The Rumpus.net » war

Into the Tiger’s Lair

Jon Nickell — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:01:08 +0000

Lahpai Zau Bawk had finally drifted to sleep when their footsteps startled him awake. Amidst the eerie shrill of cicadas and rustling leaves of the jungle, he somehow detected the crunch, crunch, crunch of footsteps on the winter grasses of the valley where he and his family were hiding. It was 3 a.m. Embers still smoldered from the previous day’s campfires. Children cried in their sleep. Confused roosters crowed sporadically. About 30 fellow villagers remained asleep. They’d been hiding in the jungle for two days, having fled their homes in Burma’s northern Kachin state to evade approaching firefights between the Burmese military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

The villagers had not moved far. Zau Bawk’s wife delivered their newborn son only 18 days before. His mother was feeble and his son, 4, was not yet capable of long treks. The other families shared similar circumstances. They chose to settle in this remote valley filled with large boulders as cover, believing they could return to their village in a few days when the fighting subsided or migrated elsewhere.

Zau Bawk rose to investigate the sounds emanating from the mountainside. Crunch, crunch, crunch… He carried a walking stick to wade through the dense tropical evergreens that saturate the region’s jungle. A short hike away, he spotted a cluster of Burmese soldiers on the mountainside above. He could make out only four or five. He feared there were more.

“Stop! Don’t run!” one of them commanded. Zau Bawk had been discovered.

A prisoner exchange gone-wrong shattered a fragile 17-year ceasefire between the Burmese military and KIA, reigniting the capricious civil war that began with a military coup in 1962. This batch of fighting erupted in June 2011, some six months before Zau Bawk fled his home. As the war dragged onward, Burmese troops attacked and pillaged Kachin villages and fired on civilians indiscriminately. They tortured boys and conscripted them into the military as porters. They raped women and girls. They forced over 75,000 civilians to flee their homes. Both sides planted antipersonnel mines throughout the rugged, mountainous countryside, many of which civilians discovered during a rush of blood and thunder.

Zau Bawk stood motionless for a brief moment, facing the soldiers on the mountainside, then without warning the thunderous RAT! TAT! TAT! of machine gun fire rained down into the valley. His walking stick exploded where a bullet struck just below his hand. He dove to the ground and screamed to the other villagers, “Run!”

Like deer evading the furtive attack of a tiger, the villagers scattered in every direction to avoid the monsoon of gunfire, dodging in and out of boulders then up into the cloak of thick vegetation. Children did not scream. They dutifully trailed their parents and siblings. They had been blessed with the longest peace known to Kachins in half a century, but still they knew the stories. They learned of these men by the dancing light of campfires and at the dinner table after their fathers said grace. They didn’t know when, but they knew the Burmese soldiers would come for them one day, with their machetes and big shiny guns and their teeth as sharp as a jungle cat’s. The time had come, so silently they ran.

Zau Bawk could think only of his family and darted through the valley. He found them circled together, his mother lying on the earth, his four-year-old son standing next to her, his wife clutching their newborn.

“Come!” he begged of them. “Run!”

He hoisted his son with one arm and lifted his mother with the other, grasping her arm to hasten her pace. He turned to ensure his wife was close behind but at first saw only the pixilated blur of darkness.

Just then a spotlight flashed from above and illuminated the field where she stood exactly as he left her, the infant boy still pressed against her heartbeat. In her eyes Zau Bawk saw the haunting vision of terror he’ll forever fail to outrun, a nightmarish monster that perennially consumes him. The hysteria made her a prisoner in her own body, paralyzing the instinctual muscular mechanics involved in thrusting one foot in front of the other.

Zau Bawk considered turning back to save them. Doing so would risk his mother and son.

Can I rescue them all from this killing field? Can I live with myself if I don’t try?

He paused to gaze at her, seized by a premonition that it would be his last chance to see her alive, then a Burmese soldier emerged from the darkness behind her and charged straight toward her. Zau Bawk turned and continued running.

His niece scampered nearby along with her four-year-old daughter. A bullet struck her calf and she tumbled to the ground. The daughter scurried back to her. She cried out in fear, then nestled up to her mother’s side, and they waited together for whatever was to come.

Zau Bawk reached the cover of forest with his mother and son and they huddled together in darkness. He embraced his son as they listened to the cries of the boy’s mother and of the others left behind.

“Father, I will always hold on tight to you,” his son whispered to him. “I will never let go of you.”

Soon their cries ceased all at once. Zau Bawk waited for another sign. Minutes passed. Hours. Nothing came. He held out for sunrise.

***

Reaching the town of Laiza, the KIA headquarters, requires a bit of creative planning since travel to the conflict zone is prohibited from Burma’s heartland. From Bangkok, my flight plan looks like something carved up by an amateur Etch A Sketch artist: I skip over Burma (officially known as Myanmar) to Kolkata, India; jump Burma again to Kunming, China; finish with an up-and-down flight to Mangshi, China, where I prepare for the last leg south through Yunnan Province to the illegal border crossing into Kachin state.

My smugglers put me in a truck at the Mangshi airport, where I duck to hide from Chinese security officers. China is not happy I’m here, or, more accurately, would be indignant if they learned why I’m here. China has long profited from an almost tributary-like relationship with resource-rich Burma. From Kachin lands they trade for jade, copper, gold, iron ore, coal, timber and teakwood. Simultaneously they scavenge for business deals in the Burmese heartland, taking advantage of the dearth of competition due to economic sanctions from much of the Western world. To Chinese officials this is a symbiotic relationship that need not be interrupted by a nosy reporter.

Or it could be that, as one Kachin pastor told me over a cup of coffee, “The Chinese think that every American travelling to this region is CIA.”

Only one year ago I was an idealistic high school government teacher lecturing about the Burmese pro-democracy movement. I celebrated with my students the surprising news emerging from what had appeared to be a hopeless miasma of oppression. The country Condoleezza Rice once dubbed an “outpost of tyranny” transformed into the darling of the Western world. They elected a quasi-civilian government and freed Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. New legislation legalized labor unions and peaceful demonstrations, and the government held press conferences with the same journalists they’d once persecuted. The United States and much of Europe responded by lifting long held economic sanctions. As if to punctuate Burma’s newfound respectability on the world stage, President Obama made it one of his first stops after reelection. I’m on a pilgrimage to investigate the truth of Burma’s progress, a journey that often feels like a quest for mankind’s potential for redemption.

As we sputter south towards the Kachin border the road climbs and snakes through hills and mountains whose grasses glow incandescent in the rainy season. Flatland farming turns to steppes. Landslides often reduce the road to one lane and small herds of ribby cattle create bovine obstacle courses.

I am nearly lulled to sleep when our driver, his English limited, receives a phone call and hands over the cell. “The Chinese military has set up a checkpoint ahead,” I am told when I press my ear to the receiver. “You may have to hide in the jungle for a while, or we may hide you in freight to sneak you across. It’s OK. You will be safe. Don’t worry.”

The driver accelerates up the mountain and veers off the main road onto a gravel path. We swerve through the jungle for dozens of miles, past reckless scooters, cascading waterfalls and increasingly dense ferns and oaks swaddled in vines. Upon re-emerging on the highway, we pull over before a sharp dogleg right. The driver smiles, raises his hand as a signal to stay put, and disappears around the bend while pretending to play on his phone. This is not the hiding spot I’d imagined.

He returns and around the corner we go, past the abandoned checkpoint inhabited by Chinese soldiers only a half-hour ago. “It’s OK,” he says. He has friends in China, the kind of intelligence networks one is inclined to nurture over decades of guerilla fighting. I have no way of knowing that this brush with Chinese authorities is mild compared to what lies ahead, when much of Yunnan Province will be swarming with attempts to capture me.

We soon descend the valley where the city of Laiza straddles the border of Kachin state and China. We cross the Je Yang River, marking our entrance into Burma, the only demarcation being the KIA soldier that waves and manually raises the wooden arm blocking the path. The tires skid as paved road turns to dust and children scamper barefoot across the street. China’s impeccable infrastructure has abruptly disintegrated, and with it the comforting pretense of stability and order. All that remains in this resource-rich land is the unavoidable confrontation with abject poverty. The road to our left leads to Je Yang camp, a tarp city of some 7,000 internally displaced peoples.

We take a right to the bustling military hub that is Laiza, where markets are filled with merchants hawking combat boots and forest green and purple longyis (sarongs), the traditional colors for Kachin men. Beer, usually reserved for special occasions in this mostly Christian state, is sold and sipped (or chugged) at all hours of the day. Maps fill former banquet rooms where generals live and strategize in the Laiza Hotel. Soldiers on scooters zoom all over streets with modified rifles dangling at their side. Reams of tape hold their ammo clips in place. Most KIA rifles were smuggled in from northwest Thailand when fighting erupted in Burma in the 1960s.

Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, the pervasive mood here is remarkably calm, as if there is no fighting at all, as if the Kachin organism has reached equilibrium precisely because it is wartime. As if war is its most natural state. The Kachins have long been renowned for their fighting prowess, something British and American soldiers discovered most famously when these hills played host to crucial fighting during World War II. US 101 Rangers – the precursor to the modern day CIA – parachuted in and fought alongside Kachin warriors to defeat what should have been a vastly superior Japanese force. Then, as now, military participation was mandatory not by decree, but by default. If you were an able-bodied Kachin male (and increasingly often, female), you fought. The kill ratio during the fighting was an estimated 50-1 in favor of the Kachins. The British officer Ian Fellows-Gordon dubbed them the “amiable assassins.”

According to one US officer, when a Kachin leader was asked how he was so certain of the kill count, he responded by dumping a bamboo tube of dry ears on the table. “Divide by two,” he said.

***

“Have you ever served in the U.S. Army?” Sergeant Naw Htoi asks. He’s manning the KIA checkpoint north of Laiza, a vital artery of traffic as soldiers fight on the front lines within miles, where civilians come and go with relative frequency. His spiral notebook is plopped onto a three-by-three wooden table beneath a bamboo roof. Soldiers in mismatched fatigues lounge on surrounding benches, resting up until their next patrol.

“No,” I say.

“You should join the army when you go home,” he says. He wears camo pants, sandals and a white tank top. A scorpion tattoo engulfs his forearm and his cheeks are the size of mangoes.

“You should train me here,” I suggest.

“U.S. Army training is better.”

“Well, train me here first and I can go back and compare for myself.”

“Good idea!” he hollers as he pounds the table and cackles.

