Coming Home
An Iraq Correspondent Living in Two Worlds
By Dahr Jamail
05/19/05 - - It isn't an accident that, after 11 weeks, only as I'm
leaving again, do I find myself able to write about what it was
like to come home -- back to the United States after my latest
several month stint in Iraq. Only now, with the U.S. growing
ever smaller in my rearview mirror, with the strange distance
that closeness to Iraq brings, do I find the needed space in
which the words begin to flow.
For these last three months, I've been bound up inside,
living two lives -- my body walking the streets of my home
country; my heart and mind so often still wandering war-ravaged
Iraq.
Even now, on a train from Philadelphia to New York on my way
to catch a plane overseas, my urge is to call Iraq; to call, to
be exact, my interpreter and friend, Abu Talat in Baghdad. The
papers this morning reported at least four car bombs detonating
in the capital; so, to say I was concerned for him would be
something of an understatement.
The connection wasn't perfect. But when he heard my voice,
still so far away, he shouted with his usual mirth, "How
are you my friend?" I might as well be in another universe
-- the faultless irreconcilability of my world and his;
everything, in fact, tied into this phone call, this friendship,
our backgrounds… across these thousands of miles.
I breathe deeply before saying a bit too softly, "I just
wanted to know that you're all right, habibi."
The direct translation for "habibi" in Arabic is
"my dear." It is used among close friends to express
affection and deep trust.
It's no fun having a beloved friend in a war zone. I'm all
too aware now of what it must be like for loved ones and family
members to have those close to them far away and in constant
danger… It's no way to live. Having spent so many months in
Iraq myself, I finally have a taste of what my own loved ones
have been living with.
While bloody Iraq stories are just part of the news salad
here for most Americans -- along with living and dead Popes,
Michael Jackson, missing wives-to-be, and the various doings of
our President -- I remained glued to the horrifying tales
streaming out of Baghdad and environs. I emailed Abu Talat and
other friends constantly to check on their safety in that
chaotic, dangerous land I'd stopped being any part of.
Trying to live life here with some of my heart and most of my
mind in Iraq, which is endlessly in flames, has felt distinctly
schizophrenic. It's often seemed as if I were looking at my
country through the wrong end of a telescope even as I walked
down the streets of its well functioning cities, padded through
a coffee shop where everyone was laughing, relaxed, or calmly
computing away, or sat for hours in a room that possessed that
miracle of all miracles -- uninterrupted electricity.
I ask Abu Talat if the most recent car bombs were close to
his home. "There have been 10 car bombs in Baghdad today,
habibi, at least 30 people killed with over 70 wounded. Iraqis
are suffering so much nowadays. It's becoming unbearable, even
for those of us who have known so much suffering for so
long."
This time I find, to my amazement, that I'm wiping back the
tears and forcing back the crazy desire I've been unable to
dodge all these months to return to Baghdad. Right now. This
second. That old pull to plunge back into the fire, despite the
obvious risk. To be with my close friend, in solidarity, in a
place that, absurdly enough, seems more real to me now that this
one somehow doesn't. To be there on the front lines of empire,
able to see, without blinking, without all the trimmings, the
true face my country shows the world.
"Please stay safe habibi, and I will see you soon,"
I tell him as my train approaches New York where I am to catch
my flight.
"Insh'Allah -- God willing -- I will stay safe and will
see you soon, habibi. Insh'Allah," he replies.
Then he quickly tells me there's gunfire nearby. He has to
go. I wait for him to hang up first. It's a kind of ritual. Only
then do I push the button on my phone, set it down, and leave
Iraq once again for this country of mine where I've never quite
landed.
Just beyond the train window, trees and houses race past as
we speed along. I watch the peaceful American countryside zip
by, knowing Abu Talat, having just dropped his wife and children
off at her father's for safety, is trying to make his way home
through streets filled with fighting and criminal gangs, the
constant threat of more car bombs in the night, and a military
cordon around his neighborhood. He is concerned that his home
will be looted if he isn't there, and feels it's worth the risk
to return to his neighborhood to guard his belongings, even
though the area has been sealed off by American soldiers.
