I've been sending David (Grouch) some e-mail hello's to let him know that we're thinking about him. Got a note back from him this morning. He attached some of his journals to the note. We all know what a great writer David is, and his words were chilling and sobering. I asked his permission to post them here. He responded that he would have done so himself if he had more time to spend on the internet.
Here is what he wrote:
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August 15, 2005: Today, the Transitional National Assembly is due to complete the first draft of the constitution. Everything, it seems, hinges on this; but the reality is, life will go on as before. Baghdad residents won't wake up on the 16th feeling refreshed, re-energized and inspired to "take back their country." They will still be sniffing the same stagnant air, rationing their daily four hours of electricity and praying for mercy each time they take a drive outside their neighborhood.
There has been a lot of haggling on this constitution—some think there are too many obstacles (women's rights, the role of Islam in the political process), others think those hurdles just need a good running jump and then the country will be up and over them. Some say the deadline of Aug. 15 can't be met; U.S. officials cheerfully turn a deaf ear and remain upbeat.
In all the back-and-forth tennis match in the media, one headline caught my eye: "U.S. Model Appeals to Some Iraqi Factions." I immediately thought, "Who? Cindy Crawford? Tyra Banks?" Then I realized that they were talking about our model of democracy.
Too bad. Cindy Crawford could probably solve a lot of the country's problems with one head-toss of her hair.
At this point, I'm not sure what will solve the problems over here. We've expended our military might and the terrorists keep popping back up like spring-loaded targets in a shooting gallery. We're killing plenty of them in the streets, but for every terrorist we cut down with .50-caliber machine gun fire, it seems like another two sneak over the border of Syria into eastern Iraq.
And still the sewage pools in the streets, still Baghdad residents only get four hours of electricity (on a good day), still oil productivity isn't where it should be. We do our best to give hope to the residents of the city. We ride around in our armored humvees, stopping every few blocks to hand out frozen chickens to hungry parents and beanie babies and soccer balls to their children in dirty rags of clothes. We've tasked our best and brightest NCOs to train the Iraqi military recruits—applying a U.S.-style basic training, which is frustrated at nearly every turn by language and cultural barriers, but still we put the Iraqi Soldiers through their paces, and they honestly do want to learn, they really do want to make a difference in their new country…but then when they go out on patrol, they're in "soft-skinned" trucks and when the IEDs come, as inevitably they will, those un-armored Soldiers are blown to bits and we must order another eight or nine Young Iraqi Man models from the factory, and it takes another eight weeks to get those recruits trained.
* * *
A few random observations:
1. Every night when I untie my boots, a little cloud of dust poofs out—like they had been holding their breath all day long and were now allowed to exhale and cough out the dust.
2. My feet, encased in these beige boots all day long for 15 hours at a stretch, are slowly being ruined. A sharp little callous has formed on the small toe of my left foot. The underside of both feet are scaly and peeling. The nails are yellowing and turning hard as dragon's claws. I'm ashamed of my feet but, short of constantly spraying them with athlete's foot powder and running a pumice stone over them every other shower, I don't know what to do.
3. Sometimes when I'm out walking around the FOB in the middle of the day's heat, I sweat so much and so hard, it feels like there's a typhoon inside of my clothes. I can actually feel the sweat-water spritzing my brown T-shirt.
4. Most of the people have droning voices when they're talking on the CPOF during the morning and evening briefings. Every so often, the commanding general will interrupt with a question or a smart-ass comment. He always sounds like he's got a piece of cheesecloth stuck in his throat and unless you're sitting near the speaker (which I'm not), you can't quite make out his hoarse mutter—except when he gives a verbal pat on the back: "Okay, thanks. Good brief." That's about as good as he gives out.