He pretends to aim a rifle, peer through binoculars, blast a bazooka. A woman wearing a motorcycle helmet steps in his line of fire to sign his notebook and drop off a batch of asparagus for the soldiers. The Sergeant raises the veggies high to show off the support offered by people often too poor to feed themselves.

Sergeant Naw Htoi was born in Myitikina, the largest Kachin city, and spent much of his life studying and working in the Burmese cultural and economic capitols of Mandalay and Rangoon. He returned only after the fighting started. “I’m a city boy, but I’m here in the jungle to protect my people,” he says. He waves us on toward the front lines. “When you return, I want you to report to me everything you see.”

***

Jesus Christ is the first thing I see. The poster dangles to the left of the door on the ten-by-ten foot barracks where some 20 Kachin soldiers sleep each night. To the right of the door is an advertisement for Royal Club Whiskey picturing a brunette in a skimpy gold gown. Cheap Chinese beer bottles are piled below, which I’m told can be used for medicinal or entertainment purposes, and sometimes for both. In war the line is thin.

Soldiers mill around with darkened, exhausted eyes. They haven’t slept in two days. A small skirmish erupted last night when a night patrol accidentally bumped, almost literally, into Burmese troops. “We are trying our best to defend this area but we are very afraid,” says Sergeant Mahkaw Isaac. He points to the soldiers around him and they break out in laughter. He is “half joking and half serious” my translator tells me.

With his baby face and long black beard, Mahkaw Isaac looks like a young Fidel Castro. He anticipates more fighting by the end of the day, possibly within hours. They’ve trapped a large group of Burmese soldiers in a cave on the mountainside above, but they have yet to attack because they’re wary of ambush. “It’s kind of bait,” the translator explains. “You know, like bait to go fishing.”

400 Burmese troops will arrive soon to reinforce the 80 that have been living in the nearby jungle outpost since January. They know this because they have excellent intelligence, and also because Kachin and Burmese forces utilize the same channel on their two-way radios.

Several soldiers wave me over behind the barracks and crack up in laughter as they point out a bit of guerilla ingenuity: two corroded steel pipes propped up by a tri-pod of branches and covered partly with royal blue tarp – artillery, at least through the lens of binoculars 200 yards away. They erected their sculpture after the Burmese positioned a .50 caliber heavy machine gun to fire on their camp. The ploy worked. The next day Burmese soldiers hid their real weapon beneath a pile of rocks, while the dummy weapon still stands.

I embark with a patrol unit of ten soldiers, five in front and five at the rear, to get a look at the Burmese outpost. We start up the mountainside and rifles cock in rapid succession. Click! Click! Click! Click! Click! The lead soldier hums a tune, like something I used to do as a kid when walking home alone after dark.

We follow a winding path of swampy trenches as cicadas and frogs shriek all around. Half a mile up we pause to rest beside the burial mounds of four Burmese soldiers. The shredded fatigues of the dead are scattered randomly across the dirt. The air is so dense amongst the trees that breathing becomes a conscious act. We hustle to the top of the hill where a cluster of ten small huts lines the ridge. Soldiers are sprawled out on cots resting from last night’s engagement.

A radio blares love songs in both Kachin and Burmese. The Burmese tunes are for the ABSDF (All Burma Students Democratic Front) soldiers that aide the KIA in battle. Following a brutal military crackdown of peaceful demonstrations through the streets of Rangoon in 1988, in which civilians were mowed down in droves with machine guns, thousands of student leaders sought refuge in the countryside and banded together to form the ABSDF. Over 20 years later they still migrate the country to fight alongside ethnic groups.

Mahkaw Isaac points across the valley to the adjacent peak 300 yards away. “Find the tree with the large yellow flowers,” he says, and from it springs the fortress of enemies. He offers his binoculars but I can make out the details without – solid bamboo, built by hand with only the jungle’s resources, about 20 feet across and two stories tall.

We are standing at the foot of more graves, only these are marked as KIA soldiers and a larger stash of personal items is piled next to them: knapsacks, jeans, fatigues. One officer walks over and lifts an ammo belt from the pile as if to consider its usefulness for the first time. At our backs is a bamboo barrier spiked like so much medieval weaponry, erected to slow an onslaught of soldiers if they decide to charge. Closer examination is encouraged.

“Are there any mines near there?”

No, it’s safe, they all respond in unison. Not to worry. No mines here. We walk around here all the time, they say.

***

A short time later we’re back at the checkpoint with the chubby cheeked Sergeant Naw Htoi when an excited voice comes over the radio. A flawed bomb self-destructed at the camp we recently visited. No one was injured, this time.

A forest green SUV pulls up with a trio of ABSDF officers who’ve just arrived from northwest Thailand to check on their troops. Kyaw Kyaw, chairman of the northern ABSDF who stands no more than 5-foot-two, steps out and offers a fierce salute to Sergeant Naw Htoi. Two others follow. One is a cannonball of a man, the only soldier I’ve seen that needs suspenders to hoist his trousers. The other is uncommonly tall, over 6 feet, and he quietly slinks into the seat next to me.

Naw Htoi stares at the tall one to my left. “You look very familiar,” he says. “Do I know you?”

The secretary informs him that we’re in the presence of Maung Maung Khin, one of the original ABSDF soldiers who also played the sinister Burmese major in Sylvester Stallone’s 2008 Rambo installment. Cacophonous laughter ensues. In the film, he orders the slaughter of hundreds of Karen civilians, the ethnic group living on the border of Thailand and Burma. In real life, Maung Maung witnessed these mass murders long before Hollywood came along and recruited him to act it out from the other side.

Sergeant Naw Htoi and the other soldiers tease him with the Burmese military slogan: “If the military is strong then the nation will be strong.” True to his character in film, Maung Maung remains stone-faced and takes a drag from his cigarette.

“That movie is very good,” Sergeant Naw Htoi says. “The way that Rambo attacks the enemy is amazing.”

The cannonball asks Naw Htoi about the recent fighting. “We don’t know what’s going to happen tonight,” Naw Htoi tells him. “The Burmese soldiers have been very quiet.”

“Maybe we should attack them!” the cannonball jokes. “They might be using tricks but we don’t want to wait!”

Naw Htoi warns him of the coming reinforcements. “If they attack us I will run!” he says, pausing like a veteran comedian. “I just don’t want to have to climb that hill!”

More laughter, with the exception of Rambo and Chairman Kyaw Kyaw. Rambo sticks to his deadpan stare. The chairman fetches a pair of black-rimmed, sequined hipster glasses to check a text message, then snuffs out his cigarette with his bare thumb.

Before leaving, I ask Sergeant Naw Htoi about the future, about the prospects in Kachinland for his two children living back in Myitikina. Does he hope for peace? It’s a question that vexes nearly everyone here.

Earlier in the week, another KIA officer told me that China provoked this war to ensure the completion of a transnational oil and gas pipeline that would deliver new wealth to large swaths of China’s landlocked southwest. “Whenever they [Burmese government] get contracts with the Chinese, all departments benefit from corruption,” Lt. Col. Labang Grawng told me. “The administrative system in this country is set up only to benefit the people in power.”

Khon Ja L, an NGO activist working in Rangoon, agreed. “This conflict is not only about ethnicity. This is a war of resources,” she said. “Everything is about Chinese investment.”

The winds may be shifting, however. As Western businesses flood the newly opened Burmese market with blank checks, officials may be less likely to ravage the country to secure Chinese deals. Still, it’s clear that Burmese leaders are keen on shoring up their riches one way or the other, whether by seducing Western investment with democratic legislation or by launching a military assault to guarantee Chinese contracts. But might there be hope?

Naw Htoi, the class clown manning the checkpoint, ponders the question and turns somber for the first time. “The people here have been fighting since before I was born,” he says. “Even after I die, the next generation will carry on.”

***

One afternoon I trek to a KIA outpost in a deluge that turns the path to mud so thick it feels like nearly solidified cement. I’m led by a soldier and his dog, a German Shepherd trained to sniff out the blood of Burmese soldiers. We’re lugging essentials for the night we plan to spend at the barracks, all purchased at the local Laiza market: hot pink and baby blue mosquito nets, lumpy cream-colored pillows, bottles of spring water and oversized buckets of pork-flavored dried noodles.

The torrential rain limits visibility, the kind of weather described by a soldier I’d met earlier in the week at the Laiza military hospital. It was raining then, too, steadily pelting the blue-tin roof of the bleak concrete structure. Lahtaw Zau Hpan, 35, sat up in bed and motioned with his arm in a sling to describe the day a bullet lodged in his forearm.

It was his turn to take sentry in the jungle as other troops rested in a nearby bunker. Unable to see through the downpour, he estimated that 15 Burmese soldiers were only ten meters away when he heard them talking. He shot first, and the Burmese soldiers returned fire blindly before retreating. One of the bullets entered above Zau Hpan’s right elbow and stopped short of his wrist. He continued fighting for the next hour, until he could no longer lift his weapon.

Laughter erupted behind us where 10 other casualties gathered around a 12-inch Panasonic to catch an episode of Mr. Bean, its physical British humor enough to overcome any language occlusions. Beyond them, Maru La Doi grimaced and clenched the legs of a gurney as a surgeon used tweezers to hunt for tiny bits of shrapnel buried in his hamstrings and calves. The doctor told him he was lucky to keep his limbs after stepping on a landmine. I foolishly asked what it felt like when the explosives peppered the backs of his legs.

“It hurt,” he said.

I pushed for further detail. How did it compare to other types of pain? Like sticking your leg in a beehive? Scorpions?

“It just hurt,” he said, and it struck me that poetry is difficult to conjure when you’re ass-deep in shrapnel.

As we strike out toward the outpost I trail closely behind our leader, struggling to replicate his prints in the mud before they disappear in a rain-filled puddle. The dog stealthily paces across the trail. My tunnel vision leaves me oblivious for miles until the dog suddenly erupts and attacks to my right, vanishing into the great wall of vegetation as if inhaled by a nebulous green monster. I glance ahead and behind for support from my companions, but no one is in sight. Certain that I’ve stumbled into an ambush, I consider diving over the steep mountainside and grasping for trees to slow my tumble – an idea born from watching too many bad action movies – when the lead soldier appears, rifle cocked, and charges into the bush. Seconds later he emerges and continues onward as if nothing happened.

Some five miles later we arrive at the outpost, a smattering of huts perched three feet above ground like beach houses wary of tropical storms. A dozen amiable assassins wearing black rain boots linger outside in anticipation of our arrival, looking more like boy scouts waiting for the school bus than the last line of defense for the military headquarters in Laiza.

