“Iraq is
variegated, contradictory, endlessly confusing. Over the years its people have
watched as others have sought to define them, creating images to be displayed
beyond its borders” (10).
—Anthony
Shadid, Night Draws Near
It may not be surprising that I, along with the other
soldiers in my platoon, didn’t really consider the war outside of what happened
to us directly. The suffering of Iraqis, the lives they were trying to live
amidst the presence of us, our war, our occupation, was hardly ever our focus. Usually,
we had so many of our own hardships to deal with that it was difficult to
imagine much else beyond our daily tasks and missions: patrolling villages and
towns populated with tens of thousands of people, training and working with
Iraqi Police and Iraqi soldiers with too few interpreters, raiding homes and
farms late at night to arrest men or take weapons and bomb-making materials,
standing all day outside pulling security for political meetings and city
council meetings, too many IEDs or IED scares to count, indirect fire attacks
at the base which were, thankfully for us and not so much for the insurgents,
poorly aimed and unsuccessful. After so much time—twelve years—has passed and
I’ve developed more of an emotional distance from my time in Iraq in 2004, I’ve
been able to, finally and fortunately, begin to study, as best as I can, the
war through the eyes of Iraqis.
“There’s a line from history that nearly everyone in
Baghdad remembers: ‘Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as
conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’ The speaker was Major General Sir
Stanley Maude, the British commander who in 1917 entered the capital to end Ottoman
rule” (17).
In Night Draws
Near, Anthony Shadid, the Lebanese-American journalist, documents his time
from March 2003-June 2004 living with and among Iraqis. His accounts overlap,
somewhat, with my time in the country—roughly late February 2004-December 2004.
While deployed as a twenty year-old specialist in the Army National Guard, I
was aware of the British occupation after WWI but I had never heard about this
well-known line from Maude. I imagine most Americans have not. If Shadid
emphasizes anything, it’s how that the longer he stays in Iraq, the more
complicated and complex the country and the war becomes. Before deploying, as a
nineteen year-old trying to understand the gravity of my situation, I started
reading, when time permitted, about Islam, Iraqi history, Saddam Hussein and
his family, among other things. I also asked my undergraduate advisor—I’d
finished one semester of college at the time—for reading suggestions and she
mentioned, Rabbit, Run; Portnoy’s Complaint; A Farewell to Arms.
At the time, because my professor knew me well, all of these fit my interest as
a young male drawn to masculine-driven realist fiction. Beyond literature, I
also read the “news” obsessively. I began to read about the war with more
intensity and attention because I knew I would, soon, be going to Iraq; somehow,
as the deployment became more inevitable, each morning I’d consume every word
in the newspaper—usually the Cleveland Plain
Dealer since my family still received daily copies back then—that dealt
with any aspect of the war: bombings, militias, civilian deaths, insurgents,
al-Qaeda, troop surges and reductions, IEDs.
Shadid: “Some Iraqis foresaw the American invasion as
a liberation” (42).
An Iraqi man says: “The American invasion has nothing
to do with democracy and human rights…it will bring more destruction, more
civil war, and a nationalist war against American intervention in the internal
affairs of Iraq” (47).
An Iraqi man says of Bush: “From the bottom of my
heart, I really respect, I adore this man” (150).
Another Iraqi man: “It is basically an angry response
to the events of September 11” (47).
After a bombing, an Iraqi man says in a hospital: “Our
floors are covered with blood, the walls are splashed with blood…they came to
free us? This is freedom?” (77)
Of course, Saddam is also mentioned, again and again,
as justification for the invasion. If Shadid’s book proves anything, it’s how
unclassifiable and complicated each Iraqi felt about the American invasion and
presence. Shadid writes in the introduction: “There is a word in Arabic that I
have heard uttered over and over in the city: ghamidh, meaning ‘mysterious’ or ‘ambiguous.’ If Baghdad’s soul is
loss, its mood always seemed to be ghamidh”
(10). Shadid argues that someone in his position, a journalist trying to
“capture” the war, must “surrender to the ambiguities and embrace what is ghamidh” (10). He later asserts what
does seem to be the most effective way to present the war landscape: “Perhaps
we simply tell stories” (10).
