Category: Iraq

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When the Bodies Don’t Want to Be Shown

The New York Times’s David Carr had a column yesterday — “Show Me the Bodies” — noting the relative rarity of pictures of U.S. soldiers slain in combat in Iraq. He discusses the factors involved, including squeamishness among media organizations and the many layers of difficulty, from danger to simple logistics, that conspire against such pictures being taken in the first place. He also mentions a notable exception to the general rule: A picture from the November 2004 battle in Fallujah, when Stefan Zaklin, a photographer with the European Pressphoto Agency embedded with an Army company during the fighting. Carr recounts that Zaklin “took a gritty, horrific portrait” of the company commander after he had been shot and killed by insurgent fighters — a picture widely printed at the time in Germany and France but not in the United States until long afterward (as part of stories about unpublished graphic war images.

Without going into the merits of publishing such a picture — I agree entirely with Zaklin’s argument (the picture he shot is at that link) that the image was important both for him to shoot and for viewers to see — I think Carr has missed the principal reason there aren’t more pictures like the one from Fallujah: The soldiers themselves won’t stand for it. Zaklin mentions this in his discussion of the picture:

“I stayed behind with the two men tasked with guarding the body.

One of the men was clearly on the verge of snapping; he was muttering to himself, trying to keep himself calm. It was dark, and my shutter speed was below what you would normally be comfortable using to get a sharp frame with a digital SLR. I focused the camera, and put it down from my eye. I leaned against a doorjamb, and fired two horizontal frames.

“I looked at the two soldiers, trying to gauge their reaction. One looked at me and then went back to watching the doorway he was guarding. The other kept muttering. I checked to see if the frame was sharp. It was. I rotated the camera, and shot two vertical frames. The mutterer stopped muttering, and shot me a look that sent chills down my spine. I didn’t know him as well as the other soldier, and decided to wait until the soldiers I knew better returned.

“In the end, I wasn’t ever able to take another picture of the dead captain.

“I waited two days, well after the captain’s family was notified, before I put the picture out for the world to see. I knew his family had been told because two colleagues had already interviewed the dead captain’s father about his son’s death. Despite the delay and a scrupulous reading of the embed rules, the military was furious that I sent the images at all. Nothing really came of it, I was essentially a convenient target for unfocused grief.”

Zaklin actually downplays the on-the-scene reaction to the incident. Toby Harnden, a British reporter for The Telegraph embedded with the same unit Zaklin was covering, reported on Zaklin’s ejection. After noting how well he got along with the Americans, Harnden wrote:

“But relations did sour towards the end, when a photograph of a dead soldier — whom I had been speaking to minutes before he was killed — appeared in a German newspaper.

“It was a haunting image of the body lying in a dusty kitchen, blood seeping from a bullet wound to the head. For me it summed up much of what had happened in Fallujah and was also a memorial to a brave American who died for his country.

“In the pain of the moment, Task Force 2-2 saw it differently.

” ‘Grab your stuff, asshole, and come with me,’ was how a captain addressed Stefan Zaklin, of the European Picture Agency, when news of the picture reached the unit.

“Zaklin was placed under armed guard and told he had violated the rules of propriety. Nothing in the rules had been broken. The soldiers had seen Zaklin snapping away in the kitchen — but it seemed that this was where the military and the media parted company.”

Carr mentions the frankness of the images that came out of Vietnam, when it became commonplace to see at least a slice of the grisly reality of the fighting. It’s widely observed that the military establishment, which allowed the media virtually free access to combat units, has crafted the current regime of rules for “media embeds” to avoid that kind of access and the uncontrolled flow of disturbing images and observations to the folks at home. The brass has succeeded to the point where it now takes a freedom of information request for us to get to see pictures of flag-draped coffins arriving back in the United States.

