Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [61]
“What?”
“One of them said to the other, ‘Look, they are from the enemy.’ They were talking about us. They thought we were Americans because we were speaking English.”
“I am American.”
“Megan! That’s so crazy.”
“No, you know what’s crazy? That they were eating McDonald’s.”
“Oh my God.”
We laughed and laughed under the trashy neon stars.
And now we were here, Nora with her slumped shoulders and drawn face, looking empty because of Abu Ghraib, and I trying to find, not the right words, but first the right feeling.
By that time, I was steeped in torture. The Middle East was divided into three classes: the torturers, the tortured, and those who stayed out of the way. Filthy things happened in back rooms, people were driven mad by torment, and slick rulers lounged on top of it all. It seemed like half the people I interviewed had been tortured. Worse, half the people I hired had been tortured. The news assistant in Cairo, Hossam, had been tortured for organizing political demonstrations when he was a student at the American University in Cairo. A translator in Morocco had been tortured so hard for so long that he could hardly walk, and one awful morning he started yelling about it in the middle of an interview. You got tortured for being too religious, for being too left-leaning, for being gay, for marching in protests, for blogging, for refusing to pay a police bribe. People were raped and sodomized; waterboarded; electrocuted, cut, beaten, frozen, burned. I met an Iranian blogger my age who made me cry, talking about how he’d been broken behind bars, about how even in freedom he lay sleeplessly in his bed and wept, too ashamed to tell his mother the truth of what had happened to him. Torture lurks at every single level of the Middle East. It’s in the fiber of the place.
“It’s pretty bad, huh, Megan.”
“Yeah. It’s bad,” I said. “But are you really surprised?”
Her eyes flickered. “Yes,” she said. “Of course!”
“But Nora, it’s a war. These soldiers are kids. What do you think happens?”
“But Megan,” her habit of repeating my name sounded, now, like an accusation. “This is the Americans.”
“But at least it’s coming out. At least at some point the system worked. It got found out by investigative journalism. And now people will get punished.”
“Yes. I know that’s true. But Megan, don’t you think this is really bad for the United States, to have people seeing these photographs?”
“Worse than invading Iraq in the first place?”
“This is different.”
“Why?” Why was I doing this? Of course it was bad for America; of course, in its way, it was worse. The photographs had made me feel sick. But I could not bring myself to tell Nora, and I couldn’t understand why.
“This is worse. It makes everything that’s happening in Iraq worse. It shows it in a different light.” She said the last sentence slowly, like she was reading it from a paper.
“But Nora …” The sentence fell off in a sigh. All the questions were piled up in my throat: Did you really believe in us? Did you think we came to Iraq to fight a noble war, did you honestly think that? Don’t you see what we have done? It felt foreign, suddenly, the two of us. After all our conversations about war, about Israel, about America, these photographs were stuck between us like a thorn tree, pricking our hands when we tried to reach through. Her fingers twisted and worked, and a forgotten coffee steamed into the afternoon.
“I mean … Nora, what did you think would happen when the U.S. started a war with Iraq? It’s a war. And—God, I sound like I’m defending what these soldiers did. I’m not. I’m absolutely not. But—I guess I’m just surprised by your reaction. It’s not like you were supporting the war until now.”
“They said they were coming to bring something better than Saddam Hussein.”
“Is that what you think this war is about?”
Nora studied her sleeves.
“I interview people every day, all over the Arab world, and I never meet anybody who thinks the Americans invaded Iraq because they don’t like dictators.”
“But Megan, people believe in the Americans.”
“Who?” My voice