What's It All About?

from Jacqueline

I promise, there is more to my life than lingering on the politics of the day, but sometimes I just can’t help it, I have to say what’s in my head (my family, at this point, are collectively cringing in their homes. Uh-oh, here she goes again). But sometimes, events and reflections in one’s personal life intersect with the news of the day.

My Uncle Jim died a few weeks ago, the first of my mother’s brothers to pass away. He was eighty three, and the oldest son in a family of ten kids – there are eight of them still living. When I was a child, my uncles were larger than life characters, men who drove a motley assortment of cars – or in Uncle Jim’s case a green van – and came down to our house in the country with most of the family on board because only a few of them could afford cars. My uncles were, to the utter delight of my cousins and I (about thirty of us, perhaps more), practical jokers and more than a little crazy. We’d be driving to the beach, hardly able to move because someone else’s elbow was in your side, and the convoy would stop at a junction, or pedestrian crossing. Without warning, Uncle Jim would leap out of his car and pretend to pick an argument with Uncle Charlie. Uncle Joe would come running up to join in, and before you knew it, there would be a crowd watching, with all us cousins giggling, our mothers sliding down in their seats. Then they would all get back in their cars and off we’d go, until the next game, whatever it might be. I loved those days when my quiet childhood was thrown asunder by the boisterous visitors.

As we all grew older, my cousins and I, those days became fewer until they ended. When I was at college in London, one of my cousins would occasionally turn up to see me, or I’d go to see them. We were all making our independent way in the world, but I still saw Uncle Jim throughout the course of my college years. I was walking across campus one day when, in the distance I saw a man waving to me. I squinted, stopped, looked again, and a cold shiver went down my spine. I looked around to see if anyone else was close by. If this was Uncle Jim, then anything could happen – he might pretend, in a loud voice, to be a bodyguard sent by my parents to take me home for staying out all night. But instead he said that he’d had some work in the area, and thought he’d drop by to see how I was doing. I thought my London family was perhaps wondering how the country kid was faring in the city. So we sat on a bench and began talking of matters of the world, of the things that didn’t make sense. “What’s it all about?” he asked, a question that was his hallmark and that often peppered his conversation. “What’s it all about?” And in my naiveté, I tried to answer him, until, realizing I couldn’t, we just sat together, each with our thoughts, trying to figure out the answers.

Uncle Jim came to see me quite a few times, and we’d sit and talk in that way, and I never did try to answer that question again. The problems of the world were beyond my ken.

My mother says that Jim was never quite the same after he went ashore on D-day and his best friend was shot to pieces before his eyes. He had to keep on running through the dead and dying, as he was part of a platoon with a mission to move into the villages and overcome the enemy.

I thought of Uncle Jim and his question this week, when I read news of a report has yet to be published in the United States, regarding a study of US military personnel at war in Iraq, and the comments they’ve made about some of the things they’ve done and the people they’ve become. It’s a confession, of sorts. Here are a few of them:

Sgt John Bruhns, 29, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armoured Division, described a typical raid. "You want to catch them off guard," he explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep ... You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall... Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds. You'll ask 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda?'

Sgt Dougherty described her squad leader shooting an Iraqi civilian in the back in 2003. "The mentality of my squad leader was like, 'Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don't have to kill them back in Colorado'," she said. "He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist."

'It would always happen. We always got the wrong house... people would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, 'Oh fuck, we're gonna get the wrong house'. Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house."

Here are some more:

"I had to go tell this woman that her husband was actually dead. We gave her money, we gave her, like, 10 crates of water, we gave the kids, I remember, maybe it was soccer balls and toys. We just didn't really know what else to do." (Lieutenant Jonathan Morgenstein, 35, of Arlington, Virginia, Marine Corps civil affairs unit. In Ramadi from August 2004 to March 2005)

"We were approaching this one house... and we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it... So I see this dog - I'm a huge animal lover... this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, what the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words." (Specialist Philip Chrystal, 23, of Reno, 3rd Battalion, 116th Cavalry Brigade. In Kirkuk and Hawija on 11-month tour beginning November 2004)

"The car was approaching what was in my opinion a very poorly marked checkpoint... and probably didn't even see the soldiers... The guys got spooked and decided it was a possible threat, so they shot up the car. And they [the bodies] literally sat in the car for the next three days while we drove by them. (Sergeant Dustin Flatt, 33, of Denver, 18th Infantry Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. One-year from February 2004)

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned... [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little two-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs and she has a bullet through her leg... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me... like asking me why. You know, 'Why do I have a bullet in my leg?'... I was just like, 'This is, this is it. This is ridiculous'." (Specialist Michael Harmon, 24, of Brooklyn, 167th Armour Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In Al-Rashidiya on 13-month tour beginning in April 2003)

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want." (Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. Four-month tour in Baghdad and Mosul beginning December 2004)

And here is a story my Uncle Jim told my mother, when he came home from France, after spending time in a hospital for men with shell-shock. Some of the details may be wrong, you know how stories can change over time. Uncle Jim and his platoon made it through enemy fire to a town that was thought to be evacuated. Running from building to building, with enemy snipers looking for them, their task was to move the enemy back, obviously, so that other troops could move further inland. They were crouching in doorways, trying not to be seen by the snipers, when a small boy came running down the street – having seen them, he was calling out to them, giving away their position. Someone shot the little boy right in front of my uncle, and it marked him for life. So, when I read the article – which will be published in full in The Nation at the end of the month – I felt every ounce of energy leave my body. I am so sick of all this killing. I’m sick that young men and women are put in a position where they take actions that will haunt them forever. I'm not excusing them, just achingly sad that it has come to this. And I am so sick that our voices are not heard, whether we are here in the USA, in Europe, or whether we are the 90% of Muslims who have had our religion snatched from us and rebundled by fundamentalists (and why hasn’t that 90% come out to raise a voice yet?).

I remember once, when I was in my mid-teens, hearing Uncle Jim talking to my mum. “I miss those days when they were all little kids, all of us playing around in the sea, having a lark.” I think he missed what I miss, those times of innocence.

I know I could turn my back on the news. I could shrug until it’s all over. But that would make me complicit. As the saying goes, “If you aren’t outraged, then you aren’t paying attention." Yet I cannot help but think of my Uncle Jim when I think of the scars on the soul left by this war. I think of sitting on a bench with him and that question lingering in the air.

What’s it all about?





FYI: The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness, by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, appears in the 30 July issue of The Nation