Lives in Ruins (26 page)

The idea of a shared cultural responsibility that persists through war and conflict is growing. “How can you worry about culture when there are all these people dead or homeless and suffering?” Wegener was often asked that question, she told Smithsonian.com, and when somebody asked “for the millionth time,” she realized, “it's always an American who asks that. I have never been asked that by somebody on the ground when I'm working.”

MY SMALL GROUP
spent less than a minute and a half relishing its success, then turned to the task of consolidating gains and moving on to the next challenge. Tim Melancon said, “This train's already moving. Any country in the news, we want the data.” The group agreed that Mali is a likely hot spot. Wegener said, “Let's draft policy suggestions. We have a good relationship with Tim now, but what if a new person comes in and goes, ‘What culture?'” She wanted the channel that had been opened up to work when future conflicts arise. “We want it to say,
Here, this is our responsibility
.”

Meanwhile, the others in the room were coordinating with their international counterparts and developing educational tools for soldiers. As one archaeologist said, “We don't want to say as [the soldiers] get on the plane, ‘By the way, remember not to destroy cultural heritage!'” Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country. Who dreamed this stuff up? I was about to find out.

I had stumbled into the beating heart of a professional conspiracy—to save the world's archaeological heritage in the most dangerous places on earth. I had witnessed a moment in history: archaeologists had offered their expertise to the military and, after years of patient groundwork, the offer had been accepted and acknowledged. I talked to the young woman who works with a nonprofit that makes massively detailed 3-D maps of at-risk heritage sites for the site stewards.
^*
I collected the promise of a deck of playing cards. I also collected a fistful of business cards. The only
person who hesitated before handing hers over was Cori Wegener, and her card, I couldn't help noticing, featured a photo of a suit of Italian armor, faceless and impenetrable. The first American Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Officer since World War II had had some unpleasant experiences with the press, and still chafed at the overwrought coverage of the looting of the museum in Baghdad (“170,000 items reported stolen”—the number was more like 15,000; “the Americans opened the doors to looters”—they did no such thing; “looters whacked the heads off statues”—with one exception, those statues were headless when excavated; and so on). She used to send angry e-mails to the
New York Times
to correct their coverage; even ten years later, the newspaper of record still referred to the National Museum of Iraq, which “looters nearly emptied.” (The galleries were mostly empty because staff had hidden the portable artifacts.) Nor did Wegener appreciate “reporters climbing on displays in the Assyrian gallery to get a better vantage point.”

She headed down the hotel corridor, frowning behind her rectangular black glasses, worrying about the cultural heritage of Haiti and Egypt and Syria. No sooner did she leave than the creator of the cultural heritage playing cards and dozens of other creative tools for training soldiers and archaeologists, Laurie Rush, fell into step with me as we headed out the door. She was in charge of cultural protection at a military fort with a mighty archaeology program that I might like to see.

B
Y THE
time I met Laurie Rush, she had been working to build respect for cultural heritage among U.S. troops for almost eight years. The news report that spurred her into action came over her car radio in the summer of 2004. “I was driving to work, to Fort Drum, the morning the story of the destruction in Babylon hit,” Rush said, referring to the NPR story, “U.S. Base Damages Ancient Babylonian Temple.” A civilian archaeologist who worked for the Army, Rush listened with dismay: after the National Museum of Iraq fiasco a year earlier, U.S. troops had been assigned to protect Babylon, yet now they had situated their base on top of the ruins and bulldozed ancient temples into helicopter landing pads, causing “vastly more damage than we had suspected,” archaeologist John Russell, the Coalition's cultural advisor in Iraq, told listeners. NPR's Renee Montagne asked Russell if the damage was reversible. In a controlled voice, Russell explained, “You can't repair damage to an archaeological site. Every time you put a shovel into an archaeological site, you're destroying some evidence from the past. . . . All the damage is permanent.” He suspected the same or similar destruction was occurring elsewhere in Iraq—for instance, at the air base in Kirkuk, where an archaeological site had been plundered to fill sandbags.

Rush, the cultural resources manager for Fort Drum, in northern New York State, near the Canadian border, manages the archaeology and historic properties on its twenty-five square miles. She is employed by the Department of Defense, which she has described as “one of the most robust and proactive cultural resources programs in the world.” She noted that “archaeologists working for all branches of the services have inventoried hundreds of thousands of acres, have discovered tens of thousands of archaeological sites, have set aside thousands of sites for preservation, and have made many significant archaeological discoveries on the North American continent and Hawaii.” Protecting cultural resources is “a fundamental part of the Department of Defense's primary mission,” Fort Drum's website declares, and the DoD spends more on cultural heritage protection than almost any other entity in the United States. It budgets billions for environmental management, which includes cultural preservation. This is a matter of pride to the archaeologists who work for the military and their fellow federal archaeologists at branches like the National Park Service—and a shock to almost everyone else, including me. The Department of Defense has archaeologists?

The DoD's record in the United States was of particular pride to Laurie Rush and her team, who had brought a parade of honors and commendations to Fort Drum. “When I began working for the DoD, I expected that I might be pressured to rubber-stamp project proposals without regard for archaeological integrity,” Rush has written. “My experience has been in direct opposition to my expectations.” In fact, she enjoyed something alien to most archaeologists—enthusiastic support. “My bosses say, ‘This is so exciting,' or ‘My wife is Native American,' or ‘We watch the Discovery Channel at home,'” Rush said. When she asked her Fort Drum superiors to set aside part of an artillery range because it held a sacred Native American site, they agreed. She is in an extraordinary position for an archaeologist: she doesn't have to beg.

