The Elephant Has Landed
by Karen Button
Winging my way back across the Atlantic, my mind is full with a thousand images, voices, and stories from those I interviewed and those I met randomly during these last six weeks in the Middle East. My last night in Jordan, unwilling to waste time sleeping, I visited with friends, schemed how additional humanitarian aide could be funneled into war-torn Iraq, and conducted one last interview, this one with a doctor who’d just returned from visiting the health clinic he once directed, but that has been in shambles since US troops shot it up in November.
He shows me pictures from his visit: a blackened room where the maternity ward once was, a gaping hole in the ceiling of a treatment room where a missile ripped through, an outside wall strafed with bullet holes and surrounded by barbed wire has a “3DB” spray-painted in black just under the health clinic’s sign.
“What’s that?” I ask. “It means three dead bodies,” he replies impassively, as he flips through images. “They spray-paint codes on the sides of buildings after they’ve raided them,” he says of the troops. In another photo, a women stands atop a heap of rubble that was once her house. He doesn’t know what the “BG80” sprayed across a surviving slab of concrete means. I hope it doesn’t refer to 80 dead, but given the hundreds killed, I know that it could.
I think back to a conversation I had with Nermin, a 23-year veteran journalist from Baghdad, while we were both in Turkey. She was telling me of the countless times she’d stopped in Fallujah on her way back home from somewhere. Fallujah, famous for its kebobs, was the perfect mid-way stop for a bite to eat.
Last November, Nermin went into Fallujah knowing it had been devastated but not prepared for how extreme the devastation was. A trip that was normally 45 minutes now took her five hours. The kebob stand was, of course, gone. Her friend from the Iraqi Red Crescent who’d gotten her in was staying in Shurta, a neighborhood, the friend said, that wasn’t destroyed like other areas.
But, it was, Nermin told me, every building either flattened or full of bullet holes.
“I’ll never forget the first house I saw. There were beautiful green curtains in a second story window blowing gently in the wind. The main gate was open and in the garden a small bike, as if someone were coming home. But beyond that sat a car, completely destroyed.
“I began to think all my dreams were in that bedroom. And where were the owners…were they alive or were they dead?” She looks off into the distance. I follow her gaze, as if I could also see these billowing curtains whose color I imagined as the green of a tree fully leafed out, a color I’ve always thought of as the color of life.
“Fallujah was called ‘The City of Minarets,’” she continues, bringing me back. “But now there is no call to prayer. Being a Muslim you are called five times a day, but there was only silence.
“I carry a phone book that was given to me in 2003. Fifty of my friends who are in that book are now lost. For the Americans, every Iraqi is a terrorist until they prove it, not deny it.”
As I step into the clean, well-organized and climate-controlled airport I wonder how many Americans could hear something like that, I mean, really listen. Most, it seems, prefer their news as sanitized as the airport. Waiting out plane delays due to bad weather, I watch with amused detachment as CNN delivers their version of domestic and international events. I have that very surreal feeling we’ve all had when no one wants to talk about the elephant that’s clearly sitting in the middle of the living room. Listening to Karl Rove being described as the next “Deep Throat” is a clear indication I’m back in the States.
As for Iraq, hardly a word is mentioned until a suicide bomber, who’s targeted American troops giving out candy, kills a number of small children. As horrible as this is, the stations play it out as if it’s the only news from Iraq, as if US troops aren’t also killing small children.
As a friend later tells me after reading my report about US attacks on Western Iraq’s hospitals, “I know this kind of stuff is happening, but I don’t want to believe it.” I agree with him, it’s painful to look at what your country is capable of. And it’s much easier to turn away from it if we’re not reminded of it each night when we turn on the news, which is why they don’t show us.
But, it is happening.
Right now.
As I write this.
As you read it.
Now, what will we do… now that we know?
Winging my way back across the Atlantic, my mind is full with a thousand images, voices, and stories from those I interviewed and those I met randomly during these last six weeks in the Middle East. My last night in Jordan, unwilling to waste time sleeping, I visited with friends, schemed how additional humanitarian aide could be funneled into war-torn Iraq, and conducted one last interview, this one with a doctor who’d just returned from visiting the health clinic he once directed, but that has been in shambles since US troops shot it up in November.
He shows me pictures from his visit: a blackened room where the maternity ward once was, a gaping hole in the ceiling of a treatment room where a missile ripped through, an outside wall strafed with bullet holes and surrounded by barbed wire has a “3DB” spray-painted in black just under the health clinic’s sign.
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“What’s that?” I ask. “It means three dead bodies,” he replies impassively, as he flips through images. “They spray-paint codes on the sides of buildings after they’ve raided them,” he says of the troops. In another photo, a women stands atop a heap of rubble that was once her house. He doesn’t know what the “BG80” sprayed across a surviving slab of concrete means. I hope it doesn’t refer to 80 dead, but given the hundreds killed, I know that it could.
I think back to a conversation I had with Nermin, a 23-year veteran journalist from Baghdad, while we were both in Turkey. She was telling me of the countless times she’d stopped in Fallujah on her way back home from somewhere. Fallujah, famous for its kebobs, was the perfect mid-way stop for a bite to eat.
Last November, Nermin went into Fallujah knowing it had been devastated but not prepared for how extreme the devastation was. A trip that was normally 45 minutes now took her five hours. The kebob stand was, of course, gone. Her friend from the Iraqi Red Crescent who’d gotten her in was staying in Shurta, a neighborhood, the friend said, that wasn’t destroyed like other areas.
But, it was, Nermin told me, every building either flattened or full of bullet holes.
“I’ll never forget the first house I saw. There were beautiful green curtains in a second story window blowing gently in the wind. The main gate was open and in the garden a small bike, as if someone were coming home. But beyond that sat a car, completely destroyed.
“I began to think all my dreams were in that bedroom. And where were the owners…were they alive or were they dead?” She looks off into the distance. I follow her gaze, as if I could also see these billowing curtains whose color I imagined as the green of a tree fully leafed out, a color I’ve always thought of as the color of life.
“Fallujah was called ‘The City of Minarets,’” she continues, bringing me back. “But now there is no call to prayer. Being a Muslim you are called five times a day, but there was only silence.
“I carry a phone book that was given to me in 2003. Fifty of my friends who are in that book are now lost. For the Americans, every Iraqi is a terrorist until they prove it, not deny it.”
As I step into the clean, well-organized and climate-controlled airport I wonder how many Americans could hear something like that, I mean, really listen. Most, it seems, prefer their news as sanitized as the airport. Waiting out plane delays due to bad weather, I watch with amused detachment as CNN delivers their version of domestic and international events. I have that very surreal feeling we’ve all had when no one wants to talk about the elephant that’s clearly sitting in the middle of the living room. Listening to Karl Rove being described as the next “Deep Throat” is a clear indication I’m back in the States.
As for Iraq, hardly a word is mentioned until a suicide bomber, who’s targeted American troops giving out candy, kills a number of small children. As horrible as this is, the stations play it out as if it’s the only news from Iraq, as if US troops aren’t also killing small children.
As a friend later tells me after reading my report about US attacks on Western Iraq’s hospitals, “I know this kind of stuff is happening, but I don’t want to believe it.” I agree with him, it’s painful to look at what your country is capable of. And it’s much easier to turn away from it if we’re not reminded of it each night when we turn on the news, which is why they don’t show us.
But, it is happening.
Right now.
As I write this.
As you read it.
Now, what will we do… now that we know?