The soldiers’ cultural obligation to care for guests trumps many of their duties otherwise – scouting surrounding areas, gathering intelligence, offering reinforcements for the battle raging in the valley below. They boil a kettle of chicken broth over luminous coals, handling the scorching pot with their bare hands, and serve dinner with herbal tea. They offer folk remedies for my upset stomach, roots and herbs ground into a fine saffron-colored powder that tastes surprisingly sweet.

One of the soldiers, Naw Ja, is watching Korean flicks on his laptop in his hut later that night when he pats his bed and offers a bit of his limited English. “Sit down, please,” he says.

Cigarette smoke wafts from the ash-filled, rusty sardine can on his desk. His combat helmet hangs from the ceiling, a lone light bulb flickers as it dangles above the desk by its cord. He pauses the film playing on his laptop and pulls out a picture of a beautiful Kachin girl snuggling a snow-white teddy bear, her silken hair dark as the jungle night. “My love,” he says.

He plans to marry her next year. Hopes to marry her next year, because first the war must end. Naw Ja joined the KIA ten years ago, when he was 16, though he could still pass for a teenager. He wears his hair spiked and his solid green fatigues a few sizes too big.

He turns back to his laptop and the video he opens is actual footage of displaced Kachins fleeing Burmese troops – panicked parents carrying young children swaddled in blankets as KIA soldiers shepherd them to safety. Similar videos are broadcast in shops and restaurants all over Laiza, a pervasive form of propaganda that draws the same riveted response as the midday Korean soaps. Scenes of the displaced are mixed with dramatized fighting action, while superimposed lyrics for patriotic Kachin songs scroll across the bottom of the screen.

As I lie down to sleep the rains continue, seeping through the tarp-covered bamboo roof of my hut and steadily saturating my sleeping bag. The storm’s violence seems to permeate my subconscious. I think of the young boys I met earlier in the week at the Je Yang displacement camp who carried umbrella sticks and detailed rifles carved from wood scraps. They scurried across an open field, kicking up dust as their sandals scraped the ground, securing high ground amidst a cluster of boulders. From there they fired their weapons over a rice field. Boom! Boom! Boom! they screamed as they shook their portions of wood like convulsing automatic rifles. Suddenly a surprise attack sprang from behind them – boys with far inferior weapons – and a chase ensued across the rice field, through towering grasses, past a pigpen, and finally upriver through a stream. The victorious boys returned to their original post, raised their weapons high and shouted in exultation. Yea! Yea! Yea! Woo! Yea!

Will their fathers ever achieve the same victory? Will they one day become victorious? Their children?

On another night our translator introduced us to a Kachin-style karaoke bar – a tilting shack behind a restaurant that waitresses unlocked for our exclusive use. In a small room filled with red floral wallpaper and cherry faux-leather couches, a KIA officer belted out Burmese pop songs with genuine zeal. Mostly, however, we watched KIA footage. A disco ball pulsated white light against the walls as real soldiers fired real guns on screen. After one battle scene the camera zoomed onto a dead Burmese soldier lying facedown in a stream. Dried blood, eggplant in color, filled the bullet wound in the back of his head, his body stiff with rigor mortis.

This continued for hours, the battles and blood and civilians in flight – all real footage – until the translator left to use the restroom. As if needing to exit the environment to truly comprehend it, he carefully examined the room when he returned. “It’s really weird, isn’t it?” he said. “The disco ball and all the violence…”

The film plays on a continuous loop in my mind’s eye as I lie in my hut. The deluge is relentless. I struggle to sleep to an eerie lullaby that fills me with dread: rain pattering against the leaky tarp, Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” warbling out of a soldier’s boom box, mortar fire screeching and roaring throughout the valley. When I was young I would often wake at night from nightmares so haunting I feared closing my eyes again. It feels something like that now, only I have yet to pass into the land of dreams. The chimera I fear is a war that never ends.

***

As dawn’s light began to peek over the mountainside where Zau Bawk huddled with his son and mother, he remained uncertain of the fate of his wife and newborn son. His body still pulsed with adrenaline from fleeing the Burmese troops. Throughout the night there had been no signs of life, no cries for help. His son still gripped him but did not ask questions. Sunrise illuminated little through the thickness of jungle.

Around 9 a.m. he heard the cries of a young girl in the valley. It was unclear at first and Zau Bawk hesitated to abandon his cover, but he recognized the pleading voice as the young daughter of his niece, who had returned to her wounded mother’s side as the soldiers pounced on the villagers. Zau Bawk found her alone, sobbing, pointing in the direction Burmese soldiers had marched with her mother in tow. The troops had bandaged the gunshot wound on her mother’s calf and loaded her down with supplies. Working as a porter for the Burmese Army is often a slow death. Soldiers use civilians until they are no longer capable, then leave them to starve in the jungle or implant the fatal bullet themselves. The girl’s mother was never heard from again.

Zau Bawk discovered his wife’s body in a grassy smear of cranberry-colored blood; the recent childbirth rendered her useless to the soldiers. Death by blade is a very personal denouement, more so than use of guns or explosives, both of which were at her murderer’s disposal. The steel point entered just below her right armpit, crashing through a fortress of ribs and continuing on through her right lung, then her heart, possibly severing the aorta and vena cava, then the left lung. The weapon was plunged with such force that it crashed through the opposing panel of ribs, exited her flesh just below her left armpit and punctured her left bicep.

There exist a few plausible explanations for the singular fashion in which the weapon travelled through her body. All involve desperation. She may have struggled for survival and turned awkwardly during a scuffle. She may have submitted to falling at their feet and pleading. But there is also the possibility that one stabbed her just as she reached out for her infant son that another had snatched from her arms. This would explain the condition of his wife’s lifeless body, but what about his son? What had they done with his baby boy?

By this time a small party of villagers had joined Zau Bawk, and one shouted that the baby was here, hidden amidst a circle of large rocks. For the first 18 days of the boy’s life his mother held him; on the nineteenth day he was tossed aside, a useless rag. His skin was thoroughly blue and his chest unmoving. The villagers could muster little hope for his survival, but Zau Bawk rubbed him with blankets to stimulate warmth and circulation. He knew he must find help soon. He headed for China.

***

Just before noon on a warm August day, I await a caravan of coach buses carrying weary passengers to Lana Jup Za, a Kachin border town replete with the dilapidated ruins of a Chinese playground. Abandoned Chinese casino hotels dominate the skyline at three stories tall. The passengers, however, are not here to party. Elderly women unaccustomed to the buses’ motion wipe vomit from their mouths as they step off the buses and onto Kachin lands for the first time in many months. Hundreds arrive at first, thousands eventually, mostly women and children.

They come from China, where they lived in makeshift refugee camps after fleeing across the border in fear. They found misery there, a lack of food, medicine, education, the basic essentials to construct a dignified livelihood; but they also found some comfort. They found comfort in knowing they were safe from Burmese soldiers, and found strength in maintaining some level of personal autonomy. They could at least care for themselves, which is often impossible in displacement camps, where access to resources is meager at best.

But government workers in Yunnan Province grew tired of their presence, and after months of efforts forced them back across the border. Chinese officials still deny compelling their return, an egregious violation of international law, despite accusations from Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. Scores of Kachin refugees attest that they were bullied even upon first arriving in China, when officials visited daily to destroy any shelter they constructed.

The newly arrived refugees carry their few possessions in worn rice sacks. Most absconded from their villages so quickly they carried little but their children. As they file into their new homes – barren concrete rooms in the abandoned hotels – gentle cries and unsuppressed wails ricochet throughout the halls. One woman sobs as she describes why there is no one to help her move in – she’s all that’s left of her family.

Many come from areas so remote they stop to shake my hand when passing, the first white person they’ve ever seen. Inside one room a man nearly nine decades in age, who fought alongside Americans during World War II, squats in his sandals and inspects the room as if meditating. He’s lived his entire life in huts with dirt floors, and although these conditions are nearly extravagant compared to other camps, he’s dubious of his surroundings. “It feels strange here,” he says. “We’ve never lived in a house like this. We never imagined we would be forced to live this life, moving from place to place.”

Despite their limited belongings, the new arrivals labor until sunset to arrange their new homes. In the midst of the antlike hum of activity, Seng Li, a director of the KIO relief committee in charge of displaced peoples, approaches me. Seng Li previously barred journalists from travelling to this town due to risks involved in the Chinese border crossing, but he endorsed my travel because he desired a witness. “Our people have been IDPs [internally displaced peoples] for 52 years,” he says, “so days like today are very emotional for us.”

The following days bring little relief to refugees as they adapt to their new homes, and my attempts at impassivity are trounced. My anger swells into a rage: towards Chinese officials for inflicting such hardship, towards the Burmese government for the pain caused by decades of oppression and violence, towards a world in which such generous and kind people could suffer so greatly. I steal away routinely to compose myself before returning to hear more stories. Then Seng Li delivers sobering news.

“The Chinese know you are here,” he sits down to tell me. “They called us last night and demanded to know why you are here.” The man my translator calls “the big guy,” known for his laid back manner, shuffles uncomfortably in his seat. “I do not know what will happen. I cannot guarantee your safety.” He pauses to reconsider. “But do not worry. I will take responsibility for you.”

We decide to depart late at night after Chinese checkpoints are abandoned, but the plan is foiled when they remain posted much later than normal. The next day we endeavor three more times with no luck. Checkpoints are extra tight, it seems, and KIO officials confirm that security in Yunnan Province is swarming specifically to catch me. Another morning departure is cancelled, but Seng Li resolves that we will leave on this day regardless of security constraints. While waiting, I am granted one final interview.

In crises such as the Kachin conflict, it is common for victims to latch onto a specific story that seems to encapsulate the totality of tragedy suffered by all. Passed from person to person, family to family, village to village and city to city, the story of an individual becomes that of the communal, harboring the hopes and horrors of an entire people.

The man in front of me wears donated clothing – black wind pants and a white T-shirt that says, “Your lips look so lonely… Would they like to meet mine?” Like others in this camp, he was forced from China after seeking refuge there. He hesitates to begin, shifting in his chair and apologizing for sweating. After a deep breath, he commences telling his story slowly, the story that has been repeated thousands of times in various manifestations by people he will never meet, across the country and, maybe someday, around the world.

“When we were in the jungle, I heard someone walking…” Zau Bawk begins, and he proceeds to tell the story of the night he ran from Burmese soldiers and warned others to do the same, of the last time he saw his wife alive, of the cries he helplessly suffered through while huddled in the jungle at night, of his infant son that somehow survived against all odds.