But there’s something deeper at work. I’m sure there was an us-and-them feeling at work between soldiers and journalists in Vietnam. But I wonder whether it was so deep as it is now. On one hand, the widely felt antipathy among many toward the media, especially in its connection to this war and its fancied failure to present the “real” (meaning “positive”) news about what we’re sacrificing so much blood and money for. On the other hand, the rank-and-file soldier has changed. In Vietnam, the troops a reporter or photographer encountered were nearly certain to be draftees, people who had landed in the military and sent into combat by happenstance; journalists might have been a nuisance to them, but they weren’t radically different by nature or mission. The soldiers we’re sending to Iraq may never have dreamed they’d find themselves fighting insurgents in the desert, but they’ve all chosen the armed forces, and they’re part of an institution that in many ways views itself as separate from civil society. Journalists are outsiders to this group and bound to be particularly unwelcome when they intrude too far on the lives and sensitivities of the troops. Thus the anger and outrage when a picture of a fallen warrior is run.

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Tennis in Iraq

Here’s an item from Iraq, by way of the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle:

Iraqi Tennis Coach, Players Killed

“(05-27) 10:38 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — An Iraqi tennis coach and two of his players were killed because they were wearing shorts, apparently in violation of a warning by Islamic extremists.

“Gunmen stopped the car in which the athletes were riding and asked them to step out before shooting them Wednesday, Manham Kubba, secretary general of the Iraqi Tennis Union, said Saturday. The coach, Hussein Ahmed Rashid, was Sunni, and the two players were Shiite, Kubba said.

“The athletes were in shorts when they were killed and police believe the attack was related to a warning by extremists against such attire, police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said. He said the warning was made in leaflets distributed in the Sadiyah neighborhood in southwest Baghdad a week before the attack. …”

First thought: Unbelievable barbarity; the people who did this are beyond understanding.

Second thought: Did this happen the way the authorities say it did? Were these guys killed for wearing shorts, or for being found (Sunni and Shiite) together, or for their car? Was the warning against shorts-wearing distributed in the neighborhood where the attack took place? You have to admit, this story is tailor-made to feed feelings of disgust and revulsion for those who oppose us over there.

Third thought: Without evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to think this really did happen. And that brings me back to my first thought: This is beyond comprehension. But is it really? My tendency is to think that wars of the past — say against Japan or Germany or Korea or Vietnam or even the less direct conflict with the Soviet Union — are easy to understand, at least on a general level. Right on the surface, you find nationalism in one form or other, a battle for territory, and an effort to extinguish competing claims to land and resources. A little below the surface, you find a struggle to impose a particular point of view of the world and our place in it. I think this is more complicated than seeing wars as struggles between fascism and democracy, communism and capitalism, or evil-doers and the rest of us.

The people we’re fighting in Iraq don’t have an army, they don’t appear to be fighting for territory or resources, and they’ve unleashed a wanton, terrorizing violence on the people they live among. So on that surface level, they simply don’t make sense. On that next level, though — exercising violence to impose their will and their view of the world — what they’re doing is as logical as anything any military commander has ever devised.

The question is: How do you oppose it, and where? Our soldiers and weapons are the best, or so we constantly reassure ourselves. But does anyone believe that they have prevailed? Or will ever prevail by themselves?

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‘Baghdad ER’

HBO’s documentary on a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” aired tonight. See it if you can. It’s tough to watch from the bubble of safety in which most of us live because it involves viewing people who have suffered awful, often fatal injuries. On the other hand, the work of the medical people and their commitment to all those who need their help is inspiring to see.

One quote of many that stood out, from Major Martin Harnish, a surgeon:

“This war and the number of lives it’s affecting is just unbelievable. I have to think the people in this country [Iraq] are in a better place for it, or will be in a better for it. I have to believe that, because otherwise this is just sheer madness.”

Quotes like that and the film’s occasional unfiltered glance at the terrible reality that lies behind the casualty statistics is sure to provoke some in the Fox News sphere to denounce it as anti-war propaganda. I prefer to think of it as a glimpse at the price we’re all paying, some way or another, for the war.

