Laura's Corner: Letters from Iraq #9 & 10

02 August
Market price

This is the day after the holiday, a Saturday in the local market. The stench of rotted peppers and cucumbers overwhelms even the sewage flowing freely outside the fences. The fences surround an open market of stalls, a wholesalers market for everything from produce to soda and flour and packaged meats. Across the street, the speakers from the local mosque come to life, sending a lonely caterwaul into the deadly still air.

In the heat and hazy sunlight, children on bicycles fly away from the market into the neighborhood, informing a dozen local shop owners of the contents of six trucks. Within minutes, hand-carts and donkey-carts arrive in the market area, each man and child quickly inspected by Iraqi soldiers before running to the back of the truck of choice and receiving goods. The items are stacked so high that carts barely roll and donkeys strain under the effort, but the unit of distribution seems to be "cartload", so everyone gets the most out of their cart.

Each truck arrives with its own personnel, and in some cases, this leaves one father and one son to unload an entire flatbed truck filled with cantaloupe and watermelon. American soldiers, frustrated at the probable wait, help with the work, and soon we find ourselves taking turns swinging melons back and forth across the market, forming a long line. For American soldiers, this is the most common form of work detail, the human chain, so we move with a speed that far exceeds the father-son team.

We even laugh and enjoy ourselves for a while; you never lose sight of where you are, but you can picture yourself doing the same manual labor at home. It's harder to picture yourself patrolling the streets of your hometown. This market almost lets us forget the work that usually only serves to remind us how very far from home we are.

03 August
Den of thieves

Tyranny is achieved through sleight of justice. This is the old Iraq. This is the place where nothing has changed, where fear and suspicion are the cost of living. This is how it all starts over.

It all starts on the day you invite men of private ambition to become men of public principles. The day you ask those who would protect their place in a city to protect that city. The day you invite cheap thugs to become cops. On that day, you'll find former militia members walking the streets with weapons, telling their fellow citizens that they guard what everyone has in common: the desire to walk freely through the city without terror. You'll discover them patrolling through sunlight avenues, smiling and waving at the street vendors and children on bicycles and teens grouped in surly knots on corners. You'll notice that commerce returns to the market districts and that animals are grazed in trash-strewn fields again.

So, did you notice anything out-of-place? Does anyone put their head down and walk faster past the safe-houses that are established in neighborhoods? Do people seem wary of being caught alone around here? Are you imagining this, or could it be that some people are leaving the area?

The shadow that lurks behind these patrols is self-righteousness. Combine this with their seemingly unlimited authority to police as they please. Now look again. And you'll find that these men who are meant to guard the city with you are taking their own prisoners and using unseemly methods to find their own evidence. When you catch them holding captives, catch them with the idiot grins of children in the cookie jar, they hand the bruised and burned victims to you, explaining that these hostages confessed to being criminals. The hostages never confess to crimes, but this is unimportant. These victims have been found guilty by their peers, although none are willing to testify. The neighbors look confused when I challenge them to find the nerve to face the men they accuse, to look them in the eye and give their testimony. Instead, militia men in masks take prisoners and everyone except the unlucky hostages takes pride in that. Frustrations mount as you try to explain to these men of the militia that they must not take prisoners, and that they must provide proof to back up accusations made against civilians. They become uncomprehending and uncompromising as stones. Too long have the people in this city considered communal condemnation a reason to terrify. To arrive on a doorstep in the night and inform a man that he will be gone by sunrise. Or his family will be dead. That's how things work here. That's what people expect, whether threat-bearer or threatened. So, you sigh and resign yourself to the vague and unvoiced hope that this won?t happen again, because explaining yourself doesn't seem to work. No matter how good the translator, you suspect that some American protections just don't have an equivalent in the Arabic tongue. Sad to say. But there it is.

You take the prisoners and turn them into detainees, process them and check the wounds. Talk to them and discover that of the six men captured, only one is likely to be a criminal, and that by his own unforced admission. The other five, he admits, wouldn't play soccer with him, so he decided to try and take them down with him. Out of spite. Out of childish spite. You wonder where the honor is to be found in any of these dealings.

You resign yourself to another reason to police the militias. Another box to check when you are on patrol: No weapons in the streets. No weapons bigger than Ak-47s in the houses. Nobody patrolling without uniform. No prisoners being tortured in the house. Check, check, check, check. This is getting weirder every day.

05 August 2007
Arrhythmia

This is how you say goodbye when you haven't the time to say goodbye. This is how you turn a memorial into the blink of an eye, the quicksilver flow of a single tear.

In a combat zone, the dead wait for almost nothing. They cannot wait on the living to complete a mission, and so if the brothers of the deceased are still fighting where these men fell, they will never have the opportunity for a final farewell.

And yet, the living too have small chance to take a moment from their own regimen. A formal service is out of the question for most of us, who are too close to completing our work to dare pause. We've come too far to do more than give a grim nod when told of our loss; the dead are a warning as well as the cost of our labor. We hear about the mechanical aspects of their death, and try and distill a hard lesson for their sacrifice: how do we do this differently next time? What have they taught us?

We reduce these events to another exercise in efficiency, especially in a brigade that has suffered so many losses since they've come to Baqubah. Even so, we can take a moment from our own hectic rush to the finish line to honor the dead, because the dead must wait for one thing.

They wait for nightfall, when it is safe for helicopters to arrive and depart without exciting the notice of rockets and missiles. In the dark, soldiers from every battalion gather on either side of the landing zone, forming a long corridor. The fallen are carried slowly from one end of the corridor to the other, onto the waiting aircraft. Salute as they pass, stand at attention as the chaplains say their last words for your brethren.

That was it. A hiccup in your day. A moment lost amongst the others, a few minutes apart from routine. The only chance to reflect on what was given today. Salute one last time as the helicopters disappear into the enveloping dust and blackness.