ray
they don’t know how warm and soft our beds are back home,
I think just seconds after the bomb goes off, knocking us to the
ground with the force of the blast. Parents rush out screaming
and crying in shock and awe, but there is nothing they can do.
A man stands, dazed and filthy, holding the scorched remains
of a bicycle that only a moment before carried his twelve-year-old
son.
Pray they don’t know how luscious and silky our women’s
skin feels, how delightfully we take our pleasure amongst the
soft wet folds of their pliant resistance. Pray they don’t
understand the freedoms that we largely take for granted, while
they weep and suffer in the bitter, blood soaked desert, searching
for the ghosts of their lost children and preparing for a nearly
inevitable civil war.
The word ‘inchoate’ come to mind.
We were standing near the side of the road when the car languidly
approached us, standing next to the armor plated Humvee, handing
out candy to local children, mostly Shia. It had been a relatively
quiet day for the eastern al-Jedidah district.
Pray they don’t know how marvelous the daily feasts we
consume back home are, I thought, meals enjoyed far from the falling
bombs and dirty streets where they endure all things, far from
the dying children with big, sad eyes of dull wonder and the whine
of cars racing desperately through the anxious streets of Baghdad.
They come at us in late-model Toyotas and Mercedes like the kind
that were once driven only by top Baath Party members. They rush
past us in a sprinkling of Jaguars and BMWs. They flood the streets
in tens of thousands of used, German-made Opels imported from
neighboring Jordan and sold just over cost, sight unseen. Some
drive at night with no headlights. Some tape glowsticks where
their taillights should be.
Not a single traffic ticket has been issued since the war's end.
More than half of the vehicles on the road have plates from other
countries, or no plates at all.
There is no way to know which ones are coming to kill us, which
ones are loaded with explosives, but I still fear the trucks,
the ‘four-by-fours’, the most. They make
the best VBIED’s, an acronym we use which stands for Vehicle
Borne Improvised Explosive Device.
I walk past the smoking wreckage of an exploded American car.
I recognize the model but can’t fathom how it has ended
up here. Through the roar of flames, amid the scorched frame of
twisted steel that remains, charred and blistering, I can see
the erect figure of the killer, a stiff, black corpse being kissed
from head to toe by the long tongue of fire that shoots out from
where the engine previously resided.
Pray they don’t know how full our closets are, how we have
enough to be continually giving it away to people we will never
see, how our homeless dine on the finest rubbish in the world
every single day, from unlocked dumpsters and overflowing garbage
cans.
The wailing and lamentation of the women, the braying of beasts
spooked by the blast, and the panicked whispering of surviving
children, the hysterical shouting of grown men wearing sheets,
the angry, confused voices swirled like the forming of a vortex
around me.
“Allah! Allah!” Their voices discordantly cry out.
I am a soldier first, in this. My duty to my country has never
been so clear.
“Allah! Allah” They rend their clothing and weep
and pull at their beards and hair and beat on their chests in
grief and rage. There is nothing we can do for them now. Nothing
anyone can do.
“Allah! Allah!” Their voices cry out in despair as
I wonder if I should write home about this later. It’s not
just that I don’t want to upset my family or cause them
undue concern about me. Our letters are not monitored, as far
as I know, but our email almost certainly is. We are no longer
allowed to use Yahoo! or Hotmail or Google. Posting on a blog
can be cause for demotion or worse.
No one here can afford to pay the fine for criticizing the way
things are going here, like the Wildcat from the National Guard.
No one here needs a stitch of extra duty.
“Allah! Allah!” The man with the bicycle falls to
his knees and looks up at the blazing sun, his gnarled old hands
outstretched.
No one in my unit talks about things like PTSD, post-traumatic
stress disorder.
No one talks about TBI, traumatic brain injury caused by concussion
grenades and rocket launchers exploding near us.
No one talks anymore about our gunner who got shipped home after
eviscerating a woman and her three children, in a market near
Fallujah with heavy artillery fire.
“Allah! Allah!” The women plead, their heads covered
in black scarves.
No one remembers his name, just that it sounded like a girl’s
name, and that he climbed off the transport and held the lady
while she died, silent tears streaking down his face.
No one talks about the fact that he killed himself less than
six months after he got back to Texas, but we all know the story.
Everybody here knows someone like him.
Everybody who has been here for longer than six weeks has fought
alongside a guy who didn’t make it back.
Everybody here prays not to be one of the names sent home and
read on the news, prays not to be captured and beheaded on television
for their parents to watch, or sick fucks to download on the internet,
prays not to be dragged behind a car as a symbol of the oppressor,
as people cheer.
There are more and more of us doing it every day now, closing
out a bad run.
No one here thinks that 2,000 dead soldiers is an ‘artificial
mark.’
