken
fermenting brew of lawmen, outlaws, guns and alcohol,
with the threat of violence always simmering just below
the surface, and sometimes above it, too.
Just
the night before, in fact, I had been returning to the
hotel late and half-soused, and as I passed through a
checkpoint I saw a beefy soldier shove a stick-thin
Iraqi halfway across the Shari al-Saadoun. Just put his
hand on the man's chest and threw him across the road
like a shotput, so that he skidded when he landed.
The Iraqi had been one of a crowd of about 20
standing there, half-soused themselves, clamoring to be
allowed past the checkpoint, and the man picked himself
up and, swaying a bit, made as if he was going after the
soldier. The soldier put his gun down and his dukes up
and shouted, "Come on, then!" But the Iraqi's friends
held him back.
Good thing none of them were
armed. I'm sure they had guns at home, though, and I'm
sure the thought of coming back for a drive-by at least
crossed their minds. Scenes like this were being played
out all over town, every night.
And Ruth didn't
like it one bit. So here she was arguing for all she was
worth that the soldier was "required to follow the
Geneva Convention" while citing chapter and verse the
section governing occupying powers, and waving that
section right under his nose, too, while she was at it,
since she conveniently had a copy right here, in case he
had misplaced his.
The soldier, meanwhile, was
arguing right back that as far as he was concerned, Ruth
and her dog-eared little copy of the Geneva Convention
could both take a flying leap. "What do you want me to
do?" he yelled. "You think I like being here?
What do you know about it anyway? Have you ever seen
combat? Some of those people would kill us without even
thinking about it!"
I'm sure he was right. But
it was still the wrong answer, since it just gave Lisa,
the activist hemming the soldier in from the other side,
an opening to twist the knife, which she immediately
did.
Lisa was Ruth's spiritual opposite.
Affiliated with the Christian Peacemaking Team, a
Mennonite organization based in Winnipeg that for some
reason sees fit to send Canadian pacifists into the
world's most dangerous places, Lisa was one of the
frailest, most unwarlike people imaginable. Just 25
years old, she had lately been stationed in the
war-ravaged jungles of Colombia, and when she stepped in
and gently reminded my soldier, with preternatural,
infuriating, calculated calmness, that he must always
remember "that you are a guest in this country, and you
should behave like one", I had a vision of a mob of
angry coca farmers tying her up and tossing her aboard a
northbound plane.
I thought the guy was going to
draw and shoot her right there in front of me. But
fortunately our attention was diverted by a hail of
rocks that came sailing over the wire, landing on a
huddle of cameraman and bruising them up pretty good.
This was the first time I'd seen rocks being
thrown at journalists, and my immediate reaction -
echoing the general consensus of other journalists I
talked to later - was "Hey, not fair!" I saw one
cameraman get hit three times, on the leg, hip and
chest, as he went reeling out of stone's throw with his
face still glued to the eyepiece as if he was trying to
find something to focus on, and finding only sky.
But every story has to have a hero, and this
cameraman now proved himself this one's. I couldn't
believe it - just as every journalist in sight -
and every soldier, mind you - was scurrying for
cover, this man, very deliberately, plunked his camera
down in the shade of a tree, set his jaw and strode back
out to the wire's edge to explain the practical
application of public relations to this screaming,
sign-waving, rock-throwing crowd. He stood there for
about 10 minutes, his arms flung wide, gesturing wildly
and screaming in Arabic, and the crowd screamed and
gestured and flung their arms wide right back at him,
but for some reason they didn't throw any more rocks,
until finally - I still couldn't believe it - the
cameraman actually managed to shout them down and shut
them up.
Then he went back to his camera, picked
it up, set his jaw again and strode right back out to
face down the loudest, most vociferous of the protesters
- a middle-aged man in a dirty dishdasha (long
tunic) standing right in front. The cameraman dialed in
on this man's face from a distance of about two yards.
"All right, then, you got something to say? Say it."
Later I learned that the cameraman was one Hali
Abdel Illa, and that he worked for the Dubai Business
Channel. "But I'm Iraqi myself," he said, still
glowering and rubbing his bruised leg. "I know how to
deal with idiots like these."
At the time, I was
moved by his bravery, so I grabbed an interpreter and
ran over to stand next to him and take notes. The crowd
didn't really have anything new to say. They were hungry
and jobless and about to run out of food and not
pleased. The angry vociferous rock thrower said his name
was Salman, and that he was an electrical engineer. In
fact, most of the men in the crowd (and they were all
men) were professionals, he said, despite their unwashed
state. "But there is no money! There is no job! We are
poor people, and we are running out of food! We need a
new government! We need a free government! Not
[Ahmed] Chalabi, he is like Saddam Hussein!"
By
this time, the army had arrived, too. Somebody had
called in PsyOps, and they had sent a specialist over to
see what if he could help talk the crowd down. But it
wasn't necessary; Abdel Illa had already done the job
for them. I had enough notes, so I went back and found
my original soldier, who was still being double-teamed
by Ruth and Lisa.
They had really wound him up.
"Look, I don't want to kill anybody," he said with a
flash of anger. "I'm tired of killing." But then, again,
he pulled out his trump card: "What do you know about it
anyway? Have you ever seen combat?"
He repeated
this quite a few times. Ruth never answered. She just
glared at him like she would a young barking pup, until
she and Lisa finally gathered themselves and left.
I couldn't let it stand, though. I knew Ruth,
you see. In a quiet aside, I told the soldier that Ruth
had come in before the war, and that she had stayed
throughout the entire bombardment of Baghdad. Might not
have been combat - but I'm sure it wasn't very much fun,
either. In fact, it was probably downright terrifying.
It was something that every Iraqi man, woman and child
had lived through.
He just shook his head and
wiped the sweat off. "When are they going to let you
guys go home, anyway?" I asked him.
"Shit, don't
ask me." he said. "I'll be the last to know."
Earlier articles in this series:
Oh no, not again
Apr 23
Freedom unbound, and out of control
Apr 22
All according to the notebook
Apr 19
Suddenly, a war without a
border
Apr 18
A lady with real
attitude
Apr 18
(©2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
