‘Josh, my boy,’ he said, as he puffed against his moustache, ‘My grandma always said: if it itches it doesn’t hurt and will heal soon.’
The words of Dr. Gilbert’s grandma helped, of course, but I would have preferred him to base his data on modern medical devices and magnetic resonance tomography.
Still, time passed, and it worked for me, in a sense, and my legs. And everything else went on – the war in which our guys perished, the chat online and the skirmishes with pacifists and anti-Americanists.
And then someone with the username Passerby joined the forum. He wrote little, just short captions. But he posted photos. Lots of them, lots of photos. Of Iraqi settlements and villages, cities. Streets, houses. And corpses. There were a lot, a lot of killed people. Not soldiers, not military. Mostly not men. In Passerby’s photos it was mostly women, old men, children… They were poorly dressed, sprinkled with dust or partially covered by brick crumb and pieces of concrete from blown-up houses. They had perished from the bombings, from the bullets and shells released from our weapons.
They were unplanned losses, but judging by the photos, there was too much. I don’t know if Passerby took those pictures, or someone sent them to him, but one thing was clear – firstly, they were not fake, nor staged, and secondly, something in that war had gone wrong.
Dead children – grey faces with cheeks pierced by splinters, half-closed eyes, blood clotted hair, crooked fingers – it was awful. Shock and, yes, exactly shock – that was the word for what I experienced.
In a war with soldiers, men have to perish; it is their work and their debt, so my old man always said so and I always thought.
When soldiers meet face to face – even if one goes in Humvee armour, while the other is skulking behind a wall with an RPG-7 – it is fair and correct. But when you try to destroy a group of fighters you suppose are in the middle of a residential block in Basra with three hundred ‘saddamitovs’ – no, not marines or GI, but large-calibre shells… they destroy the entire block, leaving a heap of ruins, a concrete medley and bent fittings. It is wrong, unfair…and reminds me of the methods of the Nazis in World War II.
Passerby also posted photos of captured Iraqis – pathetic, ragged men with sallow faces, rather like illegal Mexican immigrants. They huddled close to each other in fear, and our soldiers towered over them. In their bullet-proof vests and helmets, wielding their high-tech weapons, our soldiers looked like mythical Atlases rounding up savages.
But in some photos our Atlases behaved bestially. They kicked the legs of prisoners lying on the ground. They spat on them. They even urinated on them. It was disgusting, mean, but, alas, they weren’t staged either. I recalled Ken at once and he easily could have done this. And many other guys from our platoon too.
Many on the forum tried to ban Passerby from uploading all these photos and complained to the moderators, but when the question was put to a vote, I, surprising myself, wrote that if we ban the publication of Passerby’s photos, then we ourselves are like Saddam and any other dictators – Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-il – and will stop being citizens of a democratic state.
People grumbled a little, but nobody wished to speak against democracy, since that’s why we were fighting a war in Iraq.
But my conviction in my own correctness and the correctness of my country was especially badly shaken the day when Passerby uploaded the next set of photos – a small one, just a few frames. In them were hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi women, dressed in black scarves.
They were going down a street in a big city against a background of partially destroyed houses. Many of the women were carrying placards in the Arab language and portraits of Saddam Hussein. The laconic caption said:
‘Iraqi women who have lost loved ones during the fighting stage a peaceful demonstration against the American invasion. An inscription on the poster reads: Americans, why are you killing our people?’
In the following pictures, I saw appalling things. Marines smashed into the women, my marines. I could not be mistaken. I had served two months and could not confuse regimentals and details of equipment. Clad in camouflage armor, the marines beat the protesters with rifle butts, bludgeons, fists and boots – protestors who were mostly old women, old enough to be the soldiers’ Moms.
I looked at the pictures, I looked at the blood-stained women’s faces distorted by pain and anger. I looked at the guys from our platoon laughing, dragging a grey-haired old woman through the dirt by the hair, at the bludgeons raised in the air, at the women tangled in hems of black dresses, trying to protect themselves with thin hands from the blows…
Several minutes later I removed my account from the forum and closed the computer. Chaos danced in my head, and my thoughts were tossed like autumn leaves on the wind. Gradually the realization came: we did something wrong. And maybe to some this realization came earlier – it wasn’t for nothing that there were so many opponents of war around the world. Not supporters of Hussein, as I began to understand now, but opponents of war because war is terrible, it is death and pain. It is ruin. It is diseases. It is hunger. And again death.
Yes, Iraq, probably, was a totalitarian state, aggressive and dangerous to the whole world. Probably… but I am not sure of anything at all. And… again, probably… the people of Iraq lived in servitude, under the heel of a cruel dictator, in perpetual fear, and everyone, including the most high-ranking officials, was afraid for their lives daily. How else do you explain that many Iraqi statesmen came over to our side as soon as the opportunity was presented? Or is it the truth that a donkey loaded with gold is the best battering ram against the castle gate?
Anyway, when we brought democracy to Iraq, it had to become an important, even a great event, for all Iraqis.
But it turned out that Iraqis thought differently. Perhaps, they would have been happier with some other form of help, but not bombings and retaliatory raids. But the main thing was not even that.
To establish democracy, we agreed that for some time we would forget about it. Yes, yes, it was a very dangerous paradox: to establish democracy you forget about democracy! And if there is no democracy, everything is possible: killing, raping, urinating on prisoners, dragging old women by the hair…
And suddenly I was delighted that I had broken those fucking legs. And that in a semi-conscious state I had signed those papers palmed off on me by the chaplain. I was delighted because if not for the accident and the hospital, I would now be there, in Baghdad, Basra or El-Nadzhaf, and I would be shooting at children and thrashing old women with a bludgeon.
My broken legs preserved my honour and delivered a wake-up call to my brain – that’s what I understood in the hospital. And from now on my life will go differently.”
00:17 A.M._
Kold raised his eyes to the ceiling and thought. The Lawyer switched off the recording, took a folder out of the briefcase and slid a few pieces of paper joined together from it.
“I think you’ll find this interesting. Someone called Andrew Liebman – do you know him? – has published an article about you in the Los Angeles Times. I printed it out.
“Liebman…” Kold said. “I think he worked as a deputy for the head of the National Anti-Terrorism Committee for some time. He is a member of the CIA. I wonder what he’s written, especially considering it’s the LA Times – that’s almost a tabloid. He’s probably cursing me in it…”
“Not quite,” The Lawyer moved pieces of paper towards Kold who picked them up and began to read out loud: