Peace Kills (22 page)

Major Bob woke me up the next morning. “The Civil Affairs guys scrounged a truck,” he said. “We're going to save the modern art of Iraq.”

It was a hundred degrees by ten
A.M
. Iraq's works of modern art tend to the large, also the numerous. We moved them from the mucky basement to the dusty truck as carefully as we could. Seeing a piece from a distance, Major Bob would say, “Now, that's a really bad Chagall”—but it would turn out to be painted in Chagall's extremely late period, when he was dead, and would be signed by someone local. “Well,” Major Bob said, “it's their heritage, not ours.”

The museum building had been rubbished. A couple of modern sculptures, too big to be hidden, were looking edgy and brutalist and, frankly, improved by the vandalism. Broken glass and shredded exhibit posters covered the entranceway. A young man in a disco haircut, sharply creased pants, and expensive shoes came to the gate. “Can I get into the museum?” he asked.

The sergeant who was getting his Ph.D. in sociology said, “It's very closed.”

We dropped a truckload of art at the National Museum, half a mile away. I stayed behind to talk to Donny George.

Returning on foot, I got lost. Baghdad was, again, like Washington: I didn't have to wander far from the edifices to get into a slum. But rather than leaving the poor to the
vagaries of outdated housing stock, the Iraqis had built their slums new. The two-story hovels, with one window apiece, were made of cement blocks left unpainted. There were tiny stores along the street. The shelves were vacant. People were loitering. I heard “Hello, American” several times from kids. I got “Welcome, please” from a couple proprietors of empty stores. There were a few hard stares from young men, who muttered after I'd passed. There were a few fewer wan smiles from old people.

I was in a flak vest that Major Bob insisted I wear for a visit to Baghdad, and my clothes were khaki from dirt. But I was too old to be a soldier, and I didn't have a television camera, so I couldn't be a journalist. I don't know how I appeared to the Iraqis. Mostly I didn't. I was invisible to the majority of people. Seventeen years before, in Belfast, British troops had had this invisibility. Squadrons in battle gear would patrol the Republican stronghold of Divis Flats, and to the Irish they weren't there. The British have ended up spending nine centuries in Ireland.

I found my way back to the Museum of Modern Art. A television crew from Bahrain had arrived. The soldiers were being interviewed about the importance of Iraq's cultural heritage. An eight-foot canvas depicting an innocent Iraqi being smothered by an American flag and pecked by a bald eagle had just been pulled from the cellar. The TV reporter, Saad al-Hasani, was also an assistant professor of English at the University of Baghdad. I asked him if he knew anything about the “third group” of looters who Dr. George had said were burning libraries.

Professor al-Hasani had gone to stay with relatives in the country during the war. His apartment in Baghdad had been looted. He'd expected that. But someone had carried all his
books down to the apartment building's yard and burned them.

“I teach modern theater,” he said. “My specialty is Samuel Beckett and the theater of the absurd. I'd always had trouble explaining Beckett to my students. They didn't comprehend the theater of the absurd. Then, after the war in 1991, my students suddenly were starting to understand
Waiting for Godot
. I could tell by the questions they asked in class, by their essays. It was if they were anticipating something. There was a situation in the air. A student came up to me and said, ‘This is just like
Waiting for Godot
. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. It's awful.
Nothing to be done.'”

I told Professor al-Hasani about the book cover in the airport administration-building locker. Would air traffic controllers and aeronautical engineers be reading
Godot
, too?

“Of course,” he said.

That evening at the airport a major and a lieutenant colonel from the Civil Affairs battalion drove the truck around scrounging material to build a latrine. The major was a mechanical engineer. The colonel was an electrical engineer. They argued as if they were married.

“We can build a lighter frame if we stress the plywood in monocoque construction.”

“Fuck lightness—compression equals strength.”

I pounded nails, rather crookedly. It was an innovative outhouse. Cut-down fifty-five-gallon oil drums were set on airport luggage trolleys so that waste cans could be rolled in under the seats.

“You have seen the backside of war,” the electrical engineer said.