Zau Bawk rushed the baby to the Chinese border, where an NGO run by local women took him in and cared for him around the clock. Almost one year old, the baby is now healthy, as is Zau Bawk’s elder son, who is old enough to attend the camp’s primary school. Zau Bawk remains haunted by that night. He smells of rice whiskey consumed this morning, an attempt to elude those apparitions, yet he holds firm to a few sacred dreams: education for his children, peace for his people, a proper burial for his wife. When the war ends, he plans to return to her perfunctory grave and bid adieu with the honor she deserves.

As I offer meager thanks for Zau Bawk’s courage, I am informed of our impending departure. I climb into a bedraggled SUV and soon we pass a century back in time. Our driver takes us through jungle back roads that are otherwise impassable during the rainy season, through tiny villages of thatched roof huts in which Kachins have lived much the same for generations. Children stop mid-conversation at the sight of our vehicle and pursue us down the road. We pause in a village famous for its pineapples and fill the back of the car for the price of a few pennies. Hours later, and minutes from the Chinese border, we are welcomed for a traditional Kachin dinner at the home of the driver’s sister. We sip glasses of green tea while the driver pulls out a three-foot bong and engulfs two packs of cigarettes. Unsure of our purpose here, my translator finally whispers that we’re waiting out the security checkpoint at a distance close enough to dash across when an opening emerges.

When dinner is served, our host breaks out fancy stemware to serve her finest selection, Budweiser. We dine for hours on soups, rice, beef curries and boiled eggs levitating in gelatin. In the midst of it all, the driver receives a phone call and everyone raises their glasses at once.

“The checkpoint is clear!” my translator tells me. “You must drink your entire glass for good luck!”

Glasses are refilled after swigging. “For safety!” Bottoms up again.

“For the future of Kachin state!” we toast on the final round. “For independence!”

We rush to the car, dizzy from bubbly barley, and speed off. As we approach the border, a Kachin soldier on motorcycle passes us and leads the way. He keeps 100 yards ahead, distance enough to signal for our turnaround if something goes awry. We continue like this for what felt like hours but was probably 30 minutes. We navigate dusty back roads that remind me of many I’ve driven back home in Texas, only here the tall, lean sprouts shooting from the soil are sugarcane rather than corn. My fear dissipates, and I’m overcome by a repose that soon morphs into sorrow. I realize that my Kachin friends have surrounded and carried me to the one thing they seek most but still eludes them. Freedom.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Shit Turd and The Purple Light

Gwen Goodkin — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:45:07 +0000

Encinitas, California is a costal city just north of San Diego named by National Geographic as one of the 20 best surf towns in the world. In 1937, Paramanhansa Yogananda established the Self Realization Fellowship Ashram Center on the palmy cliffs of Encinitas to spread the supreme technique of yoga to the West. One need only walk the streets of downtown “OMcinitas, Yoga Capital” to witness his success. Here, yoga studios offer classes of every flavor: hatha, ashtanga, kundalini, prenatal, bikram, mudras, power, core power, iyengar, ananda, joy, pranayama, mommy and me, vinyasa, anusara, sun gazing. With this much self-awareness and meditation, residents such as myself tend to forget – or, rather, concentrate on forgetting – that Encinitas is also a half-marathon’s distance from the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island and has 42,000 active duty personnel, making it one of the largest military bases in the world.

Take in the bright pink light. Feel the energy in your body.
Isn’t it strange we say take a breath, when, in truth, we receive a breath?
Receive a breath.

October 2009. The economy was in a coma and we were in the middle of two wars. Iraq was winding down, Afghanistan winding up. I took my first-ever yoga class nine months to the day after giving birth to my daughter.

In the class, aimed at pre- and postnatal women as well as general beginners, I watched a woman who’d had a baby only seven weeks prior twist her body into positions I still couldn’t. Seven weeks after giving birth, I wasn’t able to sit up in bed. Just getting into bed required a step stool. I’d step on the bottom level, one foot then the other, then the top level and fall into bed like a bungee jumper, careful to keep my legs together in the false hope that it would help the jagged skin grow back straight and fast.

Send the purple light of peace out to the world.
Feel the purple light leaving you as you send peace into the world.
Om

The morning after class was a Sunday. My husband Jose attached my daughter to the front of him and we all walked toward the Self Realization Fellowship, Swamis as we locals call it. To get to the beach below, you must descend an ominous set of steps – ominous because you know you will have to huff up them to return home. If you look left, you see a cliff of fan palm trees, trunks thick with dead fronds no one will ever trim, grey-green bushes like long pom poms, bunched vines of aloe-like ice plant, tall-swaying stalks that look like soft, oversized wheat, the cliff face striated into different shades of sand and streaked vertically with water stains, rusted and broken drainage pipes. When you look right, you see the ocean dotted with black-suited surfers on ivory boards, pelicans landing quietly on the water, seagulls hovering for their piece of food, tequila-colored seaweed strings with pods that snap under foot, smooth, black beach rocks, teeming bunches of twig-legged clay-colored birds poking their thin-hooked beaks into the sand, and teeming bunches of smaller, fatter white birds poking their beaks into the sand. If you walk toward either of these flocks of birds, they will scurry, not fly, away from you.

As we headed back toward the tower of steps, the baby noticed seagulls and kicked the air. A group of men jogged toward us. As they got closer, we saw they were soldiers in training. In the front, the men wore T shirts announcing they were Navy Seals. In the rear, a clutch of about twelve guys – teenagers – struggled in camouflage pants and white undershirts. The men in the front breathed easy, looked glib. The guys in back scuffed the soft sand with their boots and carried black packs. They were flush-cheeked, wide eyed, stared straight. As they approached I noticed words written on their undershirts in black marker. I was only able to read three. Dying, Sarah, then Shit Turd.

Why were they running on this beach when Camp Pendleton has miles and miles of coastline? Had they run all the way from Pendleton? Maybe the guys in front just wanted to show us beach bums and yoga fruits exactly who the fuck was dying over there.

***

To train for childbirth, I took a class centered around the idea of mind over matter – hypnobirthing. We were coached to escape with our minds, meditating to each color of the rainbow. Every night before bed, we were to listen to a recording by the method’s founder and train ourselves to relax. This was impossible for me, since all I could focus on was the clicking of her dentures. Our instructor told us that contractions wouldn’t hurt. They were merely the result of a muscle contracting. Nothing more than flexing a bicep.

She lied.

***

Six months after I gave birth, I had to drive my niece to the airport. We were late because I’d been sick with an upset stomach all morning.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the airport,” I said. “I might shit my pants.”

My niece laughed, her face red with embarrassment for me. I laughed, too. Before giving birth, I would have been able to hold it. Now I was nervous.

I dropped my niece at the terminal then parked in the short term lot planning to meet her inside and see her off. I pulled the stroller from the trunk, then lifted my daughter out of the car and strapped her into her stroller. I draped a blanket over the canopy to keep the chill from her. I reached to close the trunk when I felt a sharp pain in my gut.

“Come on,” I told myself. “Focus.” I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. “Focus.” My daughter was next to me in the stroller, kicking the blanket that covered her. From the edge of my vision, I saw a clean, unused diaper in the side pocket of the trunk. I grabbed it and stuffed it down the back of my pants.

I climbed into the car and ripped off my pants, thankful for the tinted windows. Naked from the waist down, I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a man staring at my baby’s stroller.

“Keep walking,” I said through clenched teeth. “Go.”

He stopped in front of her and looked around for signs of an adult.

I wiped myself with my underwear. Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes as I stuffed the diaper and my underwear into an empty grocery bag I kept for trash. The man took a step away, then another. He looked over his shoulder, searched again for an adult, checked his watch and walked toward the terminal.

***

One Sunday morning, Jose and I headed out on a nearly empty freeway toward downtown San Diego, toward the air and seaports, the aircraft carriers and the destroyers. As we drove we passed a white school bus with United States Marine Corps written on the side in plain black lettering. After we passed one white bus, we passed another and another and another. Through the windows I saw soldiers asleep, soldiers listening to music, soldiers staring. Yellow school busses are like popcorn machines, barely able to contain the energy of the children inside. They are giggles and squeals and elbows to the ribs and hip shoves. But, the white school busses were still. The quiet seeped into us until the only discernible sound was the relentless click of wheels on cement.

***

Back for more of the same – that’s how the Afghans view us, according to General Stanley McChrystal, the man once in charge of Operation Enduring Freedom. How do I know General McChrystal’s take on the Afghans? Jose spoke to him at the AdvaMed CEO Summit where McChrystal was the keynote speaker. In the Afghans’ opinion, their country was a major battleground in the Cold War between America and the Soviets. We supported the Afghans who fought a long, decimating war and ultimately defeated the Soviets. Then we abandoned them and the Taliban filled the vacuum. And now, because Al Qaeda attacked us, we’re there again. Not to provide help, but to seek revenge.

“What’s most important to understand,” General McChrystal told Jose, “Is that soon after the Afghans defeated the Red Army, the Soviet Empire collapsed. From the Afghans’ point of view, Afghanistan won the Cold War for America.”

***

In the yoga class, as I lunged and struggled for balance, the instructor explained that the generations of people on earth correlate to the rainbow. Her generation was the blue generation – the generation of change. She and my parents and all the other Baby Boomers changed the world. My generation was the indigo generation, a period of transition. We stepped on the backs of her generation.

The yoga instructor walked the room correcting our poses. She shifted my hips to center then received a breath.

“These babies you’re bringing into the world,” said the yoga instructor. “Are the violet generation.” She weaved a path through the maze of mats then paused to align another set of hips. “They are the generation of peace.”

***

Nine months earlier, on the day I brought my baby into the world, Marine Lance Corporal Julian Brennan of Brooklyn, New York, was killed by a roadside bomb in Farah, Afghanistan. To his mother, he expressed a “deep empathy” for the Afghan people. His father called him a “happy and ethical warrior.”

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

Listen to Gwen read her essay:

Sleep Song, The Poetic Epilogue to War, Cancelled

Julie Morse — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:09:21 +0000

Sleep Song, the third installment of Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd’s poetic performances that showcase stories about soldiers of color in wars, had its Harlem Stage show cancelled because its Iraqi performers were denied visas.

At Colorlines, Seth Freed Wessler discusses the show and how “navigating the space of war does not end when war ends. And for soldiers of color especially, when fighting for a country that tortures people of color abroad, coming home does not mean a lifting of the lingering weight of war. The fact of racial divide accumulates upon it.”

