Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [49]
The first time I looked up and felt that Iraq was disappearing was Eid al-Adha, “the feast of sacrifice,” one of the most important holidays on the Muslim calendar. It was 2004, a time when U.S. diplomats still had the face to accuse reporters of ignoring all the happy stories of Iraq, and we still ran out to report the details of just about every suicide attack as if suicide attacks were a big surprise.
It was the eve of Eid and I was sitting around the bureau in Baghdad when the stringer in Mosul called. At least nine people were dead in a suicide bombing, she said. Nine wasn’t very many dead, not as bombings went, but it was enough. We peeled off into the desert, pushing up the trash-strewn highways that rolled north under a dull metal sky. Raheem was there, and so was Nabil, a lanky photographer who’d drifted to Iraq from Libya. Once we left Baghdad, we were drawn together in a danger we didn’t discuss. Bandits roamed. Cars got shot out. A breakdown on a desert highway could kill you. You wanted to get off the roads before night fell. We drove scuffed-up sedans in neutral colors. I wore an abaya, and draped a scarf over my head. The idea was to cut a bland profile, to look Iraqi at a casual glance from a passing car.
The bureau driver named Ziad was at the wheel, and Raheem sat beside him. They never said it was a bad stretch, but you could feel the air change. Ziad sucked on cigarettes and Raheem wrapped his silvered head in a checked kaffiyeh. Eventually we’d turn into a town, and you could feel a loosening, the stomach unfurling, the lungs expanding. Ziad pushed a worn cassette tape into the dashboard and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s voice spilled from the speakers.
Saturday night and the moon is out
I wanna head on over to the Twist and Shout
There was no sun that day, only a sky sagging under winter’s weight and the stretches of dust fields racing away until they petered into a vague horizon. Sometimes I remembered that we were going to a bombing. Sometimes I stared out at the drab earth and daydreamed. You push it away as much as you can. When the car ride ends, we’ll be at a bombing. “How are your cousins?” I asked Nabil. “They’re good, I’m thinking of going back to Tripoli to visit them.” I never want the car ride to end.
Here is the truth about suicide bombings: They are all the same. At the scene you smell salty blood and burned flesh. You see scorched cars and broken glass and mutilated pieces that you may or may not immediately recognize as human corpses. People there, the bystanders, are hysterical; they scream and weep, and sometimes they yell at you. The people in uniform are officious and struggle to cover their rage. Then you go to an emergency room and interview the survivors, all of whom say exactly the same things, the same quotes, in their own tongues. Their minds linger in those bland seconds before the bomb went off. They were sitting in traffic, shifting weight in line, ordering a coffee. They were thinking about science projects, inlaws, what to eat for lunch. Everything was normal, most of them say. Everything was fine. And then violence reared up and smacked their little corner of the universe, and nothing was ever normal again, although that is not said, and must be inferred. Many people believe they saw the bomber seconds before he set off his charge. He looked like a terrorist. The Israelis said that. It meant, He looked like an Arab. Sometimes they describe a man, and the bomber turns out to have been a woman, or vice versa. It happens everywhere: you see somebody you don’t like just before the explosion, and in your mind that person is fixed as the bomber. In Iraq, bystanders would swear they’d seen an American helicopter hovering overhead, firing