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‘Army Issues Warning About Iraq Documentary’

Someone recently told me in passing — someone who should know, since he’s there now — that what’s been happening in Iraq the last 38 months “doesn’t really rate the word ‘war.’ ” I think I understand the sentiment. We shouldn’t raise the significance of a battle with a bunch of murderous thugs (“primitive screwheads” is the term my acquaintance used) with such an important appellation. But to me, even sheltered as I am from the reality of what’s really happening over there, the suggestion this isn’t a war just doesn’t ring true. Call it what you want: People are dying by the thousands — by the tens of thousands — in a sustained siege of organized violence. Call it a picnic or a police action or the latest beachhead for democracy, the dead and wounded and the shattered pile up just the same, whether we’re paying attention or not.

HBO is about to air a documentary on one of the remarkable stories of the war: the work of the frontline U.S. military trauma hospitals in Iraq. It is not an untold story: many big media organizations have dipped their toe into it already. The HBO movie, “Baghdad ER,” is a little different, though, in that it’s the product of a longer-term immersion into the world of combat medicine. The makers spent two months filming in a combat trauma hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone. And the movie’s 63-minute length represents more than the usual gnat’s-attention-span treatment that TV news accords such stories.

“Baghdad ER” is scheduled to air on May 21. It’s graphic. The filmmakers say so, and the Army is backing them up, with the service’s surgeon general issuing a memo advising the film may provoke flashbacks or nightmares among those who have served in Iraq.

(The New York Times had a different spin on the story over the weekend. Quoting Army sources, a Saturday article says the Army is backing away from the documentary over concerns “that its grim medical scenes could demoralize soldiers and their families and negatively affect public opinion about the war.”)

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‘Why We Write’

While we’re back on the subject of Iraq, I need to point to a piece by Michael Yon: ‘Why We Write.’ He’s a freelance journalist (whom I see described elsewhere as a former Green Beret) who has reported from both Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s caught some flak recently for his assessment that the situation in the latter theater is deteriorating rapidly:

"… In 2007 and 2008, at this rate,we will face an extremely fierce enemy
in Afghanistan, one that we already know is courageous and tough, an
enemy left mostly unmolested while they brazenly guard the poppy fields
that will make them rich with money to buy weapons. Explosives. Rockets. …

"… No matter what anyone says, the Afghanistan I just left is easily as
dangerous as the Iraq I spent almost a year in. But whereas we are
beating back the enemies and winning in Iraq, the enemies in
Afghanistan are getting stronger as the seconds tick. We need to listen
to our military experts and to our young soldiers, too. Like Ernie Pyle
once noted, nobody is more plainspoken than combat soldiers. The ones I
met in Afghanistan call that the ‘forgotten war’ but unless things
change dramatically, 2007 will be a year everyone remembers in
Afghanistan."

Beyond his assessment of what’s happening in the war zones, he’s got some compelling things to say about the role of journalists in this war.

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Beer and Miniskirts and the Non-War in Iraq

Last Monday, I posted something I’d found in my daily Iraq reading about a U.S. Army captain, John McFarlin, who had been shot in the head during a firefight with insurgents but emerged unscathed thanks to his combat helmet. I was struck by what I read as the detached, nearly clinical language McFarlin used to describe the event. The Army News Service quoted him saying, “I was suppressed for a moment and then I got back up” and returned fire. I wondered aloud, with a touch of sarcasm, whether “suppressed” was a euphemism for “stunned.” Then it was on to other business. But a couple days ago, I saw a new comment on the post:

“Stunned would be if I were disoriented and didn’t know what happened.

“Suppressed is when you get down because it seemed like the guy who was shooting at you was on target and it was a good idea to drop down for a moment. It’s a technical term and I chose it because it means “the target chooses to conceal itself instead of presenting.”

“When the gunners on the other two HMMWVs [high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles] engaged him, then HE was suppressed.”

The comment was signed “John McFarlin” — the name of the man who had been shot. I was surprised, not stunned, and wrote him back, thanking him for the clarification and “for the dedication it takes to serve in such a challenging environment.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised when a few hours later, an email with a photograph attached arrived.