Black Wings: Love, Loss and Life as a Humanitarian Aid Worker in Iraq

Jamy Bond — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 07:01:15 +0000

It was a cool, blue morning in Baghdad. I stood in the rubble of a bombed out building, a shell of what it had once been. The roof was completely gone and the sun cast a bright yellow light down into its hollow space. The walls were streaked with black char and pockmarked with bullet holes. The jagged rectangle of a blown-out window stared back at me like the dark cavity of an eye. Through it, perched on a pile of rubble and wrapped in a black cloth was the small, round, brown face of a baby. It wasn’t crying, or moving, and for the brief moment that I stared at it I felt devastated at the thought that it might be dead.

I looked at the faces of the soldiers that surrounded me. There were at least ten of them, all there as my escorts. Their jobs were to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior and protect me from kidnapping or death. None of them seemed to see what I saw: that sweet, swaddled, saintly baby. They crept along, clutching their M4 rifles and scanning the landscape for signs of danger: the narrow barrel of a gun poking out from a shadowed doorway, or one of the numerous, ingenious places that an insurgent might hide an improvised explosive device (IED). The latest unthinkable place for an IED was hidden in the carcass of a dead dog. But we all knew that the future held even worse, more unthinkable places, and as I stood there I wondered with horror if that place was beneath an abandoned baby in the rubble of a bombed out building.

Just as I started to alert the soldier nearest to me of this suspicion, a woman in a long black Abaya emerged from the other side of the rubble, scooped the baby up into her arms and slumped away. The whole thing happened in less than a minute, but in that minute I went from never having a single urge to mother a child, to needing a child with my entire being.

I knew that minute was a microcosm of enormous changes occurring within me that I could only guess had a lot to do with being in a war zone.

I was 39 years old and newly married. My husband and I had been living in Iraq for nearly a year, working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a humanitarian aid organization. In recent weeks, we’d dodged bombs on a daily basis being lobbed into the green zone by militants in Sadr City. They came unannounced several times a day, dropping out of the sky with a quick hiss and a whistle before slamming into the earth, or a building, or a house. We lived in our flak jackets and helmets; we even slept in them.

My job as the Press Officer was to escort journalists into the field to see our aid projects and encourage them to write stories about the good things we were doing for the Iraqi people. I traveled down dangerous roads and to dangerous places. Places nicknamed “alligator alley” and “the triangle of death.” Places where many people – civilians, journalists, aid workers, soldiers of many different nationalities, had died. I traveled high profile, surrounded by armed Marines, most of them young enough to be my offspring, whose mandate was to protect me at all costs. I rode in armored tanks, humvees and MRAPS. I would leave my husband on a certain morning unsure if I’d come back alive or come back alive to find him dead.

Rarely did a journalist write one word about our projects. Journalists were not interested in how we were training Iraqi women to run businesses, or restoring dilapidated schools and hospitals, or rebuilding entire market places wiped out by suicide bombers. They were interested in dead bodies, charred limbs, burning cars and leveled landscapes.

But I kept trying. On the day I saw the baby, I was taking a reporter from USA Today down Baghdad’s Al Mutanabbi Street. Named for a well-known 10th century Iraqi poet, Mutanabbi Street was a small, meandering alleyway that ran downhill toward a muddy bend in the Tigris River. A maze of bookshops once lined its sidewalks. For decades it had been the place where Baghdad’s writers and intellectuals gathered, crowding into busy bookshops and cozy cafes. Iraqis knew it as the embodiment of an old saying: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads.”

On March 5, 2007, insurgents exploded a car bomb in front of the popular Renaissance bookstore. It ripped through shop walls, setting books and stationary to flames and littering the street with blackened body parts. Thirty people died and more than 100 were wounded.

Several journalists wrote about the bombing and the scene of carnage left in its wake. But no one wrote about what happened next. On the day after the bombing, when shop owners who survived were wondering how they would feed their families now that their livelihoods had been destroyed, we walked down Al Mutanabbi Street offering grants to help them rebuild. On the day the USA Today reporter and I visited, more than 60 shops had been restored.

“Did you see that?” I asked the reporter, referring to the baby.

“See what?” he said. He carried no camera and no notebook. I knew he had no intention of writing a story about USAID’s restoration of All Mutanabbi Street.

It wasn’t that I didn’t see the importance of covering the many tragedies that happened every day in Iraq. From my relative safe-haven in the Green Zone, I could hear explosions across the river at all hours and see spirals of thick, black smoke rising up from clusters of buildings and cars. The rumble of explosions became the background “music” of my days and nights.

“It sounds like dinosaurs walking across the earth,” my husband said one night as we tried to fall asleep to the low rumble of bombings. I imagined large, scaly creatures stomping the earth, whole villages crushed beneath their feet. It was nearly impossible to sleep most nights through the sputter of gunfire, the thud of helicopters overhead, the red flicker and quick whistle of tracers ripping through the sky. It felt as if we’d been dropped into some prehistoric, pre-civilization era where illogical rules applied and ruthlessness was the order of the day.

But good things happened in Iraq too. Beautiful things. And I wanted people to know about them. Some nights, when I’d finally doze off despite the symphony of chaos outside my window, I would dream of a lone, idealistic journalist who’d show up at my door with one agenda: to cover humanitarian aid projects. “I want the American people to know how hard you’re working on behalf of the Iraqis,” he’d say, with a patriotic gleam in his eye. He was exceptionally good looking, a knight in shining armor sent to relieve the agony I felt because I simply could not convince any member of the press to pay attention to our work. I’d wake from these dreams in a state of relief, high on happiness, because the short time they had occupied my subconscious made for some of my better moments in Iraq. I’d feel giddy and thankful that, finally, people would know that Americans were not only taking the lives of Iraqis, we were saving them too.

Like the life of Mustapha Firas, a young boy whose father was driving toward a U.S. checkpoint near Baghdad’s airport when he was commanded to stop by U.S. soldiers. Confused by the soldier’s commands, Mustapha’s father didn’t stop soon enough and soldiers opened fire, spraying his car with bullets, somehow missing him, but shooting Mustapha in the head just above his right eye. Mustapha’s father tried to get him treatment at a local Iraqi hospital, but as most Iraqis know, Iraqi hospitals are plagued with inadequate equipment, poor facilities, and the threat of sectarian violence or kidnapping.

Mustapha was about to die. But someone in his neighborhood had heard of our program, the Marla Ruzicka War Victims Assistance Fund, named after an American humanitarian aid worker who was killed in a car bomb. Mustapha’s father showed up at one of our community centers, an injured Mustapha in his arms, and within hours, Mustapha was at a hospital in Jordan getting treatment that saved his life. He is 12 years old now and wants to be a doctor when he grows up.

I wanted news outlets to cover the story of Mustapha, and other stories like his, because I wanted people to know that our presence in Iraq wasn’t only about greed and power and control. Some of us were there to help, to show the Iraqi people compassion and give them hope.

I felt tired and sore on the morning I went to meet the USA Today reporter at our pick up spot in the Green Zone. The night before, I’d been forced to dive into a bomb shelter while walking to dinner from my office building. A rocket exploded at Liberty Pool next door to the compound where we lived. One person was killed and two injured. My husband and I went to Liberty Pool together almost every night after dinner to play a few games of billiards before going to bed. If the rocket had landed an hour later that night, we would have been there. Instead, when I heard the siren alert and a man’s voice scream, “Incoming! Incoming!” I dove to the nearest shelter, slamming my knee into its concrete barrier. Now, it ached as I walked to meet the reporter and our convoy.

When I arrived, a large, muscular, African American solider with chubby cheeks looked me up and down and said, “You’ll need some shatter-proof goggles, sweetheart.” His name was Billy. He handed me an enormous pair of clear plastic goggles and I slipped them over my helmet and secured them to my face. Billy took his seat next to the driver and our convoy headed down the street, passing through the check point known as Assassin’s Gate, and out into greater Baghdad.

“Is this your first time into the Red Zone?” Billy asked me, a common question, especially for a civilian female.

“No,” I said and tried to sound tough. “I’ve been all over, Ramadi, Fallujah, Taji.”

What I didn’t tell him was that this was my first time in a humvee, which felt like crawling into a dark steel box of death. It was much smaller and closer to the ground than the MRAPS I was used to traveling in, and I knew from research that it was poorly designed when it came to deflecting the explosion of an IED. Now, I understood exactly how an IED could blow off a person’s legs.

“Well,” Billy said and paused. From the small square window next to me I could see three women dressed from head to toe in black Abayas, loitering on an otherwise deserted street corner. “You’re going to see some very gruesome things today.”

But instead of very gruesome things, I saw the baby that day, and afterwards everything had changed for me.

In the weeks before coming to Iraq, my mother, who had a cutting way with words, said, “Look at you. You’re almost 40 years old and you have nothing.”

“Well, that depends on what you call something,” I said.

“No house, no money, no children.”

“I don’t want children.”

“Oh yes you do.”

No, I didn’t. Not then. Not ever, I thought. I’d never felt much of a maternal urge. Throughout the years, as each one of my friends inevitably announced that she was pregnant, my initial thought was, always, ‘there goes another drinking buddy.’ Then I’d conveniently slip out of her life. I was never the woman who ran up to new mothers and begged to hold their babies. I never felt a yearning, an ache to care for something small and innocent and needy, a drive to reproduce.

I was driven by other forces. I wanted to travel to remote places of the world; I wanted to lose myself in passionate love affairs; I wanted to devour the greatest books ever written. I wanted to gather as many life experiences as I could because I thought they would make me a better writer. Naively, I never put having a baby into this category. A baby would only hinder my growth with its uncompromising need to be cared for. It would rob me of precious writing and reading time. It would exhaust me emotionally and physically. I liked babies; but I didn’t want one.

Until that moment in Baghdad. As I stared at the shell of that bombed out building, the wind and the heat and the dust swirling through its vacant walls, I felt like I was staring at myself. For the short time the baby had been inside, laying on a black cloth in the rubble, the building held more than the sad and sorry remnants of yet another suicide bombing. It held promise and hope, love and life.