August 17, 2005: As I walk to breakfast, there's a staff sergeant fishing in the polluted canal at the chow hall. I stop on the bridge to watch him cast—short little flips of his spin rod. The canal is less than ten feet wide, so you need a soft wrist and a careful aim to keep from ending up in the weeds on the other side. Every third cast, the sergeant puts another dab of peanut butter on his hook. I watch him cast until he finally lands one—a 12-incher that fights him all the way to the reeds. He keeps the fish on the line as long as he can, enjoying the way the rod tip bends and there is electricity running along the rod. Watching him, I can almost feel the fight in my own two hands. He grabs the carp out of the water, then tries to hold it while he slips out the hook. The fish has golden scales and big, bright bulging eyes. He throws it back into the water and it immediately disappears into the fudgey murk.
* * *
Today, while I'm dealing with all the normal brouhaha of war—the insistent ring of the three telephones (sometimes simultaneously), insistent e-mails flooding my computer screen, the insistent sig acts detailing the attacks and deaths—others in my office are scurrying around, exhibiting advanced signs of hypertension because this is the day that the "Today Show" is coming to do a live broadcast, followed by a USO show with Colin Quinn, Lee Ann Tweeden and Gale Sayers. Everyone in the office, except for Lt. Col. K_____t, SFC B_____r and me, leave to go rub elbows with Matt Lauer and his crew.
Of course, the phone starts ringing off the hook almost immediately.
And the CPOF chatters to life.
And K_____t runs into my cubicle, saying, "Check out Sig Acts right away. Pretty big VBIED attack. Lots of civilian casualties."
Indeed. Three VBIEDs set off, one right after another, in a coordinated attack. Dozens of people were killed in the flash-bang of an instant. All car bombs and suicide attacks are bad, but this was a particularly heinous crime, one that stands out from the run-of-the-mill attacks we've numbed ourselves with. They set off the first bomb at a bus station--killed a bunch of people. Then, after the Iraqi Police arrived, they set off another bomb, killed a bunch of civilians and police. Then, as they were rushing victims to the hospital, another suicide bomber attacked the emergency workers and killed a bunch of people. Horrible, horrible, horrible. A couple of hours later, I get an e-mail with photos from Combat Camera photographers on the scene. There are the usual pictures of Iraqis in long white robes and red-and-white-checked shumagh standing around the flaming wreckage, the barely-recognizable metal chunks of what used to be cars. Then there is a photo that stops me short: a pile of about twenty sandals, which no longer have owners, next to a puddle of purple-black blood.
Meanwhile, Matt Lauer is grinning side to side over here at Camp Liberty. Gale Sayers and Lee Ann Tweeden are hugging Soldiers and signing autographs.
In the midst of all this, one of our helicopters made a hard landing ("a precautionary landing") due to mechanical problems. So, I had to do a press release. K_____t said, "We need to get out in front of this, so the terrorists don't put out something saying they shot down one of our helicopters."
Then, just before lunch, K_____t tells me he heard over the CPOF that a Bradley Fighting Vehicle caught on fire and to start drumming up a release on that. My brain was cranking into overdrive by this point. I log on to Sig Acts…and it turns out the Bradley fired on an AIF's car, setting it on fire. Whew, one less release to write.
August 20, 2005: I woke to the sound of .50-caliber gunfire, which sounded like an angry gorilla pounding on my neighbor's door—bambambambamBAM!—it was that close. BambambambamBAM! Pause. BambambambamBAM! The gunfire continued for the next ten minutes, a steady chug of rounds, as I brushed my teeth, shaved and showered.
Aug. 29: It's nearly impossible to know who to trust over here. Just today, I was reading a news story about the suicide bomber in the Mosul Dining Facility last December who, it turned out, was wearing an Iraqi Police uniform--that's how he was able to slip in unnoticed. Security is much tighter now, but that's still a very scary thing! I have no idea if he bought/stole the uniform or if he was a "real" IP. But, yes, it is possible, and does happen that bona fide IPs and Iraqi Soldiers sometimes go over to the dark side...or, due to the very tangled religious and political history of this nation, remained loyal to the "previous regime" (as we call it) and were just biding their time until they could "wreak havoc on the infidels." This is a very complicated country we've gotten ourselves tangled up with. It's like we're the new in-law who comes to the family reunion and gets caught between all the fighting between brothers, sisters, parents, cousins and grandparents.
