"I am obliged to say that I personally feel that nothing justifies it--neither Communism, Fascism, nationalism, tyranny nor freedom; the conquest of the earth or the preservation of any way of life: nothing. Nothing in the world, however base nor however good, nor however theoretically admirable, can justify murder as an act of policy."
- James Cameron, Point of Departure
This morning it happened again. I was awake by 5 am, thinking about The Video.
By now the pixelated monochrome images are familiar to many of you. A group of men, some carrying what appear to be weapons, hustling down a dusty Baghdad street. A husky guy gesturing toward a nearby corner, then a young photographer peering around a building. The men gathering in a loose group on the sidewalk, discussing something.
Then, obliteration.
Why is this clip so disturbing? Because it depicts the violent death of a group of largely unarmed guys in mid-conversation, you say? Yeah, that's kinda messed up. But as we peer through this little window into the Iraq conflict, there is so very much more that is deeply upsetting.
What impresses immediately is the lofty vantage point. This isn't the view of some third-party observer on the ground, we aren't merely looking through the lens of a journalist or the shaky cell phone cam of a random bystander. No, this is clearly the trigger man's view, not just a viewfinder but a gunsight, too, linked by digital signals and physical controls to the fearsome weapon that kills those men on the ground. Many have commented on the surreal "video game" quality this lends to the footage. In industry parlance, these games are known as "first-person shooters." Well, here's the real deal--only, fortunately for us, just like Xbox, we can still sit comfortably and watch the proceedings in the safety of our homes or offices.
The complete obliviousness of everyone on the ground to the aircraft above in the video is really striking. I spend quite a bit of time in eastern Virginia, not far from the naval bases at Norfolk. Occasionally a military chopper will make its way up the coast on a training run and pass directly over our house. The windows begin to rattle, then the floor vibrates, the blast of metal blades becomes almost deafening and you think the damn thing is about to land on the roof, but in reality it's probably about four hundred or so feet above the ground. In short, this ain't NewsChopper4; these war machines are incredibly loud.
But in the video, none of the men on the ground seem even remotely aware of the presence of the Apache helicopters circling around them. Apparently we are looking across a distance that is so great--at least a mile by most estimations--that the people below cannot even hear the chopper circling them.
We've all seen sequences in Hollywood movies depicting the hell of combat, two armies facing off against each other on Omaha Beach, or even insurgents across a dusty alley way, exchanging fire with our brave troops. But I don't believe most of us have ever quite seen this: the final moments of sheer ordinariness, the banter on a street corner that could be a group of locals in any city, one man with his hands in his pockets, another, a reporter, trying to hear someone on a cell phone. Someone nods. The young photographer, identified by Reuters as Namir Noor-Eldeen, checks his camera, and several people peer over his shoulder, presumably to look at the image on his screen. Another guy walks toward the group. Even as the massive guns commence firing, shaking the camera, there is absolutely no reaction below. I make myself watch this, counting off the final seconds of nine lives.
Then, obliteration.
This is what wakes me up at five in the morning: the dry crackle of radio transmissions. The clipped, tense shorthand as our soldiers spot--or think they spot--different weapons. The dull, oddly routine banter discussing how to get the best shooting angle. Then, right after the carnage, when just when your stomach is turning over and you're thinking Good Christ What Have We Become, you get your answer like a cold slap in your sorry-ass liberal face: the unmistakeably triumphant banter of flyboys, reveling in their success.
Ha ha ha, I hit him.
Oh, yeah. Look at those dead bastards.
Nice shootin'.
Thanks.
If these were hunters discussing quail or deer, you or I might think, what the hell is wrong with these guys? But just what are we supposed to think here? When they have just slaughtered all of those human beings.
Well, almost all of them: the dust begins to settle and there is another Reuters employee, Saeed Chmagh, the man just chatting on his cell phone a moment ago, now bleeding out on the street, crawling through the dirt.