I returned to our compound to find my husband sitting on the floor of our small bathroom in his flak jacket and helmet, reading a book. “Duck and cover alarm,” he said and smiled a little. Iraq was changing him just like it was changing me. But most of the time we were too busy or scared to notice. The body armor was taking a physical toll: he’d been having painful muscle spasms in his back, and one day he pulled me aside, his eyes racing and his face covered in sweat, sure that he was having a heart attack. We rushed to see a doctor only to be told that it was most likely anxiety. Now, sitting on the bathroom floor next to me in the gray dusk light, his face looked older, lined and a little gaunt, his eyes tired and sad. He was no longer the sweet, boyish rock star I’d married. I sat down next to him, smelling of sweat and dirt and exhaustion.

“Let’s make a baby,” I said.

He looked at me, flabbergasted. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“I know,” I said. “But I mean it.”

“Why?” He asked.

I started to tell him about seeing the baby earlier that day, but I stopped.

“Why not?”

“Let’s think about it,” he said and put his head on my shoulder.

“I’m 40 years old,” I said, “we don’t have time to think.”

“We should be sure we’re doing it for the right reasons,” he said and sighed.

“But are there any wrong reasons?” I asked.

Maybe it was that most if the time, our work in Iraq seemed pointless, so small in the scheme of such destruction. Many of our projects failed, racked by corruption, attacked by insurgents, halted by lack of funding, or poorly executed by for-profit contracting companies. Our entire world at times seemed colored by injustice and corruption, suffering and loss, sadness and madness. The only thing that kept us going, that kept us from succumbing to the helplessness and defeat we felt in the midst of incomprehensible pain, was knowing that we could save lives like Mustapha’s, knowing that we could help victims of a heartless insurgency like the shop owners on Al Mutanabbi street, knowing that for every, say, 100 actions of injustice, there was one of compassion and love.

We worked 15, 16, 17-hour days there, but somehow we found a few moments to make a life. I remember those moments vividly. It was a warm evening in May. The air was gritty from rolling dust storms, the sky a pastel swirl of red dust and setting sun. The evening call to prayer could be heard in all directions. I loved the eerie note of calm and peace it brought each evening, despite the horrors of the day. It was the first night in weeks that we didn’t feel compelled to sleep in our bathroom, the only windowless room of our small concrete house where we could shut the doors and shield ourselves from the flying glass and debris of an exploding rocket. We crawled onto our tiny bed and wrapped ourselves up in each other, escaping the stress and the fear, briefly revived and alive, panting with passion and pleasure.

The next day, I left on one of the most important field trips of my time there: escorting three American and several Iraqi journalists to see the grand opening of a refurbished fish farm in Babil province.

The Euphrates Fish Farm had once been a showpiece of Saddam’s. It was built in 1979 within sight of his imposing palace on the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon. But years of war, sanctions and strife had reduced the farm to a shadow of its former self. It could no longer meet demand by the local community for river fish, the main ingredient in Mazgouf, a traditional dish of fish, split open and cooked over an open fire.

Khudhair Abbas al-Emara, the farm’s owner, beamed that day, proudly leading the reporters through a maze of large water basins teaming with slithering, silver fish. Our project had helped him purchase millions of baby carp to sell to local fish farmers. We had refurbished his farm’s pumps and bought high-tech vans designed to sharply reduce the number of fish that died in transit.

“I’m very happy,” he said repeatedly about the transformation of his hatchery, which now employed 600 people. The farm’s output had gone from 2 million fish to 12 million in just a year. Continued success would have a far-reaching economic impact on the region. It would boost fish production and raise demand for locally produced fish feed. Water driven by the farm’s pumps would help irrigate area crops. Perhaps most importantly, it would create jobs and keep local Iraqis from joining the insurgency, something many did simply because they had no alternative.

I remember scores of children hanging around that day, peering gleefully into the water basins filled with fish. Four of the children belonged to the farm’s owner and they followed him everywhere, caught up in the excitement of the event, angling for the attention of reporters. They loved being photographed and kept offering their gleaming white smiles for the cameras.

It was our most successful public event. News stories appeared on several Iraqi TV stations and over the Associated Press wire. We were ecstatic about the coverage. I fanaticized about other US news sources picking up the story – CNN, Time, The Washington Post. Finally, people would know that Iraq wasn’t just about bombs and bodies.

But three days later, as a direct result of the news coverage, two of the farm owner’s sons disappeared, kidnapped by insurgents. This was meant to punish the owner for collaborating with Americans and send a grave message to other Iraqis who accepted our aid money.

When I learned of this, a slow, sick feeling spread across my chest and stomach. I realized my vulnerability, my naiveté; it hit me hard and fast and certain. I was the one who’d brought the journalists and allowed the cameras. I was the one who’d spent weeks and days and endless hours organizing, persuading, manipulating all of the forces that needed to come together in order to win publicity for the event. I kept seeing their faces, white teeth shining through muddied lips, and their eyes, round and full and innocent. I was sure they were being tortured in some Iraqi dungeon somewhere, a prison cell, a basement. I imagined them forced to take up arms, to work for the insurgency, to murder their own families. I imagined them scared and shivering, their bodies bruised by beatings, or, worse, beheaded.

I still don’t know what happened to them. I made multiple inquiries, but the answers were vague. I was told they were being held for ransom, most likely still alive, money would probably change hands. But I’ll never know the full extent of their suffering. My time in Iraq had come to this.

No one can truly know the numbers: how many children have died as a result of the Iraq war, how many wounded, how many orphaned, how many kidnapped, tortured, forced to kill. There are very few statistics on this, the worst part of the war.

But there is a photograph that has become an important representation of the cost of the Iraq war on its children; a photograph almost as famous as Huynh Cong Ut’s photo of Phan Thi Kim Phu, the naked Vietnamese girl running in agony from a napalm attack, her clothes burned off, her skin scorched and hanging from her arms. It is the photograph of Samar Hassan, a screaming 5-year-old girl covered in her parents blood, that photojournalist Chris Hondros snapped minutes after her parents were shot to death by American soldiers who mistook the family’s car for a suicide bomber near a Baghdad checkpoint.

I had looked at it several years ago when my husband and I were considering taking jobs in Iraq, weighing the pros and the cons of it. We were against the war, but this was a humanitarian mission. Could you be against the invasion but support rebuilding the nation? We did. Our friends and family didn’t understand this, especially those who decided never to talk to us again, they were so against our getting involved. Everything was very black and white to them; there was right and there was wrong and we were wrong. And yet, we felt that as Americans we owed it to the Iraqi people to help them if we could.

When I looked at the photograph of Samar Hassan back then, I didn’t see it for all that it was. I couldn’t. I had never been close enough to a war to truly understand the power it had to destroy lives. Now I could. I was no longer on the outside looking in. I could see the magnitude of pain it captured, the loss.

And here I was, partly to blame for the kidnapping of two young boys who might never be heard from again. I had a searing sense of the six degrees of separation we all have with the suffering of the Iraq war. How tied we all are to each victim and perpetrator. I wondered where Samar Hassan was now, who she was now. I wondered if I’d get out of Iraq alive, and if I did would I ever be complete without a child of my own, a child I would have the power to do right by, a child I could love and protect and make understand that everything we do has its consequences, that a good life is one where we make every effort never to be the source of another person’s suffering.

I recently went searching for more about Samar Hassan, and I discovered the real story of tragedy and redemption behind her iconic image. In addition to Samar and her two parents, there were five other siblings in the car that night. Samar’s brother, Rakan, suffered a bullet in his spine and was paralyzed from the waist down. Several of Chris Hondros’ other photographs from that night show Rakan on the ground, unable to move, then pressed against a wall in a state of shock, and finally being rushed to the hospital. US Senator Edward Kennedy led a team determined to help him. He was treated at Massachusetts Medical Center in Boston, and after months of care and rehabilitation, a healthy, seemingly happy Rakan was sent back to Iraq walking on crutches.

It would be so nice if Rakan served as a symbol of redemption and promise in an otherwise horrific string of events. But his story doesn’t end there. Rakan was killed in June 2008 when insurgents bombed his new home, his family targeted for accepting American aid.

Soon after the kidnapping at the Euphrates Fish Farm, my husband and I left Iraq. We flew to Koh Samui, an island off the coast of Thailand where everything was quiet and serene and beautiful. I was sitting on a beach, watching a yellow sailboat glide slowly across the clear, still water of the bay when I realized I had missed my period. I bought a pregnancy test from a nearby store and waited until morning. I left Dan sleeping and slipped into the bathroom. I peed on the narrow white stick and watched as a pink plus sign appeared. I was pregnant. In a moment, the world felt like a better place, full of kindness and possibility and love. I thought I could already feel something deep inside of me, growing. It felt like a miracle, a victory. What else could we have done? At the very least we had made a life. We had made a life in the middle of all that death.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Longing for Peace

Lisa Dusenbery — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 18:05:48 +0000

“On Sept. 11, 1948, my father, Khalilullah Nuristani, was born under the same burden of greatness. In retrospect, he must have believed that he could fulfill what had been his father’s unfulfilled destiny. My father became a tireless fighter for a free Afghanistan.”

Afghan writer Kakail Nuristani compiled photos, letters and documents from his father’s life, working with Adam Klein to tell a fascinating story that spans three-generations.

A Decade of Stopping The War

Lisa Dusenbery — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:50:51 +0000

Stop The War: A Graphic History captures the images—photographs, posters, graphics, cartoons and art—of a decade’s worth of the stop the war movement in the UK. The Guardian gives us a sampling of the book with this gallery.

Guantánamo Diary

Lisa Dusenbery — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:29:02 +0000

“They started taking detainees away every night, by groups of twenty. We didn’t know where they were going to, but we thought the US. One day, it was my group’s turn. The Pakistanis took away our chains and gave us handcuffs ‘made in the USA’. I told the other detainees: ‘Look, we’re going to the US!’ I thought the Americans would understand that the Pakistanis had cheated them, and send me back to Saudi.”

In their latest volume, The London Review of Books has published the story of Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest person held at Guantánamo Bay.

(Via Maud Newton)

War Games

Matt Gallagher — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:29:53 +0000

“It’s war. They don’t give a freakin’ you-know-what about you. They will kill you. They’re out there to kill you. So I’m ‘a kill them. You write that in the paper. You write that. You make money off that. No, man, I’m pissed. All y’all take this down. I’m pissed, man. We don’t care about nobody except this U. We don’t. If I didn’t hurt him, he’d hurt me. They were gunnin’ for my legs. I’m a come right back at ‘em. I’m a fuckin’ soldier!”
– Kellen Winslow, November 8, 2003

It’s been nearly eight years since Winslow’s infamous postgame rant, unleashed after his Miami Hurricanes lost a close college football game to Tennessee, yet it still serves as a sort of cultural touchstone for post 9/11 America. The backlash to these comments was immediate, and the narrative universal: How dare a college athlete playing a child’s game compare his actions to that of a member of the armed forces? Facing a torrent of criticism, Winslow apologized days later, saying he could not “begin to imagine the magnitude of war or its consequences.”

