The Skeptic الشكاك

860 Lost

I thought this blog post, from the New York Times‘ Stephen Farrell in Baghdad, was excellent:

BAGHDAD — So, a couple of weeks ago I met a guy on a highway near Abu Ghraib.

An American contractor, who somehow drove the wrong way through the Looking Glass and ended up lost in the real Iraq. A real land full of real Iraqis who would really have killed him had he gone much farther out of the I..Z. (International/Green Zone). Or B.I.A.P. (Baghdad International Airport). Or V.C.B. (Camp Victory).

Wherever he was coming from. Some acronym for some Comfort Zone, somewhere, anyway.

Military acronyms are everywhere in Iraq. Some of them don’t make much sense unless you jump all the way through the mirror and embrace the thinking as well as the language.

They are created in a world where 1,000-year-old Iraqi towns barely exist in reality, only as grid references or satellite coordinates, where real people are dismissed cursorily as ‘Hajjis,’ and where the two helpful guys at the back of the Green Zone’s Oakley sunglasses-Oreos-and-Slasher Videos emporium are known as “The Iraqi Shop.” Because there’s only one, in this world.

Anyway I called this lost Abu Ghraib contractor Lost. Because he was. Because I didn’t know his name. Because it was mildly funny. And because he was a living, breathing metaphor who was even wearing an I.Z. tee shirt.

I shouldn’t have.

I met the real ‘Lost’ a few days ago, another guy entirely. And there was nothing funny about him. His American military boots were walking across particles of dead human flesh, which wasn’t his fault. And his mouth was uttering banalities of callousness. Which was.

There had just been a bomb. There has always just been a bomb in Iraq, still. They are smaller now, so the deaths are in single or double figures, not triple. They are less frequent, so overall casualty charts have spiked down. For which we are all grateful.

And because security is tighter for the usual V.I.P. targets, the bombs are now often outside a smaller mosque; one without a golden dome, or tucked away in a desolate back street. Somewhere out on the edge of the canvas, anyway.

So we went to the scene of the bomb. Because this is a complicated time in Iraq. Neither Armageddon nor Peace in our Time, as one of my Irish colleagues used to put it, and you can’t get a proper sense of the street through a news agency wire, or relying on a second-hand witness account gathered by somebody else.

On the street the bomb scene was as confusing as usual. More so, in the middle of a religious holiday. Young girls in their glittering, Friday-best dresses carrying dolls and picking their way through fallen brickwork.

A teenage boy with Down Syndrome was patrolling the street and leveling his new Kalashnikov AK-47 at all and sundry. A startling sight, until on your second drive-past you notice that the weight of the weapon is all wrong in a child’s hands and it has a plastic magazine.

The kid was lucky. Moments later a convoy of behemoth American MRAPs cruised down the street, their turrets rotating, Terminator-style, on the lookout for all-too-real Kalashnikovs and Rocket-Propelled Grenades that are still everywhere here.

And then you reach the bomb scene itself. Within two seconds a fearsome-looking Iraqi with a beerless beer belly grabs your shoulder and pulls you out into the middle of the street. Here we go again, trouble.

Except the wrinkles around his eyes denote concern, not anger, and the force of the pull is away from something, not towards. You get to tell the difference, after a while.

He points first down to the fallen bricks the girls were treading over, and then upwards to the tottering balustrade from which the stones tumbled. And more were about to fall, right onto where your head would have been. A smile, and he is gone.

Lying around the bricks and shattered glass are blackened axles being dragged away; children trying to work out if this or that diesel-sodden fragment lying in the stagnant pool is an organic fragment that they need to remove, or not.

American soldiers are bustling around, Iraqis gradually restoring order to chaos.

And the day moving inexorably from Bang O’Clock to Gawp O’Clock to Blame O’Clock, before it recedes into the lingering smell of burnt yesterday.

In the background, behind the recovery trucks, one poor guy is scraping up human remains into a canary yellow plastic bag. His protective glove is a smaller black plastic bag, which he waves around animatedly as he rails against the culprits, the government, the Americans, everyone.

His yellow collection bag is transparent enough to see glimpses of red and black inside it, if you look. Which you don’t.

As you are processing that thought one of yellow bag man’s friends holds aloft the upside-down corpse of a dead little bird. To prove, what exactly? He didn’t know. You don’t know. None of the crowd has any idea, but everyone goes silent and expects you to film it. Because it’s Death O’Clock.

