Ten years ago,
on the night Baghdad was bombed, I was in Kenya, swimming in a river that is
known for its crocodiles. The moon was nearly full, or just beginning to empty
and the gray light made my skin luminescent as soapstone. The rains had not yet
come to the Samburu district, to the unplaced spot on a map where I sat in the
still warm shallows. The dry season kept the crocodiles from the river—the
water not deep enough to hide in.
The rough and
rocky landscape, painted silver and dark with the moonlight, looked like what I
wish the moon were like. The warmth of the night, the soft rustle of the
leaves—trees I do not know by name—all was lovely and strange. I remember
thinking, with a place like this in the world, how can a war have begun?
I used to have a strange knack for
being disconnected from my country, from my home, when the grounding events of
my generation shake the earth. I am lucky, I am privileged beyond words to be so
personally untouched, to have swum in moonlight while a war began, to have
lived a life divorced from war in the decade since that night. You expect the
wars, attacks, storms, all of it to ripple across the air like a shaken sheet
of tin, cracking and reverberating like masquerading thunder, and shattering
everything in the world. In part, of course, there are shocks and changes, but not as constantly obvious as you expect. As the wars go on and we are not required to
sacrifice a thing—instead encouraged to consume to keep America strong—that we
are at war becomes as distant a thought as men golfing on the moon.
We carried a
crank radio on the trip through Samburu, part of a college study abroad
program. I’d heard the BBC announce the bombing of Baghdad before I went to the
river. We’d all listened closely for days, chewing our lips and silently
wondering if war was coming, hearing the hours and days tick by until our President
declared war, declared bombs to be dropped on innocent and bloody-handed alike.
There were twenty-seven of us American students, all listening to the news of
our country while we might as well have been on the moon. It was strange. The
boy whose brother was in the Marines, the girl with four brothers and dreaded
the ghost of the draft, they may have felt it more than others, this tension.
But, during the day and away from the clipped voices and static of the news, we
were largely, contentedly unaware. There were elephants to be seen, villages
and farms to visit, camp to make and strike, card games to play while the
trucks rolled through the acacias and rocks. Safari is Swahili for wander, and
we did this blissfully.
But then, every
night after dinner, the voices came spackling through the airwaves and
announcing that this was real, bombs were dropped and the war in Iraq was on.
It has never made moral sense to me why this happened, how this was allowed to
happen.
They say that
there is no part of history more distant than the recent past. My history
lessons ended with Nagasaki, barely touching the wars in Korea or Vietnam or
Iran or Kuwait, the bombings and skirmishes and occupations elsewhere. I
suppose my teachers thought, because this happened in their lifetimes, their
adulthoods, this was not history.
Thus we are
disconnected from the grounding events of our present.
I used to think
that war was more like chess, that soldiers lined up and faced off, and whoever
had the most dead lost the war. That the bodies would be counted, and the
battle could be quick and organized. I was five or six, thinking this. But the
idea of tallying the dead, of killing people at all to solve a fight, didn’t
make sense.
Before coming on
safari, we’d toured the slums of Nairobi. I’d never seen poverty before, seen
the costs and underpinnings of modern Western life. Houses are made from
cardboard, from cinderblocks salvaged from other rubble, from sticks and paint
cans, hammered flat to be shingles.
And then there
are the children of downtown Nairobi. They huff bottles of carpet glue, high
beyond hunger.
I see war as a
vehicle for multiplying such sights across every place it touches. A bomb
lands, goes askew and kills civilians. Men, women, children, babies and
grandparents, their loved one lost to violence. Grief, in a place where the air
thunders with anticipation of death, can lead nowhere good. Children with lost
parents will have to go somewhere, homes and businesses destroyed and
neighborhoods unsafe, all this foments poverty, desperation, and most unjust of
all, the strain of living with constant terror. I will take expensive oil and
the loss of America’s global dominance, gladly, as the price of stopping all of
this sadness.
Several years
ago now, when the wars were no longer a new shock to be washed away in
moonlight, I walked across a college campus where thousands of tiny white flags
stood witness for the civilians who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than
an acre of the campus was a sea of these white flags. I could not count them,
still cannot absorb the number of lives they represented. Each one of those
flags had a mother and a father, was a child once and should have grown old.
For a while, I
drove a back road from my home in New Hampshire to the grocery store because it
brought me past a little white clapboard house. The house had black trim around
the windows, a mansard roof like a storybook, and a growing tally of Iraqi dead
posted on the front door, visible from the road. The number swelled every week.
I love the line of the arm I never saw, drawing the new number on the door,
refusing to forget the price we do not pay.
Sitting in the
Kenyan river, I watched the moon rise up. The friends I was with laughed and we
made crocodiles noises. It seems impossible that this same moonlight glanced
down on the new rubble and wounds of Baghdad, fought through the dust and
smoke. The radio news rang in my ears and I felt divorced from my passport,
from the flag I pledged allegiance to for so many years. I wished I belonged to
the peace of this landscape, but knew that I did not. By birth, I will always
bear some of the responsibility for what was done, what is done, daily, without
my blessing or say-so, but in my name.
Every
year in March, they broadcast the years that this war has gone on. Today, it is
ten, and although the military operations in Iraq have officially ceased, I
would not say this war is over, or that anyone has won. The number, a full
decade while I have done nothing, makes me cringe, how a war has gone on,
revolutions have reverberated out like ripples in a river, and I’ve barely
noticed. I think of the white flags across the green grass, the squeal and
smell the ink of a thick marker adding up the civilian dead on a back road
door. I think of the moon that night ten years ago, rising in the violet grey
sky, in the tear between happiness and regret, and I can begin to believe that
other ways of being are possible.
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