Winslow’s initial statement, though melodramatic and a bit dense, deserves more thorough examination than originally undertaken. We live in an era of hyperbole, after all, where new best ever and new worst ever athletic performances are discovered and discussed ad nauseam every day. Accordingly, I doubt very much that any fan or competitor took Winslow’s words as an expressed desire to enlist in the Army.[1] Further, the equating of sports with warfare is neither new (Grantland Rice coined the term “The Four Horsemen” of Notre Dame in 1924), nor does it occur only with violent sports like football (see the various war-related headlines for last year’s 11 hour tennis match at Wimbledon between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut). And America’s newly crowned Douchebag of the Millennium, one Lebron Raymone James, utilizes military metaphors only slightly less than he refers to himself in the third person. Which is to say he does it a lot.

Though it’s considered unseemly in our time, this analogizing of sports to war makes complete sense – athletics, at its essence, is nothing more than mock battle. There’s “us,” there’s “them,” and “they” must be defeated. While modern athletes may not want to explicitly kill their purported enemy, they sure as hell don’t mind sending them to a figurative afterlife, i.e. the offseason.[2] Many of the same traits that mark an exceptional athlete – physical prowess, grace under pressure, an obsessive need to work and work at the small, technical aspects of a craft – also mark an exceptional soldier. And the same tried and true clichés (which are clichés because they are tried and true) that inhabit many sports about teamwork and sacrificing for the good of the game imbue the military, as well. The team is the unit, and the game is the mission.

If one were to draw a Venn Diagram to illustrate this union, the ancient Olympics would have a prominent place in the intersected part of the circles. Not only were these games partially assembled for temporary respites from war, but the final race of the Games was usually the Hoplite Race, an event that required competitors to don the helmet and armor of an infantryman, all the while carrying a bronze-covered wood shield. Training for war during peace – sounds like an ad slogan for the Nike Pro Combat line![3] Additionally, how many sports teams have borrowed the “band of brothers” line from the St. Crispin’s Day Speech in Henry V? My completely unscientific research suggests somewhere in the 900-1200 range, and that’s just in the professional ranks.

To tighten this shot group a bit, America has its own complicated history with the relationship between sports and war, from Bob Feller to Muhammad Ali to Pat Tillman. The latest bizarre entry into this ever-evolving tome? When Marine Lieutenant Colonel Shane Tomko joked over the summer during an on-air interview that the only way to stop pitcher Roy Halladay was with a tank round.[4] Still not convinced? Still believe in the much-vaunted spirit of the game, and find the very concept of war to be something else entirely? Consider these words of wisdom by a pair of America’s most beloved dickheads, General George Patton and Coach Vince Lombardi. “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” General Patton said. “He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.” And Coach Lombardi? “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” The same sentiment pervades those declarations, if not the same degree of application.

While the sports world attempts to dramatize its happenings with overreaching comparisons to armed conflict, the complete inverse occurs within the military. Sports analogies exist, and exist in plentitude, in an effort to normalize the abnormal. Finding significant or sensitive information on a raid is a “touchdown.” Nicknames for local Iraqi and Afghani roads like “IED Alley” are coined and used by ground troops; senior command prefers less morbid terms like “Route Tigers” or “49ers Way.” During armor officer training at Fort Knox, my group of 40 second lieutenants was told we needed to quarterback combat operations in the vein of Brett Favre.[5] When appropriate, we needed to move with an Allen Iverson-like swagger, while still other times exude quiet confidence, ala Derek Jeter. One eccentric instructor suggested we watch pro wrestler Mankind’s greatest hits if we weren’t yet comfortable with how much blood could pour out of a human body.[6]

Then there was March Madness. No, not that one. Another March Madness.

In the spring of 2008, while the NCAA basketball tournament played out half a world away, Muqtada al-Sadr lifted the freeze on attacks against Coalition forces by his militia, Jaish al-Mahdi. The central and southern parts of Iraq exploded in violence, particularly in Shia-heavy areas. Based out of a village northwest of Baghdad that rested on a sectarian fault line, my scout platoon and I spent the first night of what came to be known as “March Madness” chasing a lot of ghosts and a lot of gunfire but finding nothing. The next morning we stood in the dirt, looking at a building with a sloping roof and two cannonball-sized holes in the middle of it, courtesy of an Iraqi army BMP (armored personnel carrier). They claimed to have taken gunfire from the second floor during the chaos of the night, so their gunner decided to eliminate said floor.

The streets were deserted, even on this main strip that doubled as a marketplace. At first, we came across only one local, a teenage security guard scared out of his mind, but forced to show up for work because his father made him. The pucker factor, as it’s so eloquently referred to, was high.[7] Every rooftop shadow became a sniper, every piece of garbage on the ground an anti-personnel IED. We turned a corner and came across a group of kids playing foosball.

They were in front of the village’s “arcade,” which was nothing more than a couple pool tables, some dartboards, and this one foosball table. One of their cousins had given them the keys, and because the electricity had gone out over the course of the previous evening, they’d moved the table outside.

If any of these scrawny, malnourished boys were frightened about what had occurred the previous night or what was to possibly come, they didn’t show it. They were way too involved in the happenings of foosball, every touch pass a shout, every goal a cheer. There were five or six of them, aged anywhere from 7 to 16, and in lieu of finding order and peace in their existence, they had created their own.

Still on edge, my men and I at first sensed a trap.[8] After deciding an ambush would’ve already occurred had there been one set, we laughed at ourselves and joined the Iraqis at the table, first the interpreter and I playing a game, then a sergeant and a private. The rest of the platoon took turns swapping security and spectator duties. In the meantime, the madness and the stresses of the war drifted away for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of a game. A child’s game, I might add, fittingly played with children.

Eventually, the radio squawked, imploring us on to some follow-on mission, but this experience still lingers with me, and not in the same way that most “no shit, there I was…” war stories do. In many ways, those skinny, clowning kids did more to return their village to normalcy than we did. That dirty, trash-ridden street served as home for them, and home meant something. Sometimes that something meant foosball. Our presence there, though, was transient – there’s only so much peace twenty Americans carrying rifles and machine guns can bring to a foreign land; for us, it was just another day in counterinsurgency, an irregular type of warfare that doesn’t fit the clean American narrative of killing the bad guys with as much munitions and grunting as possible.

Which brings this back to Winslow.

Given the parallels between sports and war, and an established precedence for equating the former with the latter by athletes and American culture alike, why did Winslow’s outburst get so much attention and incur the people’s collective wrath? First, he made the mistake of appearing earnest in the video clip in question, and nothing attracts derision nowadays quite like earnestness. Second, his timing couldn’t have been worse, as the American military was less than a year into the Iraq War, with yellow ribbon patriotism at its most fervent and garish. But most prominently, Winslow upset the understanding of who and what modern American soldiers were. This actually reflects far more poorly on society as a whole than it does on a giant 20-year-old with soft hands and a big mouth.

Since shedding the Draft like snakeskin for an all-volunteer force, America’s military has taken on a voyeuristic identity not too unlike that of a celebrated athlete. No longer populated by the literal boys and girls of next door, the modern American service member serves the role of a hollow caricature. When less than one percent of a nation fights two separate wars for the better part of a decade, it’s all too easy to turn those individuals into ciphers onto which are projected all kinds of ideals, hopes, ambitions, and fears. These ciphers, sequentially, are then distinguished and known and remembered only in the abstract, where they can remain brave, loyal, and forever sacrificing. (Or the opposite, if the projector desires it to be so.) Winslow violated all of that by attempting to interject anger and emotion and raw, ugly intention into what he understood as his purpose, football. Again, this purpose is often mocked by our society as a child’s game, yet we all still enable the Kellen Winslows of the world to believe it to be more by pouring millions and millions of revenue dollars into it every weekend, every autumn.

Kellen Winslow’s greatest sin wasn’t diminishing the gravity of war, or exaggerating the importance of football. We all do that daily, whether we’ve served in the military or not. No, Winslow provoked our fury because he inadvertently gave a face to those we prefer faceless. And he did so with all the vanity, self-absorption, and cocksureness of a 20-year-old raised and cultivated in a fish bowl. The 21st century warrior caste also operates in a self-contained environment populated primarily by young men with too much testosterone and too little life experience, some of whom are vain, self-absorbed, and cocksure – especially in the throes of anger. Ask a young infantry foot soldier how he feels about the American public or al-Qaeda or Jaish al-Mahdi immediately after a firefight in Afghanistan or Iraq, and Winslow’s rant would seem like child’s play, suddenly remarkably appropriate for that misleading and misrepresentative “kid’s game” label.

Perhaps the most famous moment of war and sports converging occurred in the winter of 1914, on the Western Front. “The Christmas Truce,” between British and German soldiers, led to a spontaneous game of soccer in No man’s land, while their brothers in arms cheered them on and swapped gifts with one another. By all accounts, it was a fleeting moment of peace and compassion in the midst of one of the darkest times in world history. Men put down their rifles, picked up a soccer ball, and tried to find themselves again, if only for a day. And there’s the rub. For all the similarities between war and sports, the latter enriches our humanity, while the former attempts to destroy it. Sometimes, too many times really, the world goes entirely mad. And when that happens, playing a kid’s game to wait it out doesn’t seem childish at all.

[1] I’m inclined to point out here that, with proper training, Kellen Winslow would likely make a fantastic soldier. One of my fellow platoon leaders in Iraq played high school football with Winslow, and frequently described him as “a fucking monster.” Considering the fundamental purpose of any military – kill the enemy before they kill you – it’s fair to assume a spot on the front lines could be found for an angry, macho athlete that measures 6’4 and weighs 240 pounds.

[2] Insert Ray Lewis joke here.

[3] Why Nike doesn’t get more flak for this, I’ll never know. It’s infinitely more cheapening of military life and culture than anything an overly garrulous jock has said in an interview.

[4] Lieutenant Colonel Tomko followed up that gem with “I can say whatever I want because I’m a war fighter.” Err … yikes. Ladies and gentlemen, the civilian-military divide!

[5] I’m not sure if the U.S. Army has an official position on cock shots or not.

[6] Maybe you had to be there.

[7] If you have to ask, you probably shouldn’t know.

[8] Admiral Ackbar understands.