* * *

In the morning Major Bob woke me again. “We're going to the French Quarter with Civil Affairs,” he said. I thought proudly about the written report—for a few minutes. Then the Civil Affairs batallion commander said, “Some Special Forces guys were patrolling through there. They told us it was a mess. We're only supposed to do an assessment, but we've scrounged some tools, and we were scrounging around in the terminal and found a bunch of antibiotics and medical supplies the Iraqis had hidden.”

We were greeted by the village elder who'd said the water main was broken. Without the formidable woman, he was more talkative. He said the American attack on the airport came through the middle of the French Quarter. The area had been defended by Iraqi secret police, but not very well, to judge by the slight shell and bullet damage. The village elder said he'd been a fire chief for thirty years. The French Quarter was not a cap to his career. After a secret-police vehicle was hit by an American rocket, a house caught fire, and the entire block burned down. Ten families were left homeless, but fortunately they were homeless already, having fled from the war.

Tarik al-Wasty, a carpenter and pipe fitter at the airport, had spent the five days of the bombing and assault lying on the floor of his house with his wife and ten children. He showed me a hole where a tank round had come into his garden, and offered me tea. His two-year-old son was still terrified, would sleep only if curled beneath his father, and was coughing continually. A medical corpsman brought some drugs from the Iraqi cache. The corpsmen
tried to explain to Tarik, whose English was not good, that steam could be used to help clear the child's chest. Getting a blank stare, the corpsman attempted charades and was prevented from persuading Tarik to boil his toddler in a pot by the family's nine-year-old son, whose English was excellent.

The electrical-engineer lieutenant colonel had discovered fellow electrical engineers among the French Quarter residents. They were probing the innards of a transformer. The mechanical-engineer major had found additional engineers. They were inspecting the water main, which had been crushed by a tank. “I think I know where there's a big piece of pipe I can scrounge,” the mechanical engineer said.

Major Bob and I looked at the school. It was the one public building I saw in Iraq that hadn't been looted. There were only a few bullet holes in the walls. The school was decorated with murals of Smurfs and Mickey Mouse drawn, it looked like, by the painter of the Chagalls at the Museum of Modern Art.

The fire chief and some of his friends gave us a tour of the village. The houses were prefab, semidetached, and looked like modest European vacation cottages but with bomb shelters in their yards. Recreation facilities had been provided for the previous construction-worker tenants—a picnic area, a swimming pool, tennis and volleyball courts. The nets were gone. The poles were bent double. The swimming pool was half-filled with chunks of concrete. The picnic area was layered in trash. The fire chief said something about “repairs forbidden” and that the French Quarter had fallen out of favor with Saddam Hussein. If appearances were any indication, so had the rest of Iraq.

“Having looked at the Mideast,” Major Bob said, “I realize how the Arabs came up with the concept of zero.”

Will a strong Iraq emerge from the chaos? Let's hope not. But will the Iraqi people become part of the modern, free, and prosperous world? That's possible, though I have only one piece of anecdotal evidence to go by. I was riding through Baghdad in the last truck of an Army convoy, with a unit that will go unidentified because drinking was a punishable offense for U.S. troops in Iraq. We spotted a man selling beer on the street. “I'd better stop,” said the sergeant who was driving, “and check my windshield-wiper fluid level or something.”

I jumped out of the truck. “Let me do this,” I said. “I've been coming to the Middle East for twenty years. I
know
how to
haggle”

“How much for the whole case?” I asked the vendor in pidgin and gesture.

“Twenty bucks,” he said in English.

Twenty dollars was a fortune in Baghdad at that moment. Also, I didn't have twenty dollars. I had a ten and a bunch of Kuwaiti dinars. The vendor looked askance at the dinars. The soldiers weren't carrying much money, either. They came up with another six dollars among them.

I dickered with the beer merchant. He bargained. I chiseled. We bandied. A crowd gathered to watch. Some teenage Iraqi boys, seeing an Asian-American soldier in the truck, hollered,
” Thigh Cone Do!”
and exhibited awkward kicks.

The seller of beer and I concluded a deal of considerable financial complexity involving U.S. dollars and Kuwaitidinars,
with change in Iraqi dinars at an exchange rate determined by consensus among the purchase's spectators.