“Dear Dan,

“No problem!

“I really don’t want to make much of it, but really it felt like an open hand slap on the head. The equipment that we have these days is pretty good–I mean this not only in relative terms, but in absolute terms, as well. Not only was my life preserved, I was able to return to the fight at hand, though I prudently remained down until my fellows engaged the AIF [anti-Iraqi forces] individual who shot me. The photograph attached shows the exit hole of a round that passed through the buttstock of the crew served weapon I was manning. Had I been up, and that butt stock been where it normally is–out against my shoulder–the round would have struck me–although in the armored plate. So, even then, I would have been protected. Anti-climactic, I know.

“By way of letting you know that I am in fact the Soldier mentioned, I send you a photograph of the helmet. I retain the helmet to this day, and will always display it as proof of our nation’s dedication to caring for our Soldiers. This is the bottom line: I was shot in the head, and not so much as a pause in duty, let alone a Purple Heart. That’s the good news to take away from this.

“You’re very welcome, by the way. Go have a beer, lay down in the grass, or do something else pleasant that you like to do, would you? That’s part of the point of what we do as Soldiers.

“Best!

John McFarlin

CPT, AR, USA”

(By the way, all of Captain McFarlin’s remarks in this post are quoted in their entirety; I’ve spelled out some of the acronyms he uses in brackets.)

That last little paragraph rankled me. To me, it’s saying, buddy, don’t you worry about what’s happening over here. Just turn over and go back to sleep. And I told McFarlin so:

“… There’s something implied there that I object to — the notion that you and the millions like you who serve and have served in the armed forces are enduring disruptions in their own lives and putting themselves in harm’s way so that the rest of us can sit on our barstools as if we have nothing to worry about. Don’t get me wrong — I like to have a beer as much as the next guy, and I’m buying if we ever find ourselves in the same neck of the woods — but frankly I don’t want anyone risking life and limb just so I can drink my microbrew unperturbed. If you spent any time perusing my now very occasional comments on the war in Iraq, you know I’m no fan of the enterprise and never have been. In short, I’ve always felt we went into the conflict with only the most casual assessment of what the true long-term costs and effects would be; the people who have paid the immediate price for that carelessness are people like you who undertake their service in good faith and the tens of thousands of Iraqis who, with no say in the matter, have died as we remake their society for them. Ultimately I don’t expect you to agree with any of the above — in fact, I expect you to tell me how short-sighted and misguided a view it is. (But the right to freely express such disagreements — that’s worth serving for). I also think that the least we owe you as citizens is to think seriously, every day, about the war and about how to resolve the conflict before it becomes something we bequeath to the next generation, or the one after that, to take care of.”

At this point, it won’t be a shock to hear that McFarlin wrote back:

“Dan,

“Absolutely you can use anything we write to one another as you wish. Be charitable to my person, even if we may have different points of view–that’s all I ask. I know you’re not a fan of the effort in Iraq (it really doesn’t rate the word “war”), not why it was engaged, nor the sausage-making that’s going on over here as it’s presented in the news. I can appreciate that.

“It takes an effort on my part to even think of how the inconvenience and risk which I take as being part of this effort in Iraq is something I should consider being upset about. I mean, I am a member of what amounts to a modern warrior-monk society. Think about it: no sex, no beer, plenty of privations, and the opportunity for bodily mortification. Many of the discussions about the deeper politics surrounding why we are here never really enter into our minds. Or if they do, they enter them quietly, sit down, read a newspaper and have a smoke, and then tiptoe out the way they came. We’re differently minded people, I guess. Maybe this is some sort of congenital blue-statism. Or maybe there’e something more to it than is easily or glibly explained.

