The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [44]
Being embedded, I divided my time along much the same lines as the soldiers’ time was divided. I spent the vast majority of my day cozily consuming Baskin-Robbins ice cream sundaes, Whopper Juniors, and full-blast air-conditioning behind the high, high walls of whatever base I happened to be on at the moment. But then a short stretch of most every day I spent out on patrol with this or that MP unit, driving around hot sections of Baghdad or Mosul or Tal Afar or whatever city we happened to be in at the time. We were visiting police stations and ostensibly providing “support” to local cops, although it was abundantly clear to most all the soldiers I spent time with that the real mission was to drive around in circles so as to provide the enemy with a target once daily.
Over time I started to feel in my bones that this weird walled-off archipelago was itself a profound metaphor for American domestic reality. The high walls around the forward operating bases, or FOBs—at places like Camp Liberty they appeared to be upward of twenty or thirty feet tall in parts, lined with knots of barbed wire and gun turrets—were supposedly there to keep insurgents out of the American compounds. But the more I looked at them, the more they reminded me of the freaky-tall bulwarks on King Kong’s Skull Island: masterpieces of architectural overkill, the panic visible in each extra foot of protection, walls designed to keep something in, not out. In America we live in a bubble and the rest of the world is a dangerous mystery, about which many legends may be spread by those cunning and unscrupulous enough to bother. The outside world has become scary enough that most of our people have decided not even to bother trying to figure it out—which is how you end up with such lunacies like They hate us for our freedom and 9/11 was an inside job. If you’re confined to the territory of the bubble in your search for explanations for an event like 9/11, those are the kinds of explanations you’ll come up with.
A key aspect of the derangement is this cutting off of the people from outside reality. We are like a person slipping into paranoid psychosis for whom hallucinations and imagined conversations increasingly take the place of real object relations in the outside world. A paranoiac can handle those imaginary conversations just fine—but shake him by the shoulders and force him to focus, and he might very well stare back at you in terror, not knowing who you are or what you want. In that one panicked moment before he can think of some new fantasy that explains what’s happening before his eyes, you’ll see the whole sorry deal laid bare.
In Iraq, where those occasional clashes with the outside are of the rudest possible variety, I saw those moments over and over again. These Bloodhounds in Baghdad were about to drag me to one more.
THE BLOODHOUNDS are an active-duty unit normally based in Germany—a close-knit, professional, idealistic group of young kids so cheerful and hardworking it was almost off-putting. In my getting-to-know-u first day with the squad—an early-morning meeting in a Camp Liberty parking lot that had been arranged by army press officers—the Blood-hounds had done a zany around-the-campfire-type group introduction (in which each soldier gave a nutty capsule description of himself) that was like something out of Up with People.
“My name is Josh Billingsley, and I have an abnormally large head,” said one, who really did have a big head. Everyone laughed.
“I’m Jaleel Ibrahim,” said the next soldier. “I’m the token African guy.”
More laughs.
“And I’m Sergeant Russell,” said the third. “I am soft-spoken and wholesome, but also offended easily.”
Jesus, I thought. Is this war, or a boy-band audition? At first I’d found the happy-go-lucky attitude of the Bloodhounds horrifying; in the middle of all this twisted violence and unreasonableness, spending