|
Every summer for the last ten years I have had the
opportunity of talking with War Journalists and Photographers at a conference in
the Mountains. Some of the bravest men and women I have ever
met. They remind me of my deceased brother-in-law who flew an
unarmed recon plane in Vietnam for two enlistments. He had
wanted to be a fighter pilot and to fly with the Blue Angels but instead he had
been given the job of flying a slow unarmed plane over the jungle where he daily
ran a gauntlet of enemy fire from small arms to rockets but somehow came home
alive but sick at heart. Within a few short years he was dead from a
heart attack leaving a son and daughter and their mother.
Today I listened to journalist Don Lee Anderson
talking to Charlie Rose from Baghdad. Anderson is the New Yorker
writer in the current edition writing on being behind enemy
lines. His talk about the common people of Baghdad and their
humanity towards him was heartbreaking. We have all seen the El
Jazeera pictures of the children along with the dead American soldiers and yet I
had the feeling that I was listening to a man who could in the next two or three
days be dead.
There is an aura of unreality to the discussions of
this war that I have heard both from the Media and from many on this
list. At the Journalist and Photographer's conference, I talked for
the last several years with those who had been in the Middle East in wars and
during peace time. They spoke of how incredibly dangerous the
place was. Something I have not heard on the Media.
Generally they speak of staged demonstrations of the common people holding AK47s
and screaming Sadaam's name and down with America.
Let me diverge for a moment and tell you about
Brittany during WW II. I had a French teacher who was there during
the war as a civilian. He said that the farmers had a collection of
flags and that they brought out the correct one to wave when that army marched
through their country. German for the Nazis, American for the
Americans etc. What people wouldn't rather save their homes
and families no matter who is fighting the political wars of the
world. "They are big, we are but poor! We must do what we can
to survive in the midst of all of these 'great' issues."
Their model is the Tai Chi model of survival. But I have no doubt if
they were being slaughtered that they would be ferocious since my French teacher
certainly was.
I wonder about Iraq and what that means for them
and Anderson. How they are treating him well since he will write
about them right up until the moment when he must face the same beast as
they. The Hounds of War. The Journalists told me that
there was no place in the world as armed as the Middle East. That
everyone had their Kalishnikovs, pistols etc and that they knew how to use
them.
How quiet will this population be when the small
arms fire begins the steady crescendo to the rocket launcher against their own
homes? Would we fire on our own Army even if they were oppressing us
and a foreign army promised to remove that oppression? I doubt
it. When under stress, we tend to own our close enemy whether
the mafia or the Michigan Militia if we are being invaded from
without. Underneath we are all Americans. Why
would we expect them not to be all Iraqis?
Americans claim the right to bear arms but most
don't, even in Texas churches. The word that I was told
by the war photographers was that in the Middle East the non-armed was the
exception. That the entire place was an army. When
you are cornered, even the peaceful person will usually fight rather than
die.
I thought at one point that Sadaam might play the
Jesus card and choose martyrdom. Refuse to surrender,
destroy any WMDs that he truly might have, and allow the American ocean to roll
over him with a minimum loss of life in the civilian
population. Through his death he would prove that he was not
the monster that everyone had said but the one who had cleverly fought the
Americans to a standstill for the last eleven years for his nation's
pride. When he offered to debate Bush I thought he might go
that way.
Instead he seems to have chosen Beuregaard at the
first battle of Bull Run using the Americans over-confidence against
us. Where Washington society brought picnics to that first
battle, we brought the embedded press in a murderous version of reality TV that
even Orwell couldn't predict. Might it come down to our
choosing something that we refused in Vietnam? Choosing to
destroy our world in order to win? Can Jerry Falwell
survive the picture of that child whose hair is tumbled like fake fur and whose
brain cavity is empty? Or that face with no body lying
on the ground like a mask?
Nobody invented any syndromes for the WWII
heroes but they had them none the less and that was a clear victory with
survivers in the concentration camps to justify the destruction of Dresden
and Berlin. Anyone with an ounce of sense reading
Slaughterhouse Five or the downfall of the Corporate CEO Hero in Sirens of
Titan would "get" that Kurt Vonnegut felt great guilt at having the
terrible enemy assure his survival during his country's Fire Storm in
Dresden. How will we survive the true meaning of Shock and Awe
when it rips through Baghdad from house to house if they make the same
fight as the members of the Alamo are reputed to have
done?
These may not be simple
farmers. Helpless peasants dying because that is their destiny as in
the Contra inspired massacre's in Guatemala. The Mayans didn't
carry guns and their sense of their place in the Universe is different from the
Islamic model of Jihad in everyday life. We tend to
think like the Israelis who won every battle until recently when their
hearts began to lose their ability to avoid the feelings of hatred coming from
across the barbed wire. The hardest bullets to avoid are always
mental.
The Spanish and the Indios in Mexico still
fight after 500 years. But why are we surprised, the Moors were in
Spain for 700 years and the Spaniards never forgot that fact. And
then there are the Basques who read the flight of birds even
today.
There is so much that George Bush doesn't know and
should. If he only knew how much he had missed, while he
was drinking, that he and we would need from
him. Americans need to feel that we are right in order to
do the unthinkable. If we see the unthinkable happening and the Don
Lee Anderson's dying in front of our faces, along with the enemy that we begin
to empathize with, then technology becomes irrelevant. Greece will
never forgive Turkey for the destruction of the Parthenon. Should we
have fought those nine pre-emptive wars with our own demons before we
projected them out onto the world in a small third rate country whose courage
could steal our hearts and doom our children?
Ray Evans Harrell
|