C'mon, buddy. All you gotta do is reach for a weapon.
Buddy. Try as I might, there are no words to adequately describe the disconnect between what I am feeling, and what these brutes are saying.
As you know, dear reader, it gets so much worse. A van arrives on the scene, and a middle-aged fellow jumps out. Two other men on foot run up from different directions, pick up Saaed by the shoulders and feet. We have no way of knowing, but I suspect he was still alive at this point. With all those bodies on the street, why else would the men go directly to this one? And as we hear from the radio discussion, our boys in uniform, circling omnipotently, are fully aware of this--and can't wait to finish their "job."
Picking up the wounded?
C'mon, let me engage!
The requisite permission is quickly granted. Another hail of bullets appear to come from a second chopper to our left, exploding into the van with such force that it literally leaps backward onto the sidewalk. The van driver tries to run away. He is quickly cut to pieces.
This morning my three-year-old son came tearing into our bedroom, as he is wont to do, at 6:30 am, clutching Where the Wild Things Are. He plopped down on the bed and leafed through the well-worn pages, and I turned over and looked out the window, across the lake, where the rising sun was tinging the tops of the spring trees red-gold. And I thought about that van driver's kids, wounded in the destroyed vehicle, having just seen their father blown to pieces. Sometimes I get frustrated and yell at my little boy, and the tears well up easily and pour down his flushed cheeks. I think about those kids in the van, one four- and one eight-year-old, how they must have been crying in that moment.
Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.
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Many of us suspect that this is only the tip of the iceberg. That in a bloody war against insurgents in heavily populated cities, the killing and wounding of innocents is a common, perhaps even daily occurrence. Search for "apache gun video" on YouTube and you will quickly find hundreds of clips from Iraq and Afghanistan, most of which are apparently posted by military personnel--the 21st-century equivalent, I suppose, of painting symbols on the side of your aircraft for every "kill." The posters are quick to label these clips with titles like "Insurgent Take Down" and "Gunships Vaporize Terrorists," and indeed, some of the victims are clearly engaged in combat. Others, though, seem merely to be walking toward buildings, or strolling across bridges, and I suppose we just have to take the poster's word for it that we are watching our Mortal Enemy being blown to bits and not, say, a policeman, or a security guard, or a taxi driver, or a barber.
In fact, in the longer version of the Wikileaks video, there is a second attack on a building from which insurgents are believed to be firing. Just before the first missile hits, a man can clearly be seen simply walking by on the sidewalk. A heartbeat later, he is summarily annihilated.
Many here have expressed compassion for the military personnel in that helicopter, thrust by their leaders into a hellish conflict and forced to make split-second life-and-death decisions. And, having read (with no small amount of skepticism) the Pentagon's official investigative report, I do understand a little better the context of the fighting that day. In the heat of conflict, perhaps even the photographer looked like he was assisting insurgents by photographing American positions. But my benefit of the doubt for this fog-of-war interpretation runs out at the arrival of the van and the ensuing merciless attack on the rescuers. I just don't know what else to call it: it sure as hell looks like murder.
But I have to get to my job. I get up, brush my teeth, make coffee, thinking about all of the chasms, physical and metaphorical, that define this war. The soaring distance between those Iraqis on the street and the flying machines that destroyed them; the long ocean miles between my comfortable home in suburban New York and the streets of Baghdad; the even wider gulf between those who fight America's wars, and those back home who continue on with their lives as if nothing at all unusual was happening.
And I think about the layers upon layers of cognitive dissonance that make this war possible: a guy in a chopper who's probably been taught Thou shalt not kill his whole life still pulls the trigger and shrugs it off; a government that claims to champion human rights and God-given freedom routinely using overwhelming violence as its foreign policy tool of choice; a society that is increasingly polarized between those that serve in the military, committing unspeakable acts in the name of duty and honor, and those of us that stay at home, going about our daily business, as if joining our happy children at the breakfast table was the most natural thing in the world.