Back in the truck, as we tried to catch up with our convoy, I did the math. I had bargained my way from $20 to a final price of $24.50. And the beer turned out to be nonalcoholic. Baghdad will be Houston
with
Enron.

As a memorial to the astonishing war-slaughter of the modern age, I propose the island of Iwo Jima—for its ugliness, its uselessness, and its remoteness from all things of concern to the postmodern era.

Iwo Jima can be visited only with military permission and, usually, only by military transport. A comfortless C-130 Hercules propeller craft flies from Okinawa over seven hundred miles of blank Pacific, moving as slowly as the planes of Iwo's battle days. The island is five miles long, running northeast from a neck of sand at the base of the partly collapsed Mount Suribachi volcanic cone and spreading to a width of two and a half miles in the shape of a paint spill, with Mount Suribachi (really a 550-foot hill) as the can of
paint. The colors are gray, gray-green, brown, and black—the hues of camouflage. From the air Iwo Jima looks as small as it is, a reminder of the insignificance of the great tactical objectives of war. The landscape at Ypres is banal. The beaches at Normandy are not as nice as those on Cape Cod. From the top of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg the prospect is less aweinspiring than the view from many interstate rest stops. And Iwo Jima protrudes unimpressively from an oceanic reminder of the insignificance of everything.

I went to Iwo Jima with a director and a cameraman. We were working on a one-hour cable television documentary about the battle. Between February 19 and March 26, 1945, 6,821 Americans and about 20,000 Japanese were killed in the fight for the island. How could a one-hour anything—prayer, symphony, let alone cable television documentary—do justice to that? The director, the cameraman, and I had worried about it the night before in an Okinawa bar. We decided that 26,821 men would have told us to knock off the chickenshit worrying and drink.

The three of us were guests on a trip that is offered periodically to young enlisted Marines, in recognition of exemplary performance and attitude. The journey is spoken of as a “morale booster.” It was summer. Iwo Jima is almost on the Tropic of Cancer, parboiled by the North Equatorial Current. In the sun its charcoal briquette rocks become a hibachi. The temperature remained over a hundred degrees at midnight. The humidity was 100 percent. When there was wind, it was an eructation. The volcanic vents on Iwo Jima are still active. The name means “Sulfur Island” in Japanese. The Marines were not allowed to smoke or swim or explore on their own. They slept on the ground. Reveille was at five
A.M
. They were led on hikes all day, covering the island's 8.5 square miles. I
was never in the military, but if this is what boosts morale, I want nothing to do with what causes morale to deteriorate.

However, young men and women do not join the Marines to get comfortable. And going to Iwo Jima is a way for new Marines to imbue themselves with the spirit of the Corps. The battle for the island was fought by the largest force of Marines that had ever been assembled. The casualties were shocking. More than a third of the nearly seventy-five thousand Marines who landed on Iwo Jima were killed or wounded. The bravery, too, was shocking. Of the 353 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during World War II, twenty-seven were given for heroism on Iwo Jima, thirteen posthumously.

“Iwo” became a byword for fighting while it was still being fought. The U.S. military had hoped the island could be taken in two weeks. The battle lasted thirty-six days. Japanese resistance was expected to be stubborn. It was ferocious. Only 1,083 of the approximately 21,000 Japanese defenders surrendered or were taken prisoner. The landing on Iwo Jima occurred as the war in Europe was ending. The Allies were on the Rhine. Warsaw had fallen. Attention turned to the Pacific theater. The Secretary of the Navy himself, James V. Forrestal, was on the beach at Iwo Jima on “D-day plus four.” When Secretary Forrestal saw the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, he said, “This means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

And there is that flag-raising. The Associated Press photographer Abe Rosenthal's shot is the best-known image of combat in World War II—perhaps the best-known image of combat in history. The word “icon,” blunted with use, can be applied precisely to the picture of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. Rendered in bronze at the Marine Corps War Memorial, with men thirty-two feet tall, the
flag-raising is more impressive than the mountain where it happened.