I'll check in with him again later…obsessively… to see if
he's in one piece at the other end of the invisible phone line
that still seems to connect us, along with all my other friends
there. Of course, it's just a regular day for him in Baghdad,
and another irregular, out-of-body experience back here, where,
with every long-distance chat, the duality in me seems to grow
more extreme.
Questions of Identity
Coming home from the war in Iraq, I find another kind of
duality. It seems to me that the war I've left is going on at
home on many fronts -- and yet most people seem almost
blissfully unaware of it.
I was in Juneau, Alaska, when the Senate voted to take
another step toward opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
for drilling. So another, allied kind of war continues on the
beautiful, precious land of my home state. I wonder how many of
the proponents of drilling are aware that the oil drawn from
ANWR won't even be used domestically, but will be sold to Japan.
I wonder how many Americans, whatever their positions, know
this.
For 10 weeks now, I've traveled along each coast, giving Iraq
War presentations, most of the time to large crowds hungry for
information. It's been heartening to see so many people so
concerned, as well as angry, about what's being done in their
name -- and with their tax money.
Upon returning from a presentation in Vancouver, Canada, I
wait for a U.S. border agent to scan my passport. I watch him
languidly flicking through my many pages of Jordanian/Iraqi/
Lebanese/Egyptian visas, staring at the Arabic script and
stamps.
"What were you doing in the Middle East," he asks.
I feel a little spurt of anger and glance up at the signs all
across this border station informing non-US citizens that they
will have their photos taken upon entry and then place their
index fingers on a scanner -- solely for our safety and
security, of course. I have that natural human urge to tell him
it's none of his damned business where I've been; after all, the
United States is, at least in theory, a free country. Instead,
of course, I simply say, "I'm a journalist."
He looks at me, hands me my passport, and I come home yet
again. As for the anger, it quickly dissipates. Such a small
moment amid so many larger catastrophes. Besides, he's just
doing his job.
Not too long after, I get an email from a friend in Baghdad
who's just spoken with a friend of his, a teacher in Fallujah.
She crossed another kind of "border" there, also
guarded by Americans -- a border around her own city. She had to
undergo a retinal scan mandated by the Americans and had all ten
fingers printed in order to obtain the necessary identification
badge which, unfortunately, she then lost while shopping in a
Baghdad market. When she tried to return to Fallujah without it,
Iraqi National Guard soldiers wouldn't let her back in.
"She told them she'd lost her ID in Baghdad at the
market, that she wants to go home, that they have to let her in,
but they refused," my friend wrote. "A neighbor of
hers inside Fallujah was there and told them she was his
neighbor, but they refused. She called her husband with her
neighbors' mobile and he came to the checkpoint with her papers,
showing that she is his wife and he lives in Fallujah but they
still refused to let her in."
She was crying, my colleague said, as she related her woes to
him. She had lost 9 relatives during the American assault on the
city in November, 2004. Then he wrote: "I want you to tell
your friends and your audience about this. Please ask them what
would happen if they were prevented from getting inside their
city although the people inside knew they were a teacher who had
to get to their school?"
My friend also wanted me to ask what Americans would do if
our country were invaded and the only ID that was worth anything
was that given by the invading forces -- even though you had
several of your regular forms of identification with you?
Being a Raving Lunatic and Other Confusions of War
Of course, most Americans back in this strange land know
nothing about such doings in Iraq, thanks to the ongoing efforts
of the Bush administration and its faithful loudspeaker, the
corporate media, which has done such a fantastic job of
whitewashing the degrading situation in Iraq: Fallujah begins to
resemble a concentration camp; the death toll of innocent Iraqis
continues to escalate; the Iraqi resistance and foreign
terrorist groups are now focusing heavily on the new Iraqi
government and the new Iraqi security forces; the American
troops continue their aggressive operations -- and all that
comes through here in this still peaceful-seeming land are
flickering images of car-bomb carnage.
