Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 11/02/04: Killing Is My Business...

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

The rain started this week.  Not rain like in Cambodia, where the sky opens for days on end; it’s more like spring in Ithaca, where the skies stay gray and ominous for week after week.  Everything gets damp and chill from the drizzling cold, and the occasional cloudbursts drench the streets and gardens and leave you shivering in your house as the winter winds blow through the window grilles.

I knew Jordanian winters were wet and chilly, if not truly cold, but I still didn’t come well enough prepared.  I overlooked the simple fact that Jordanian houses are not well insulated, and dampness is hard to evade.

With the chill comes the tension.  In coffee shops and bars, among groups of friends at parties, even getting into a taxi, you see the nervous smiles.  The coming election has everyone scared.  People will mention it and grin, as if it were a joke – “Bush or Kerry, eh?” – but no one wants to talk about it.

What do you expect?  We’re next door to Iraq.  The violence isn’t on our doorstep, exactly, but like the winter chill, it’s pervasive.

I did finally meet one guy here who supports the war.  He recognized me from my first visit, years ago.  Actually I think he recognized me because he was hitting on one of my friends, but I ended up talking to him anyway.  He opened the conversation by telling me how he was fighting with the U.S. troops in Iraq, he was just in Jordan on leave.

“I started as a translator,” he told me.  They’re called “fixers,” native speakers who translate, help the troops get around, assist with interrogations, and generally act as errand boys.  “But then,” he continued, “when they did my evaluation, and they see, I am crazy!  Now they send me in with the troops… I am active duty translator, fighting with them, attacking houses with them.”

This fellow, who we’ll call  Dave, (it’s not his real name, but then, he doesn’t go by his real name anyway, he prefers to use an Anglo pseudonym he was given by the troops who couldn’t pronounce his name in Arabic) has gotten himself a reputation around Amman for telling stories.  When I told my friends about my first conversation with him, they laughed, and said they doubted he had been in Iraq at all.  “Who would admit it, if they were,” they said. 

But Dave showed me reams of pictures of him hanging around a barracks with an assortment of clean-cut men and women in Army uniforms, carrying M-16s. In one, he is carrying a very realistic-looking heavy assault weapon.  So, while some of Dave’s comments must be taken with a grain of  salt, it’s safe to assume that he is really working with the military, and has access to heavy artillery.

And he is 100 percent behind the war.  He loves the Americans he works with, and perhaps he has good reason.  After all, he is Iraqi.

“This [war] is the noblest moment of my life,” he told me when I met him.  “Saddam killed my father and my grandfather.  This, this is my revenge.”

I make no secret of the fact that I do not believe in the justice or efficacy of this war, but I wasn’t going to argue with a rationale like that.  I just let him talk.

Dave has a ton of stories, and he loves to tell them.

“Don’t trust the media,” he told me, “They are saying, ‘oh, a fourteen year old boy was killed,’ what they don’t tell you is, that motherfucker had a AK and was shooing at soldiers.  What are they supposed to do, run?”

“What happened at Abu Ghraib,” he explained, “it is a normal thing.”  The soldiers need information, he explained, and to get it – they gotta do what they gotta do.

“This is a great thing you are doing – your soldiers are doing,” he will say.  “Also, fantastic women in the Army.  You know the best place to have sex?  In the back of a humvee.”

He described other things, too.  The carjackers and criminals his unit has caught, the raids they’ve made, the looters they’ve shot.

In Fallujah, he says, he was with a company of humvees and Abrams tanks that was on the move when some locals tried to protest the invasion by lying in the road.  “They were told to move, man, but they didn’t move.  So the driver in the tank, man, he just drove right over them.  And let me tell you, that driver, he was going about 65 miles an hour.”

I must have missed CNN that night. 

I start to hope he’s lying to me.  I hope he didn’t actually see American soldiers crush peaceful protesters under the treads of their tanks.  But truth or not, the more he tells me, the more afraid I am. 

Last time I saw him, he was scheduled to go back in a few days, and he was complaining that he might be assigned to a National Guard unit that would have him behind a desk, not carrying a gun, in the thick of it.

“Yes,” I grudgingly agreed, “a desk job could be less fun than the blowing stuff up.”

“Are you kidding?” He exclaimed.  “You’re there, you have a gun, you can point it at anybody?  It’s amazing.”

Somehow, I am not comforted. 

Is this who we are putting in the field?  People who think war and death is pretty much a cool gig?  Is this what he has learned from the American soldiers he admires so much?

After all, the people who trained Dave, the people he emulates, are our boys.  The folks who have shown him how to have fun at killing are our friends and neighbors are.  The ones we are supposed to support, and I want to, I always have believed in the nobility of men who put their lives on the line for their country, and now, frankly, all I can think is that I’m glad I don’t live in the country those boys are going to come home to. 

I asked Dave once, when he told me not to trust the media, if he thought their conclusions were wrong, as well as their facts.  I asked him if he thought the situation in Iraq was salvageable.  If he thought there would ever be peace.

“You know man, I don’t care,” he said. “Saddam is gone, that’s all I care about.  If in the future, it is still all rubble and danger and shooting, I don’t care.”

“But,” he added, perhaps seeing the look on my face, “But I think, in five years, Iraq will be a nice place.”

And still I am not comforted. 

But then,  I may never understand his personal need for vengeance, either.  In his position, might I not side with anyone who would give me the power to take my revenge?  To hurt those who had hurt me?  Might I not come to love them, the enemies of my enemy?

And when I had a gun in my hand, would I discriminate, innocent from guilty?  Would I have mercy to spare for anyone?  Or would I come to love it -- to play the part of a god, dealing out retribution to those I chose?  Would I rejoice in power and violence?  Would I brag about those I’d killed to strangers in bars?

I might.  I don’t know.

War isn’t about justice, after all.  We don’t fight wars to make peace.  We fight wars to make war.  To do vengeance.  To feel power.  To be warriors. 

Business is good.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/2/04

Posted by rjt at November 2, 2004 07:47 AM