Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [89]
We talked first about Mamduh's life in Basra. His father had been a truck driver and he was the oldest of six boys. They lived in a big house with his grandparents and uncles. When Mamduh was thirteen, his father made a joke about the government; someone reported it and his father was taken to prison by Saddam Hussein's soldiers. Two years later he was released, but he was physically and mentally destroyed. He never worked again and soon died.
After his father's arrest, Mamduh supported the family by working construction. Often he got dizzy and passed out from heatstroke. Meanwhile, Iraq became more oppressive and Mamduh feared for his life. Almost all the men he knew were "drafted" by Saddam into an army that they hated.
During the Gulf War, there was a brief time when the Iraqi people believed the United States would help them overthrow Saddam's tyranny. While Saddam's armies were tied up in Kuwait, many people in Iraq hoped for a new government. But after the war, the Americans let Saddam alone. Mamduh felt President Bush had changed policies and betrayed the Iraqi people. He believed that American soldiers even helped Saddam kill Iraqis.
After the war, Saddam ordered his soldiers to kill anyone who helped the Americans. He said, "Even their blood is filthy." People were made to drink oil, or they were shot and their stomachs were split open. The streets were filled with the bodies of the dead.
Mamduh knew that unless he left the country he would be killed. He couldn't tell his family he was leaving because they might accidentally betray him or be tortured later for information. So he slipped quietly away. He walked for two days until he met an American soldier and asked for refuge. He was treated as a prisoner of war and sent, like all the Iraqi soldiers, to a camp in Saudi Arabia.
The camp was supposed to be temporary, but it still exists today and is still filled with Iraqi men who turned themselves in during the Gulf War. It's located in the desert, fir from the eyes of outsiders, and run by Saudis who these three men believe have contempt for Iraqis.
I asked Saif and Hamid how they had arrived at the camp. Hamid dismissed the question. "His story is my story. We all had the same story."
Mamduh said, "Over 54,000 young men were in the POW camps. There was no work and the water was salty. We went for years without seeing women or children. In the night, men were taken from their tents and shot."
Saif said, "I would wake up in the morning and the friend who slept beside me would be missing. I wouldn't even ask where he was."
Hamid said, "The soldiers called us dogs, camels, or donkeys."
This was upsetting to all three men. In fact, the worst damage seemed to be a loss of their dignity through this seven-year process of being herded from place to place without respect or choices. Many men in the camps committed suicide or escaped back into Iraq. Others just died because, as Saif put it, "They got tired of it."
I was struck by how different their version of the Gulf War was from the one I had seen on television and read about in the newspapers. I realized I knew very little about what our president had promised the Iraqi people or what consequences followed our policies after the war. I reflected while these three men watched their friends being killed, I was reading books and going to the movies. While they were being bombed by American planes, I was drinking coffee with my friends. Long after I had relegated that war to the dustbin of history, they were imprisoned in a camp, fighting for their physical and psychological survival.
Finally in the early 1990s, several prisoners slipped under the carriage of a supply truck and rode to a city. There they managed to speak