August 31, 2005: The thuds striking the earth are barely noticeable to us in the Division Headquarters with the constant murmur of voices punctuated by occasional exclamations of laughter, the stream of official radio chatter from the CPOF speakers overhead, the hissing drone of the air conditioning, the very thoughts inside our heads which steadily cry out, "Home! Home! Home!"
No, the thuds are hardly audible—mere distant thumps, like a giant was walking over the crest of the horizon with hard, measured footsteps. We pay them no mind, like all the other daily thumps and thuds and thunder-cracks of bombs.
But less than 20 minutes later, we find ourselves snapping to attention because suddenly those distant explosions are front and center in our operations: terrorists have fired mortars and rockets into a crowd of thousands who had congregated at a mosque in Khadamiyah in honor of an ancient imam's birth (or perhaps it was his death—either way, it was a religious celebration of his coming or going). At least eight indirect fires were launched at the unsuspecting pilgrims from two different sectors of the city, one landing on the mosque, the others falling outside and along the miles-long stream of chanting Shias. The first reports streaming in estimated the civilian casualties in the hundreds; a few hours later, that would be downgraded to seven dead and a few dozen injured. Some of our helicopters in the area saw the rockets launched; the pilots locked on target and effectively wiped out the terrorists, blasting them straight up to whatever Allah they had been praising. Ground troops also quickly descended on the area and rounded up more than 50 people and evidence, including a metal tube which had probably been used to launch the rockets.
Back in Cubicle Headquarters, our first instinct was to not issue a press release, but to step back and allow the Iraqi Ministry of Interior to handle the media—which they did in due time and with due competence with no help from us. However, in the meantime, Col. G_____s had descended on our cubicle, insisting we get something out there right away. I sat down and started drafting what I could from what little I knew. Lt. Col. W_______e disappeared into an hours-long meeting and I was left with Col. G_____s hovering over my shoulder, jingling the loose change in his pocket and helping to wordsmith the sentences so that we put out accurate information, but yet remained generic and hazy enough to allow for wiggle room according to future developments. Col. G_____s said we needed to include casualty figures, but I held fast to our policy of not getting into the "numbers game" and he acquiesced. Within thirty minutes, we had patted and molded and shaped a press release to our mutual liking and he pointed his finger at my computer screen and barked like a city editor, "Send it!"
Really, though, our little massaged, 150-word press release was a mere afterthought in the grand scheme of things because MOI already had their hands on the controls and, by that point, the wire services had already filed their own stories with no help from us.
We went on about our daily business. I read e-mails, I saved photos to the archive, I strayed long enough in the bathroom to read a couple of articles in The New Yorker, we went to lunch and ate our carrot sticks and parmesan chicken breast and blueberry cheesecake, we came back to our desks and fell into the torpid slumber of post-lunch lethargy, we played computer solitaire and passed around e-mail jokes.
Then the Bad quickly morphed into Worse.
Back at the mosque, in the already-edgy crowd, someone yelled, "He's got a bomb! Watch out! He's going to blow himself up!" or Arabic words to the effect of "Fire! Fire! Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater. The beast with four thousand feet grew restless, started churning, then a wave of panic started rippling outward from the ground zero of whoever had sounded the alarm (which, in all likelihood was a false alarm planted by a terrorist). The four thousand feet pivoted on their heels and began stampeding outward like a spreading stain. The huge mob of pilgrims started pushing and screaming, shoving and running, tripping and churning, the fallen trying to rise but kicked down by more and more feet gaining acceleration from the feared blast zone, those at the edge now turning in the face of the surging human tide and walking rapidly at first, then as they felt the hot breath on their necks starting to run and trip and fall and lie flat to be stomped by all those sandaled feet, the four thousand sandals now running, running, running with blind panic. The screaming mob funneled onto a bridge, all of them squeezing their way toward the other end, only to find their way blocked by an impenetrable Iraqi Police checkpoint. People were crushed, the breath pushed from their lungs, their ribs cracked, their organs compressed, legs and arms and necks of young children snapped like thin, dry twigs.
