Politically Inspired Fiction: The War Is Over

By Stephen Elliott, AlterNet. Posted April 8, 2003.

Politically Inspired is fiction inspired by current events. A new short story appears weekly on AlterNet.

You try to explain later why you did it. The desert is so hot, so endless, flat and wasted all the way to Jordan. And I was on assignment. I had asked to be on assignment here, in this stupid war, the war for oil, part two. This is where you make your reputation when you are a journalist, by being shot at from jammed rifles hidden behind scrub bushes, but the war is over for me.

We rolled through clay and rocks toward Basra. The residents of the city were fleeing. Some were being shot in the back as they ran. There weren't enough Marines to keep them safe. The Marines had no intention of keeping anybody safe. But that was a week ago. I took a picture of a woman lying face in the ground. Blood poured from the wound in her neck, crusting and pooling around her scarf that had fallen up toward the top of her head, stray curls of hair framed her cheeks. Except that she was dead and covered in blood, she was dressed the way most of the women were dressed, in a long, flowing, shapeless dress. Her skin, where not painted red by the blood, was only slightly darker than the desert floor. And she was hunched, her body bent, as if she had fallen on a large stone. But it wasn't a stone, it was her baby, and the baby was of course dead. Here is your abortion, President Bush.

Of course, the papers didn't want it. The American paper I work for, on the western edge of my own country. All of the pictures I shot of this woman. I shot hundreds of pictures of this woman, her white clothing folded around her waist and legs, her black scarf, the wheels of an American jeep just barely visible on the horizon. The dead were everywhere as I rolled, embedded in the machine, toward the second largest city in this parched and ravaged country. I took hundreds of pictures of her and sent them home and they were denied. They were not even sent across the wires. They were not syndicated, I was not reprimanded, they are not my property. There are other photographers here, hundreds of them. My images are good, they knew I would get them something better next time.

At night we slept in canvas tent cities, rapidly torn down and set up again. Sticks with roofs and walls to protect us from the elements. There are hundreds of tent cities along a supply route. I was diverted toward Baghdad, a POW had been rescued, the coalition was attacking the airport, making quick strikes into the capital, things were looking up. Saddam may or may not be dead. Peter Arnett was fired for granting an interview with Iraqi television. In his interview he thanked the Iraqi government for being so open with the media. What a joke. They expelled the journalists. They have not been open with anyone, no one is open, except perhaps for a boy in an apartment in Baghdad, sending blogs into cyberspace until his connection gets cut.

Poor Michael Kelly, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is killed when his Humvee rolls, trying to avoid sniper fire. He drowns with the driver, their heads dipped under water for hours before being towed out. Danny Pearl of the Wall Street Journal is on all of our mantel pieces, neck slit open for the video cameras. "I am a Jew, my mother is a Jew." Everything changed with Danny Pearl. In Kosovo we would watch the war from cafes, that's over now. The story of the journalists in this war is an interesting one. It will be written. Maybe I will write it, between shifts back home waiting tables, because nobody will ever buy my photographs again.

Here is a secret that everyone knows: Pictures lie. Remember that when they play loops of crates found full of white powder on the evening news. How angry everyone was when Al Jazeera showed dead American troops. Oil fires make for spectacular back drops. Framing is everything. I have always had an eye for good composition.

Sometimes, with bombs dropping, when you haven't showered, when you're not careful to drink enough water, you have a lapse of judgement. Maybe you black out. I lost over $200 in a poker game with a colonel from the Third Cavalry. "You're not thinking straight," he told me. "What do you think a pair is worth in seven card stud?" His good humor made me angry but I didn't let it show. The lines across his square face were void of concern. I envy people who have made all of their decisions already so they can stop thinking about things. I've had meltdowns before. Nothing the colonel needed to know about.

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