Almost every day in Iraq I “left the wire” as we would
say. We’d rumble out on our Humvees—I drove the last one in our small convoy of
four—and do patrols, route clearances, and sometimes just drive around the
hills or villages or towns doing “presence patrols.” Every now and then we’d
stop for various reasons and I’d stand outside my Humvee where, unless we were
in the middle of a desert field, Iraqis, usually young men or boys, would
approach us and talk. To generalize, I’d say that any Iraqi approaching us had
more positive feelings about our presence and what we were doing; so when they
spoke to us, usually with broken English, they complimented what we were doing,
thanked us, told us stories and stories about Saddam and the regime. Those who
didn’t want us there probably, I think, would not approach us. For much of
Shadid’s book, he does, remarkably and vividly, tell stories of the families
dealing, on an intimate level, with the invasion, the bombing, and, later, the
occupation.
An Iraqi man says: “‘I can’t show my fear in front of
my children…if I’m afraid, they’ll become afraid. Life’s not comfortable,’ he
said, recalling the twenty missiles that had struck nearby the night before”
(64).
After an American bombing, Shadid describes what a man
says to him: “He simply turned to me and said matter-of-factly, ‘Fuck all
Americans.’”
Over the past year as I’ve worked on my second
manuscript of poetry, tentatively titled, Service,
I’ve been attempting to write poems with a more expansive and wider range of
personae. Specifically, I’ve wanted to write, I say with much humility, more in and of the Iraqi experience of the war. Most of the voices I attempt to
develop are centered around the soldier or veteran experience. I’ve wanted to
create a more multi-vocal, polyphonic tapestry which will, hopefully, provide a
more layered multi-dimensional portrait of the war. I’ve been reading accounts
from Iraqis, journalists, and reaching out to speak to Iraqis who might be
willing to talk (that’s still in-progress). I say this with no
self-congratulation or nobility. My current position as a graduate student
allows me to, luckily, simply explore and read what I want. Although I’ve
worked over the past few years to discover first-person nonfiction accounts of
war by non-soldiers, non-veterans, I’ve seen how very few there are. As I read
Shadid’s account of what Iraqis tell him leading up to and during the invasion,
I also remember what people, in America, said to me.
“You see how
they act over there—they’re a bunch of animals.”
“We should just bomb the whole place.”
“They should be thankful we’re going over there.”
“We’re just doing it for oil.”
“Just like Vietnam.”
Although it seems to be a well-known, tidy cliché, I’ve
always found it true: I really didn’t consider the political, social,
historical, economic—to name a few—complexities involving my deployment to
Iraq. All I knew: I was going and I wanted to do everything in my power to come
back. This was, usually, mixed with a feeling of vicious, nightmarish
self-loathing and regret at joining: how did I get myself in this? After all, I
signed on with the Army National Guard approximately four months before 9/11 as
an incoming high school senior. I remember practicing, in the barracks at Fort
Bragg, disassembling my M16 and thinking, in terror, that if it took me just a
second or so longer to disassemble and reassemble I might die. It never came to
that, thankfully, but how was I to know?
One Iraqi man tells Shadid: “We have eleven thousand
years of history…I know it sounds facetious, but it gives you resilience” (84).
A woman, Nadeen, says: “What gives them the right to
change something that’s not theirs in the first place? I don’t like your house,
so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it…what
they’re doing to us, they deserve to have done to them, their families, their
children” (87).
Shadid’s account is one of the more startling and
comprehensive among the many journalistic accounts of the invasion. His focus
is solely on the Iraqis, those caught with the war, literally, in their
backyards and front yards. Amidst the bombings, the destruction, the gradual
and relentless movement of the war, life does, as much as it can, go on. Shadid
writes: “Scenes from normal life persisted: young boys, their bodies dark and
thin, swam in the muddy Tigris, while fishermen led their boats along the
clumps of green reeds rising from the banks” (54).
Although this seemingly innocent and bucolic scene he
mentions above does fall under that wide and complex landscape of war, it
happens alongside more of this: after a bomb during the invasion, Shadid
writes, “Across the street the severed hand of a seventeen-year-old boy was
tossed gracelessly in a pool of blood and mud” (79). Much of the book is filled
with this image: blood mixed with mud. There is also very much blood with
water, oil, debris on the street, blood in various shades as it dries. Although
we enter, as readers, the lives of Iraqis as they struggle through the invasion
and the first months of the occupation, even Shadid can’t come—like I want—to
some plausible conclusion or closure: “Baghdad is a city of lanterns amid the
blackouts,” he writes. “A city of ghosts shadowed by fear, a city that is
forsaken. The city I knew would always remain ghamidha” (308).
*
Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq War and the author of The Stick Soldiers (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013) and So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010). He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the Gettysburg College Emerging Writer Lectureship. He is completing his Ph.D. at Ohio University.
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