In 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, American troops
massacred over 400 innocent civilians by far the majority of
whom were women, children, and the elderly. In Fallujah during
the November siege of the city, according to Iraqi medical
personnel, well over 1,000 innocent civilians (the majority of
whom were women, children and the elderly) were slaughtered.
Over one thousand innocent civilians, people who, under the
Geneva Conventions, an occupying power is required by law to
protect, died in what was essentially a Vietnam-style
"free-fire zone."
In Conditions
of Atrocity written for the Nation magazine, Robert
Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and well-known expert on humans in
extreme moments, cited both My Lai and the Iraqi prison of Abu
Ghraib as examples of what he called "atrocity-producing
situations… so structured, psychologically and militarily,
that ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you
or I, can regularly commit atrocities. In Vietnam that structure
included ‘free-fire zones' (areas in which soldiers were
encouraged to fire at virtually anyone); ‘body counts' (with a
breakdown in the distinction between combatants and civilians,
and competition among commanders for the best statistics); and
the emotional state of US soldiers as they struggled with angry
grief over buddies killed by invisible adversaries and with a
desperate need to identify some ‘enemy.'"
Sound familiar?
"This kind of atrocity-producing situation," Lifton
added, "…surely occurs in some degree in all wars,
including World War II, our last ‘good war.' But a
counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when
driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly
prone to sustained atrocity -- all the more so when it becomes
an occupation."
As my thoughts are being calmed by the blur of trees and
houses out the train window, I'm suddenly brought back with a
jolt -- as has happened over and over in these few weeks -- to
Iraq-in-America. Another passenger seats himself next to me,
reads the paper, and then turns -- I suppose simply because I'm
there -- and asks, "Did you see Bush's press conference
yesterday?"
I tell him I hadn't.
"This damned guy! When are people going to wake up to
his bullshit?"
I assure him I have no idea -- and that's true. I've been
wondering just the same thing ever since I came home. But he
doesn't need much from me. As if he'd been reading my mind, he
quickly lets loose with this: "I'm a Vietnam Vet. My son
just got back from Iraq. He was in Fallujah in November. It's
all bad, man. My son, he's like me, he won't talk to many people
about what happened over there…but he told me."
He looks me in the eye intently and then points to the side
of his head -- that familiar kid's gesture for insanity -- and
continues, "Now my son has problems upstairs. He told me
they don't have a plan, they don't have a solution, they're just
trying to contain things over there."
He rattles on, angrily, and I nod while I glance out the
window from time to time, letting his information settle in on
top of what Abu Talat has just told me. I finally indicate to
him that I understand, because I'm a journalist who has spent a
fair amount of time in Iraq recently.
But he's not in need of encouragement. "Bush is a draft
dodger and a deserter," he continues. "He and all his
cronies are thieves and should be in jail! If I keep talking
about this I'm going to lose it. Have a good trip."
He gets up and walks away. I take a deep breath. This isn't
the first time I've had folks unload on me about Iraq. I guess
it's in the air. I've had similar encounters with Iraq veterans
from both our Gulf wars while traveling, as well as with
civilians. Every encounter -- the ones where no one mentions
Iraq as well as the ones where it comes up -- has its bruising
aspects. I've had to go back to some of my family members and
make amends for an outburst just after I returned. Feeling the
desperation of the situation there and overwhelmed by the urge
to bring Iraq home to people who truly have no idea what's
happening tends to put one in an awkward situation where it's
not too hard to come off as a raving lunatic.
Is There Anyone in the World…?