And death is all around you. Dead body parts on rooftops. Dead scraps hanging like bits of fruit on the trees if you get there early enough. Which thankfully we hadn’t, but you don’t want to double check by looking up.

And when you do eventually glance up there are women picking, well you don’t want to know what, out of the laundry hanging from their balconies.

Around the bomb scene the Iraqi army is already confirming that some of its soldiers have died. Exact numbers are always hard to know early on in Iraq, when injured can be mistaken for dead, and dead for injured and missing for both.

Then the American soldiers come over. A cursory check of your identity card. The usual quick interrogation. No, we aren’t embedded. No, we don’t live in the Green Zone. Yes, we go around Baghdad all the time on our own. Yes, really.

They are polite, courteous, even friendly. More so than usual. Dismounted they exude competence, and seem relaxed.

It is easy to see why. Although you can’t be certain of anything anywhere in Iraq this particular cluster of post-bomb civilians seem non-hostile, even in a poor Shiite area where there has to be a heavy Mahdi Army presence.

So pleasantries are exchanged, scenes described, background details conveyed. Some of the Americans chat, others nod good-naturedly. And then one gives an off-the-cuff assessment. In an acronym, of course.

“It was a kind of a J.V. attack.”

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner. Or a civilian. Or maybe I just have poor acronym-recognition software. I’m used to VBIEDS, and HBIEDs, RPGs,and EFPs.

But J.V?

Joint Venture attack, perhaps?

J-Something-Vehicle-Something-Improvized-Explosive Something-Something-Device?

No, sorry, I didn’t know this one. So I asked. And I still really, really wish I hadn’t.

“What’s a J.V. attack?”

“Junior Varsity, you know. Minor Leagues.”

Now I’m as elite, cynical, bitter and hardened MSM media as they come. Obviously, almost by definition, if I’m writing for this website. From a whole ocean East of the East Coast.

But, what? There were three or four dead people already, at that stage. At least. Including Iraqi soldiers. Parts of whom are still wandering around in front of us inside a yellow plastic bag.

By the end of the day the death toll went up to double figures, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said. Fewer than that, according to American military.

Dead people? Junior Varsity? Minor Leagues?

That man is lost.

3 Comments »

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1. That journalist has no idea what that soldier’s story is. Maybe he’s in the second month of his first tour, in which case he’s a jackass. But maybe he’s on Month 8 of his fourth one-year tour in Iraq and has seen far too many Iraqis and American buddies of his die over the past 48-odd months and is now just trying to cope with the horror. That soldier could be on Prozac or something and just trying to hang on. I’ve got buddies who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan for over 50 months (!!!) since 9/11. Those guys are allowed whatever callousness or verbal tick they need to get them through the day. I don’t know — this piece was funny at times and quite well-written. But c’mon, you’re going to get all high and mighty because some American used a commonly-known-in-the-US sports acronym at a bomb scene? Really?

   Comment by Abu Muqawama — October 23, 2008 #

2. I’m assuming this was the bomb that targeted the labor minister. To focus on the callousness of someone who made a remark, as opposed to someone who set off a bomb in rush hour, does strike me as a bit off. Also, I suspect that most of us have at times said things regarding events in Iraq that, if put down in print, would look pretty bad.

   That being said, Stephen Farrell is a very good journalist who has been in Iraq a long, long time, so I respect that he might feel like expressing himself this way.

   I have noticed a slight difference in how civilians in Iraq, be they Iraqi or foreign, and US troops relate to a scene of carnage. Civilians often seem to have undirected rage, or blame visible authority rather than invisible perpetrators. Troops in contrast may be more likely to put on an air of indifference, distancing themselves from it all. Maybe you find a different way of coping depending on whether or not you’re carrying a weapon – ie, whether you might have to make a snap judgment at any time on whether or not to inflict terrible wounds yourself, or whether you’re more likely to think of yourself as a helpless victim. That’s just a guess, though.

   Comment by Abu Silawa — October 25, 2008 #

3. Casualty in double digits. This is what stands out for me the most. When a term about double digits deaths is used, this carries little significance to me. People died, a U.S. nobody in the army machine calls it something. People died…again. Shitty.

   Comment by MASRYMON — November 1, 2008 #

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