“This thing that happened to me, getting shot. It’s great, a great success story about how a nation graced with smart people, liberty, and money has been able to defeat the weaponry of our would-be killers–a bunch of primitive screwheads without a moral leg to stand on, straight criminals, really. Not with bullets–though we have plenty of those–but with synthetics and ceramics worn by a Soldier on a hot April day in Diyala Province, Iraq. This is both remarkable and anti-climactic. Some person with a twenty-pound brain worked out the material science that permitted me to live. It had nothing to do with heroics or MY effort at all–although some Soldier before me secured the blessings of liberty so that the person with the twenty pound brain could concentrate on material science instead of how to navigate the maze of corruption and race hatred so prevalent in so many parts of the world. I want people to know that I got shot. And lived. And more than that, I wasn’t even hurt. I was right back in the fight, and I think it’s important for people to know that we live in an amazing country, and that the most misguided of adventures (for those who characterize the extraordinary effort in Iraq as such) can result in sublime moments. Moments that throw into sharp relief the difference between who we are as a people, and the peoples of the rest of the world. Even if I died for something as obscure as the right or the opportunity for a skinny, thick-glasses wearing kid to excel in material science, it would be enough. Because that’s worthy.

“But, regarding the notion that the millions who serve don’t do so to allow their countrymen to live in peace and prosperity: If I were to say to you that it is a common saying here–in reference to some idiotic celebrity news headline, or the latest imbroglio over which American Idol contestant is going to continue, or the no holds barred fight over a leather covered ball striking a player in a game where the wages are ridiculously inflated–that we fight so that people in America can live so well, that these are their concerns, rather than the horrid, inhuman concerns that people in Iraq must bear…would you believe it? We look at our countrymen living well in America, and we smile crookedly at our own privations, knowing that the terrorists are losing. BIG TIME. Every beer that is drunk. Every woman who wears a mini-skirt to a bar and goes home with a guy she picks up. Every porno mag that gets bought. Every Jew that says “Shalom” to a Muslim. Every inane television program. These are victories–we live vicariously through our countrymen–and so it’s no stretch at all to say that we enter the heart of our discontent and find solace in the fact that our sacrifices have some meaning in a greater context which, though it can be hard to comprehend day to day, makes some sense in a long view. We say, over our meals while shaking our heads over some idiotic sensationalism, “We fight, so that people can worry about that stupid crap,” and we mean it. Unbelievable, but true. I know you don’t want guys like me putting our lives on the line so you can knock back a nice cold one in comfort while watching Battlestar Galactica, but most of us in uniform are convinced that we already won the lottery, even by being born in the United States, and the least we can do is shoulder a share of the burden.

“I hope that I have presented this strange point of view that drives many Soldiers without being overly pedantic, but there’s something profound in the selflessness of many Soldiers. We talk a good game about how we’re in it for us, and about how we’re going to go buy a Harley when we get back, or blow it all on strippers, or some other misuse of our wages (I personally am getting my credit card debt paid down a bit) but in truth, we’re the workhorses of empire–an empire that every American, whatever his political stripe, shares in, just by virtue of the freedoms and luxuries which they take for granted–or even not for granted–every day. And this empire always existed, and was always secured by force: sometimes bald-faced, sometimes sublimated in some way that was not so offensive to the sensitive.

“I hope that this rambling is comprehensible, and that you understand that not once have I taken any easy path in expressing what must necessarily be a complicated web of thought. As for any differences in opinion we may have: We believe what we believe because it seems right to believe the way we believe, and not because of any fundamental difference in the quality of who we are. So much public discourse is shameful, with accusations and attempts to annhilate those of different perspective–a great waste of energy. I hope that in this case, I have expressed how what I believe provides a context for the decision to volunteer for deployment to Iraq, rather than the very much less worthwhile discussion methodology of trying to convince someone that what they believe isn’t correct.

Best,

John”

I haven’t written back, yet, beyond a small note of acknowledgment. Somehow, in the spirit of the exchange, I feel I need to let him have the last word till I write a more thoughtful response to him. Stay tuned.

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‘Suppressed for a Moment’

With the Army in Iraq:

The Army News Service reports that Capt. John McFarlin, attached to the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, Task Force Band of Brothers’ Military Transition Team, recently had a close call during a battle with insurgents: He owes his life to the Army Combat Helmet.