A Conversation with a Soldier

David Cotrone — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:00:10 +0000

Note: All names have been changed.

Major Mark Ross is currently home from Iraq. He has had two tours of duty and will redeploy in a year. He knows he suffers from PTSD and that returning to battle is unhealthy, but wants go back, feels he needs to go back. He’s 49 years old and has a family of five. We met in Boston.

***

Mark waited thirty-one years for Iraq. As a military man, his first tour of duty was a five-year stint in the West Pacific. On a battle cruiser, his crew waited to respond to the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

“We were waiting for the go ahead,” he says. “But we never got the call.” His voice is low and gruff, his hands moving as he talks. “That shit really hit the fan.”

At 17, Mark enlisted in the Marines. With two sisters and two brothers, he left his broken family, his father a military man, his mother sick of it. The war in Vietnam had ended four years prior and he started to spend his days smoking pot.

“There was nothing else to do out there,” he says, referring to his hometown in Western Massachusetts. “There were about 3,000 cows, you know?” He laughs. “That was it.”

At first attracted to the Service because of the recruiter’s stories of glory, Mark went into boot camp as a self-proclaimed “fat kid” and came out weighing only 127 pounds.

“It was sixteen weeks of abuse,” he says. He’s not sure if he’s joking or not. “It wasn’t a shock though. I knew it was coming. Only one rule: Do what you’re told.” Recollecting, he looks to the ceiling. “Oh, yeah, another one: Family comes second.”

Now, Mark is no longer a grunt (an infantry man), but a Major. Major Mark Ross. He heads the branch of Civil Affairs, a branch charged with rebuilding Iraq — infrastructure, education, employment. For fifteen months, his unit set up camp in Doura, a slum in southern Baghdad. There, he led 300 missions, each one different from the next.

“We could never set a routine,” Mark says. “Ever.”

Routine would have meant digging their own graves. It wasn’t hard for insurgents to track the schedule and habits of Mark’s unit, to watch the caravan from afar—from a rooftop, maybe—to hit a detonator’s switch, to trigger an explosion.

Explosions were not uncommon. Doura—home to countless civilians and a large market—was an Al Qaeda hot zone. The neighborhood was called “the arena.” Not only was there conflict within the native population (the effects of ethnic warfare), but also animosity toward Mark’s unit of 13 men and two women; with Mark delivering jobs and security to the city, Al Qaeda put a bounty on U.S. soldiers’ heads.

“The place was kinetic,” Mark says. “People shooting at you every day.”

While patrolling sixty blocks of the city, the unit grew accustomed to gunfire, rounds pinging off their Humvees for eight to fourteen hours a day, IEDs and homemade bombs turning the streets into litter, rebels shooting children in the street, bodies mixing with the sewage, no longer belonging to time.

Elsewhere, the Green Zone. A safe zone north of Doura, the Green Zone was “where you went if you didn’t want to fight.” Complete with a swimming pool, air conditioning and near-gourmet food, it was a whole other world. Most often, orders from high command came from there, administered over the radio. These commands even had a name: Good Idea Ferries, so named because of their lack of sensibility.

“You get these calls, you know,” Mark says. “And they’re just like, ‘Hey, Major Ross, we think it would be a good idea for you to go check out this power plant or that school.’”

He pauses, thinking of how to phrase what he’s about to say.

“And you know what? They’re usually not good ideas, not good at all. You’d think those guys would have a clue, but they don’t.”

He raises his fist to his mouth and coughs.

“They have no fucking clue.”

The Good Idea Ferries usually sent Mark’s unit to the countryside, down farm roads, into gunfire. Once, away from the relative safety of the city, 200 meters of his Humvee were taken off by an IED. Somehow, everyone walked out. But according to Mark there were a few soldiers too shaken up to function, too “fucked in the head” to even get back inside a car, let alone a Humvee. Because of the blast, Mark himself suffers from mild traumatic brain injury, even now. He remembers the sounds of the bomb going off next to him, and then, just a few days later, the next one. He remembers the shock of the concussions. He remembers the ringing inside his ears that wouldn’t go away. He awoke this morning drenched in sweat, with a searing ache in his head, with a memory.

In Baghdad, Mark has stood in a morgue packed with bodies, the smell of decay in his nose, blood on his boots. He’s turned right while the Humvee behind him turned left, the latter then obliterated by a bomb. He’s laughed at this matter of chance, thinking it could have been him, wasn’t he lucky? (All he could do was laugh, grieve for twenty minutes at the memorial service, strap on his gun, head back out into the streets, stay focused.) He’s been shot at by children who were given fifty dollars to shoot at American soldiers. He’s seen a baby being eaten by a dog on the side of the road. For entertainment, he’s watched flies being zapped by a bug light: “hillbilly TV.” He’s seen soldiers collapse in the 140° heat. He’s seen a soldier fall and never get back up. He’s seen the principal of a Palestinian school hung in the middle of the Doura market. He’s given five dollars to children for picking up the trash on the street, for helping. He’s seen these children shot in the head by insurgents, left on the street as if they were symbols. He’s put these sights and memories somewhere deep within his mind, a place he calls his File Cabinet. Months later, the File Cabinet has been opened, kicked over, not even sleeping pills or anti-depressants able to close it or right it up. He’s tried to be “a callus.” He’s tried to forget. He’s walked over dead bodies. He’s been covered in dust, even after showering, nothing but dust. He’s felt responsible. He’s tried to justify giving those children money, getting them killed, all for picking up trash.

***

“I know this sounds sick,” Mark says. “But there’s an adrenaline rush.” He’s talking about the stuff of battle, the satisfaction of “hunting someone who’s hunting you.”

Besides the aspect of thrill, Mark says he’s good at leading others, likes it — loves it. “You get so caught up in it. It’s like a drug,” he says. “You need it.” Keep doing it. Keep using it. Keep going. “Even if it’s bad.” And the powers of addiction are strong; Mark says he would already be back in Iraq if it weren’t for his kids, his daughter and two sons.

Mark talked to his wife on the phone every day. But the lack of connection—the lack of touch—was, and still is, a factor.

“The hardest thing about war isn’t being away,” he says. “I can deal with that. I have a job to do.”

Meanwhile, at home, his children had celebrated their birthdays, his son had had a bad day at school, his daughter fallen off her bike. Without a father to turn to, though, they turned to their mother for comfort, for discipline and advice. So now, Mark’s children aren’t used to his presence; they barely recognized him upon his return, didn’t know how he fit into their lives. He didn’t know, either. He didn’t know how to hold them, what to tell them, what to think. For the children, it’s as if they are sometimes fatherless, sometimes walking with a ghost. For Mark, his life is always in midair.

***

Mark admits to suffering from PTSD, to borderline depression, to feeling the terror of utter boredom, of total helplessness. Compared to constantly having his senses on edge overseas, at home, everything becomes mundane and dull. What is there to do besides sit in front of the television set and eat, put on weight, think about the friends he left over there? There’s nothing. He watches CNN, tries to stay up on the news. Before, he was the news, he knew things that couldn’t be told on the screen or shared over the airwaves. Now, he knows nothing, only what passes by so briefly on the box.

And then there’s the pain, the doctors who don’t know how to treat it. When Mark sees his physician, he’s prescribed aspirin until he explains that he gets headaches because of bombs that went off below his feet. If he goes back to war his wife will divorce him.

“She will,” he says. “She’ll fucking divorce me.” He’s told there’s no medication for that. He’s going back next year.

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #4: Jen Percy in Conversation with April Somdahl

Jen Percy — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:41:00 +0000

On February 20, 2007, April Somdahl’s brother Sgt. Brian Rand shot himself near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He had just returned from Iraq and was about to become a father.

Nearly everyday while Brian was deployed, April spoke with him over Yahoo chat.

Jen Percy: You mentioned that your brother Brian thought he was a vampire. Why?

April Somdahl: He kept getting shot at but he wouldn’t die. He thought he was immortal, like a vampire.

Percy: How did you respond to this?

Somdahl: I said, ‘Well you know, Brian, vampires are just a myth. It’s a made up story.’ And he said, ‘But if you think about it every made up story has some truth in it somewhere.’

Percy: Is this why he shot himself?

Somdahl: No. He said the Iraqi man he killed was following him. I told him to apologize to the man, and he told me that when he did, the Iraqi man said: “you need to come with me.”

Percy: When you talked over the internet with Brian, can you recall any of your conversations?

Somdahl: I’d always try to talk to Brian but he’d say, ‘April you know these guys need you more than I do.’ Then he’d put the other soldiers in front of the computer. One of the guys told me that all of the Iraqis looked like cockroaches to him. He said ‘Iraq is infested with a bunch of cockroaches and he couldn’t wait to kill them all.’ Most all of them had PTSD. Once I was talking to Brian and he told me there was a guy outside that needed my help. He said that there was this soldier outside who had been walking around in circles for hours in the sun. I told Brian to send his buddy Chris outside to ask the guy what he was doing. After a few minutes Chris came back and said, ‘Well, remember those people in the convoy that blew up earlier today? He said they blew up into billions of pieces and that he’s looking for them because he thinks he needs to collect a fragment of their body to take home and give to their family. He keeps yelling billions and billions.’ I told Chris to get him inside and sit him in front of the computer:

April: Hi, hey. How you doing? I’m out here in North Carolina.
Soldier: BILLIONS OF PIECES!
April: What?
Soldier: Billions. I gotta find one.
April: Now that’s not very nice to pick up a piece of someone and give it back to their family is it? I think that would freak them out.
Soldier: No, no. They have to have a piece of them. I just need one little piece. It could be anything.
April: Those men are dead. You’re not going to bring them back. The families will have a funeral for them. If you bring a piece of their bodies back to their families you could hurt them. You don’t want to hurt them do you?

{silence}
April: You going home soon?
Soldier: Billions of pieces! Billions of pieces! Billions! Billions!
April: Okay. There may be billions of pieces of them all over the earth but do you know those pieces will sink into the earth and they will form new soil or even fossils and they will become part of the world again. That was only their bodies–but their souls, they already passed onto heaven and they are probably looking down on you right now thinking how crazy you are. That was just there bodies that they left behind.
Soldier: Billions!
April: I’ll tell you what, when I die, you can take my body and throw it over my neighbor’s fence.
Solider: Really?

***

Read “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #1: Deborah Hampton in Conversation with Kellesimone Waits”

Read “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #2: Tao Lin in Conversation with Shannon Neale”

Read “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #3: Kevin Lincoln in Conversation with Joshua Cohen“

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