Then, somewhere along the bridge, the pressure of human bodies grew too great and the railings burst open, snapping and spilling body after body into the Tigris River forty feet below. Women covered in black from head to toe toppled over the edge and smacked the water, their heavy abayas quickly dragging them under. The current sucked and licked up the young children falling like little drops of flesh from the bridge overhead. And still the bodies pressed outward from the imaginary bomber, the pressure of the crowd at last finding an opening, a relief valve. Hundreds of bodies were jettisoned out of the break in the railing to the dirty, roiled water below. The Tigris showed no mercy this afternoon.
Back in our cool cubicles, all laughter came to a screeching halt as the CPOF speakers started delivering the grim news. We turned to the TV for the most up-to-date (but not, as it turned out, most accurate) information since the roads around the mosque had been closed, sealed off by the Police who wanted to contain the death around the mosque. Western media was shut out from the area. A Washington Post reporter called, begging me to see if she could hitch a ride with any of our patrols going to the bridge stampede. I said we can't even get to the bridge at this point. Now CNN was reporting wildly exaggerated figures of 600 dead, now it was climbing to 650 dead. Apparently, they'd heard from someone at the scene who said they heard someone had heard on Al-Jazeera that Iraqi Police were handing out those figures. There were reports that 50 people eating at the mosque had been sickened and killed by rat poison. We drift over and watch Al-Huriya television broadcasts. One of the Iraqi generals comes on and says not to believe any of the numbers which are being reported. However, no matter what anyone says, it's plain to see there were lots and lots of dead. No one knew if there really was ever a suicide bomber. At this point, it didn't matter. More people had died in half an hour than in all of last month. It was the shout that killed, the words that devastated more than any shrapnel or flames could ever do.
A Kate Bush song started playing in my head:
But they told us
All they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
From a distance.
We struggled to make sense of it. We tried to separate truth from fiction, rumor from confirmed reports. We sent teams of military police to the area hospitals and the mosque to count bodies and report back as soon as possible.
BBC Radio called and asked if they could interview me about the events of the day and I said I could only talk about our limited involvement with the rocket attacks. They said that's okay, that's all they needed from us, but of course once I was live on the air, they snuck in several pushy questions about the bridge stampede and I could do nothing but stutter about how the Iraqi Security Forces had everything under control, that they were the ones in charge at the scene. I had no fucking clue if that was true or not, but it was one of our official "messages" we needed to push when speaking to the media and I recited it like a good little boy.
After I hung up, I drifted back over to the TV sets. Al-Arabia TV was showing footage from the scene. Bodies stacked like cordwood along the pavement. Some of them were covered with sheets, some were covered with tarps of gold foil (perhaps some building material dug out of the trash nearby). When they ran out of materials to use, they just pulled shirts up over faces. Still, as the camera panned along the sidewalk morgue, the breeze lifted the corners of the blankets and the gold foil and the dead looked at us through the camera—the open mouths with their teeth dirtied by river water, the rolled-back eyes, the knitted brows, the look of confusion. A young boy in a T-shirt, flies walking across his eyeballs, his arms reaching out for his mother, the last image to pass through his brain: her face up on the bridge rapidly receding. The buckled limbs, the splayed feet, the hundreds and hundreds of shapeless mounds beneath the sheets. It was almost too much for us to bear. Beside me, one of our female interpreters, kept gasping and clucking her tongue. She couldn't even find the words—she could only helplessly cluck her tongue.
We watched the still-living walk among the newly-dead, lifting the corners of blankets, taking a fast peek, then moving on to the next body. Every so often, a woman in black would collapse and begin wailing, rocking back and forth over the news she didn't want confirmed—the "Yes, it's me" face of her sister, her mother, her husband, her child. One woman fainted completely away and several men rushed up to splash water on her face. Curiously, the water was carried in plastic bags, like they'd just come from a pet store with a few goldfish. They splashed the cold, clear water on the woman and picked her up by the still-limp arms and pulled her to the shade. One of the men yelled and waved a stretcher-bearer over. Two stretchers came—one for the woman, one for the dead body she'd just identified. They were both carried away, the men picking their way carefully through the miles of bodies which had been fished out of the Tigris and dumped along the road. |
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