“While McFarlin’s unit recently responded to attacks on an Iraqi police station in Buhriz, he was hit in the helmet with a shot from an AK-47.

“I was suppressed for a moment and then I got back up” and returned fire, said McFarlin. “…Things are going to happen. You’ve got your equipment: you’ve got your IBAS, you’ve got your Kevlar and you’ve got your eye pro. (You need to) offer as little target as you need while doing your job.”

Suppressed? Is that the same as stunned?

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‘Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon’

WSJ.com: Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon.

My headline for the story might be, “So what do you expect?” The Wall Street Journal reports the results of a Harris Interactive poll finding that “a large majority of Americans believe Iran is using its uranium research program to build a nuclear weapon.” Is that belief a surprise, considering the fact this is precisely the message that government and media are giving citizens, readers, viewers and listeners every time the subject of Iran comes up?

Let’s take a look at what Harris Interactive said Americans believed about Iraq in March 2003: Among other findings reported on March 6 of that year — 13 days before the war began — Harris reported 80 percent of Americans “believe Iraq has or is making nuclear, chemical or biological weapons”; 78 percent believed “believe there is at least some link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.” Lost in the mists of time is the finding that, even with those beliefs about Saddam and Iraq, only a plurality of Americans (45-36 percent) said they favored an attack at the time.

The point of all the above being: If people are bombarded day and night by the same set of “facts,” that’s bound to affect their thinking.

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Polling the Troops

Zogby International will get a ton of publicity for its new poll on how members of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq feel about serving there. The headlines so far focus on the poll’s finding that 72 percent of those surveyed — 944 people serving with various branches, a survey size Zogby says gives a 3.5 percent margin of error for the full sample — think the U.S. should withdraw sometime in the next 12 months. Twenty-three percent go along with the commander-in-chief’s suggestion that the forces should stay in Iraq “as long as they are needed.” The Marines are most gung-ho on staying — only three in five think we should be out within a year; four out of five National Guard members and reservists think it’s time to be winding things up.

More interesting numbers, to me: Three in five say they know why they’re in Iraq; two in five say they’re unclear on the reason. Nine out of ten reject the presence of weapons of mass destruction as a reason for invading. So why did we go in? Five out of six say it’s payback for Saddam Hussein’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Three out of four also think we wanted to make sure Saddam didn’t protect al Qaida in Iraq.

It’s another black eye for the reality-based community, which has insisted for years that a) Saddam had no role in 9/11 (even Cheney, the promoter-in-chief of that myth, was eventually forced to concede the point) and b) Saddam had no substantive relationship with al Qaida. At the same time, though, the troops don’t seem to be buying one of the substitute rationales for the war: that it’s all about creating a model democracy for the Arab world. Only one in four respondents named that as a reason for the war.

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Be Free, But Not Too Free

By way of judy b., a piece from The New Republic on the case of Jihad Momani. He’s one of two Jordanian newspaper editors jailed earlier this month for reprinting some of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad that have prompted the recent orgy of outrage across the Muslim world. As The New Republic recounts the case, Momani’s paper, al-Shihan, “published three of the Mohammed caricatures on the grounds that people should know what they were protesting about. The cartoons were accompanied by an editorial that pleaded, ‘Muslims of the world be reasonable,’ and asked, ‘What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?’ ”

Momani and an editor from another publication that also ran some of the caricatures were thrown in jail. Coincidentally, Jordan’s “liberal” potentate, King Abdullah, visited Bush at the White House just after the arrests. As TNR’s James Forsyth points out, the White House has been the source of some pretty heavy rhetoric the last couple of years on the transformative power of liberty and its institutions. Presented with a chance to speak up about a case in which the issue of freedom was a hard-edged reality instead of a soft-focus romance, Bush said nothing.

According to one press account, Momani and the second editor have been freed on bail. But charges under Jordan’s Press and Publication Law are still pending. PEN Center USA, the national chapter of the international group set up to defend writers facing official sanctions for their work, is conducting a letter-writing campaign on the editors’ behalf.