Pray they don’t know how much meat we eat, how many varieties
of soap and soft toilet paper are available to us, what a seat
warmer is. Pray they don’t know what we know about their
own drinking water.
I originally signed on to the Army Reserves to help pay for college,
but after what I have seen in these ancient streets, streets filled
with curses that follow on your heels like a scrawny but vicious
mongrel nipping at your shoes, I know that most of the days ahead
of me will be filled with trying to forget rather than remember.
I did not know back then that things like this could happen. I
didn’t expect to have to kill so many people to get an education.
I shot two men on Christmas Eve for refusing to take their hands
out of their pockets. I have had the terrible privilege of watching
those men bleed to death slowly, and knowing there was nothing
I could do to save them, to take back what I had done.
Pray they don’t know how we go on with our lives as if
none of this ever happened, how we fill up gyms and sports stadiums
and malls and subways, laughing and cheering and bickering; how
totally unaware of their suffering we are, of our role in the
destruction of everything they love and hold dear in this world.
For every man we torture we create ten new insurgents.
“Allah! Allah!” Their voices are quieter now, more
hollow.
Several of the men begin to move the bodies to the side of the
road.
Private First Class Jackson becomes disoriented due to the stream
of blood trickling out of his ruptured eardrum. He sits down and
our Sergeant attends to him while the rest of us help clear the
blast area.
We line up what we can find of them, corpse to corpse, with the
heads facing east, or where the heads used to be in some cases.
There are burnt and severed and bloody limbs lined up next to
the bodies we think they belonged to.
Pray they don’t know that we have no exit strategy, no
realistic goals that we are in the process of achieving, just
this, a torpid presence sent to restore order through a puppet
government, and the suppression of violent insurgent rebellions.
“Allah! Allah!” Their hands shake like naked, twisted
tree branches, towards the expanse of apathetic desert sky.
When we are finished and loading up, I walk along the line created
by the nearly sixty bodies. Thirty-five of them were smiling children
less than an hour ago. The wind shifts and thick smoke hits my
eyes. The body armor my parents sent me feels heavy, like an albatross
pulling me down. The heat is unbearable, as is the silence that
has fallen, in the crushing oppression of this new sensation;
lost hope.
Pray they don’t know how many holidays we take off, how
much time we spend idle, watching television and playing video
games, or drunk, alone, sullen. Pray they don’t know how
many of us have lost the will to read the news in the morning
paper.
I imagine a great castle in the distance, made entirely of glass
and sand, where cruel men dressed in expensive pajamas kill and
torture those less fortunate than themselves for their own amusement.
Sergeant loads PFC Jackson into the Humvee.
“Allah! Allah!” They plead with us to explain what
has happened, to give meaning to this inexplicable tragedy, but
we ignore them. There is nothing we can do for them at this point.
It is best to simply take our wounded and leave. The dead will
have to sort themselves out.
I imagine the shrill and wicked laughter of kings and tyrants
and demagogues filling up great empty banquet halls. I imagine
that the road to their unholy kingdom is paved with these terrible
sights, these mangled corpses with terrified expressions on their
faces.
“Allah! Allah!”
I hear my name called out, the familiar syllables gliding on
the wind amongst the swarm of unfriendly consonants around me,
reaching my ears unmolested. The sound of my name still soothes
my nerves after all I’ve seen. My name is my ticket home,
the only thing that gives me hope that I will one day leave this
terrible place and see the faces of those I love again.
Pray they don’t know how important our names are to us,
that they never find a way to take them from us, or all is lost.
I imagine, as I shift my weapon from one hand to the other, that
if I could only find these great and terrible men, if I could
slay them, all of this would end, then I could go home again,
we could all go home, but I know that it is a delusion brought
on by the frenzy stirring inside of me now from standing so close
to death, and from the heat.
Pray they don’t know how often we complain about nothing,
how listless and discontent we have grown, how many of us have
surrendered our search for some greater meaning in all of this.
I look down to see a young boy’s body, both arms blown
off, lying amongst the rest of the men. He is no more than eight
or nine years old. His eyes gleam brightly in the sun, unblinking,
still filled with awe, as if he did not have time to register
what was happening around him, or fear it. Flies have already
begun to gather on his body.
Pray they don’t know that their death was for nothing,
that none of this was real, that no one would be held accountable
for the terrible sacrifices demanded of them.
There were no weapons of mass destruction here.
There was no connection to 9-11.
There is no way to justify what we have done here, what we continue
to do, what we feel we must do now.
Forever and ever, amen.
I reach down with my free hand and close the young boy’s
eyes for the last time, as I say a prayer to a God I fear no longer
listens to me. I am a murderer now; once, not so long ago, I dreamt
I would be a great poet.
There is no doubt in my mind as I look one last time in his clear,
brown eyes that they know. Every last one of them knows, and they
hate us for it.
[END]
© 2006 Devan Sagliani - Contributor's
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