So she and her colleagues were particularly embarrassed. “It is
difficult to imagine a group of professionals who could have been more dismayed than U.S. military archaeologists when the news of the damage done to Babylon hit the global media.”

The soldiers didn't mean to mess up the 4,000- and 5,000-year-old ruins—that was the part that most bothered Laurie Rush. The archaeologist who reviewed the damage had noted that a “minimal level of background about the significance of mounds in Iraq” would have made the difference. A
minimal
level. The simplest lessons about history and preservation could have saved the ruins of Babylon from permanent harm. Convinced that “a better educated force would not have made those kinds of mistakes,” Rush decided to take on the problem: “We have got to teach our deploying soldiers. I said to myself, I have the skills needed to fix this.”

“Traditionally, in the U.S., the most important archaeological properties on military lands are put off-limits to military personnel as a preservation measure,” Rush wrote. Perhaps the agency had been too protective. “If you manage cultural property at home by not letting soldiers anywhere near it, you can't expect them to spontaneously know how to occupy a cultural site overseas.”

The morning that the U.S. military got beaten up by the press over Babylon, Rush pulled into the back gate of Fort Drum Army Garrison and headed for the computer in the Cultural Resources Building. She knew relatively little about Mesopotamia, so before she pulled her staff together and approached the command about providing direct cultural training to soldiers, she Googled the archaeology of Iraq. “I found a website and was reading about ziggurats; then I got to the bottom of the page and it said, ‘The platforms are excellent for landing UFOs.' Noooo! It was a site sponsored by some crystal skull place!” Rush laughed, a genuine laugh that sounded like it came from a much bigger person. She laughed surprisingly often for someone who worked on a cold, bleak military post on complex and intractable problems.

Part of Rush's appeal was her physical presence: small and
sturdy, relaxed, no makeup, a wispy, blunt-cut blond pageboy, and a grin that split her face into two joyful parts. Her white shirts were crisp, chinos relaxed, shoes comfortable. “I'm a clunky-shoe person,” Rush said. When she sent me some admiring profiles of herself that had appeared in Fort Drum's on-base newspaper, the
Mountaineer
, focusing on her accomplishments and awards—most recently the Rome Prize, a fellowship usually given to academics—she joked about being an egotist, but her self-deprecating attitude and frequent praise for her colleagues contradicted that. She insisted that the trust that the command at Fort Drum had placed in her was the key to everything. “I have the two best bosses in the world,” she said. When Rush told one, a retired colonel, about her idea to give cultural training to deploying soldiers, “He looked at me and said, ‘If I'd had that kind of information, that would have made all the difference in the Balkans.'” He told everybody else on the base, “‘Anything she needs trumps anything we need for Fort Drum.'”

Outside Fort Drum, archaeologists, preservationists, and military people were coming to the same conclusion Rush had—that knowledge of archaeology was of vital importance to the military—but they tended to be isolated, not organized. The bewildering bureaucracy of the military prevented any number of archaeologists from communicating their expertise and alarm. Archaeology itself is not easy to navigate; it is a broad and complicated profession, and the archaeologists of the Old World (who study Iraq and the ancient civilizations of the East and Middle East, including classical Rome and Greece) tend to go to different conferences and read different journals from the archaeologists who work in the New World of the Americas. But Rush is a proud product of American archaeology, which locates itself firmly in departments of anthropology, the study of humans (unlike in Europe, for instance, where archaeology is a branch of history). She is trained to bridge cultural gaps.

First Rush applied for, and won, a DoD Legacy grant to develop that deck of playing cards that would teach deployed soldiers the
basic archaeology of Iraq and Afghanistan. Then she began adapting archaeological sites for cultural-heritage training at Fort Drum. By the time I visited her base, she was wired to a deep and impressive range of colleagues from archaeology and the military; and everywhere I went to read more about this issue, there was the name Laurie Rush.

THE HEADQUARTERS OF
the Cultural Resources department at Fort Drum is upstairs in an Army-issue-beige building, in a spacious storeroom divided by a row of yellow metal shelves and lined with gunmetal-gray file cabinets and map drawers. Rush opened a cabinet and pulled out stone projectile points and beads, the focus of her work for years. She pointed to multiple jagged pieces of stone arranged in a circle on a workbench. “This is what an Indian grinding stone looks like after being run over by a truck,” she said. Things got messy sometimes with tanks rolling around. The last eight years of emergency international activism had taken Rush to Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Turkey, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Italy, but home base was this storeroom, the offices for her and two other full-time archaeologists, plus the workroom downstairs where artifacts were sorted and cleaned. As head of Cultural Resources, Rush was responsible for the residue of the culture of all the people who have lived on Fort Drum's land, from Native Americans of ten thousand years ago, to twentieth-century farmers and pig-iron workers, to the current population of soldiers. Since she started working on the base full-time in 1998, her team has made discoveries that included a sacred Native American site and the remnant shoreline of a prehistoric glacial lake. When you consider that finding sites was not even their mission—the team's purpose was to find places for the military to safely build on, not go looking for archaeology—these discoveries were impressive.