At least in these weeks, I've begun to understand what war
veterans who have seen the bodies -- as I have -- get to deal
with on returning home. Now that I've had a little time to get
my head on straight, to process some of the atrocities I saw,
and to take a little breath, I find myself, against my better
judgment and everything I swore I wouldn't do, heading back to
the Middle East; back to chronicle more of what's happening
there. I keep wondering how long it can go on; how long so many
people in my home country will continue to ignore it, to be
complicit, whether they know it or not, in our brutal occupation
-- so long after it was proven beyond a shadow of a shadow of a
doubt that this war was illegal and based on nothing but lies. I
can't help wondering as well how long they will be complicit as
their tax dollars continue to be spent on a war machine that is
eating their children and loved ones, along with innocent
Iraqis; complicit as social programs and benefits, civil rights
and liberties are stripped from them -- a little more with each
passing day.
Even a debate among anti-war groups about whether the United
States should withdraw immediately or propose a phased
withdrawal on a timetable was capable of sending me off the
rails. All I could think was: Silly debate. As though either
view of how "we" should proceed mattered, as though
their opinions carry the slightest weight with the no-timetable
Bush administration.
I kept wondering why the streets here weren't filled with
people every single day…
A couple of days ago, I forwarded an email to Abu Talat that
had been sent to me by a man who attended one of my
presentations. He had thanked me for telling and showing them
the truth…the photos, the footage, the stories of Iraqis and
of U.S. soldiers. He had written asking me to tell my Iraqi
friends how horrified he was by what our country was doing in
Iraq, that he was doing whatever he could to stop the
occupation.
Abu Talat wrote back to him directly -- the longest email I'd
ever seen him send -- and forwarded a copy to me. Here's what he
said in his eloquent, though hardly perfect English:
"Thank you Americans (those who believe that American
troops are destroying Iraq). Those who believe that facts
cannot be hidden with chicken mesh. Who believe they have no
right to put ideas in the minds of people of a civilized
country, a country in which civilization began before the
United States existed. Those people who know that democracy is
not given, it is obtained. Who know that Iraqis are people who
have to live just like any nation. Who believe that we are no
different in the ability of our minds because God made us all
so you cannot force us to have the ideas of others unless we
accept it after we are fully contented. Those people of the
world who raise their voices against colonialism, control,
force, the invading of other countries… I thank them, I
encourage them, and I ask God to save them.
"Other people of the world who are not on these
ethics, who don't implement those ideas, I call them to look
around themselves, to awaken themselves, to put themselves in
our position. To face what we face, to remember that they
don't accept in any way to be insulted, nor to be threatened
or killed like what is happening in my country by the
invaders. I ask God to spare any difficulty from their country
rather than being invaded.
"…Is there anyone in the world who can accept to be
killed? Or detained for no reason? Is there any of you who can
accept to be put in the situation we are facing, to see their
houses crashed or demolished, ended, to see your people
treated with no respect, to have guns aimed at them wherever
they go, to live without electricity when you used to have it,
to see roads closed… whether they will live until tomorrow
under a normal life, these are, my friends, just a few things
to be told.
"So please tell your friends and people to raise their
voices to pull the troops out from invaded Iraq. Seeking that
God helps Iraqis to bare the situation done by the troops of
the invaders."
From the window of my plane, I watch the lights of New York
fade -- and the internal duality quickly begins to fade with the
glowing lights of the colossal city. Somewhat to my surprise, it
encourages me to know I'm now moving ever closer to the place
where so much of my heart turns out still to be. Unsure whether
or not I'll actually go into Iraq, at least I will be nearer to
it, and to Abu Talat and my other friends who live the brutality
of life there every day. At least I'm on my way back to a place
where I feel I can do something…even if sometimes that only
means providing moral support for habibis. At least I'm on my
way back to a place where few can help but be aware of what is
truly happening. At least I'm on my way, ever closer to
occupied, inflamed Iraq.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Alaska who
has spent 8 months reporting inside occupied Iraq. He writes
regularly for the Sunday Herald, Inter Press Service and the
Ester Republic among other outlets. He is a special
correspondent for Flashpoints radio and appears on Democracy
Now!, Air America, Radio South Africa, Radio Hong Kong and
numerous other stations around the globe. He has recently
returned to the Middle East to continue his reporting on the
occupation of Iraq. Dahr Jamail's latest pieces from the region
can be read at
his website.
Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail
