The Real Face of War

The televised face of this war is a lie. It's a flickering screen with a Fox-TV newsman's macho boast that US troops are in the heart of Baghdad and are "here to stay." It's a Pentagon press conference assuring us that another city has been "taken," but not yet "secured."

Occasionally, however, we catch glimpses of the reality: descriptions of incidents that reflect the real impact on both sides.

A U.S. Marine in a medevac unit outside Al Kut, unable to save a dying American soldier, buries his resucitation equipment in despair. I'm reading this in my morning paper. I close my eyes and try to imagine where this Marine came from, what he did before he was shipped over to Iraq. Maybe he worked in an inner-city hospital where gunshot wounds are the norm, but the hospital's emergency room has the equipment and personnel to save lives and patch together even the worst cases. But the stripped-down, gritty, sweltering reality of a battlefield after three days of non-stop fighting with bullets still whizzing overhead and not enough clamps to stop the bleeding and not enough hands to patch all the wounds fast enough has finally broken his will. What will be left of this man when he returns home?

I read a quote from soldiers who've shot up a van full of women and children. The soldiers' initial, agonized question, "Why did they do it? Why did they try to run the checkpoint?" will eventually, with the passage of time, become "Why did I do it? Why did I shoot them all?" The soldiers will remember that brief scene over and over again in their nightmares for the next 20, 30, 40 years.

These soldiers weren't the only ones who prepared for the worst, only to realize that war brings on the worst in spite of their best-laid plans.

Ibrahim al-Yussuf's parents thought they could save their 12-year-old son by sending him to live with relatives in Zambrania, a small, rural village outside of Baghdad. The city was too dangerous, they thought, as loud explosions and fireballs lit up the skyline at night. After all, a U.S. HARM missile demolished a busy market, killing 67 people and wounding dozens more. If Ibrahim left the city he'd be out of the way of stray missiles.

But soon after the war started, U.S. military planners set up "kill boxes" in the region south of Baghdad, a largely rural area, where Zambrania and several other villages lie. Kill boxes were used in Afghanistan; they're grid-like areas on the military planners' maps that are designated as free-fire zones. U.S. fighter pilots are allowed to shoot anything that moves within these zones. But, just as in Afghanistan, there is no way that civilians on the ground can know when they've entered a kill box until a bomb falls on them.

Ibrahim and his 17-year-old cousin, Jalal, left home to have lunch with Abdullah, a friend who owned the neighboring farm. They were torn apart by a U.S. bomb because they were outside, walking, and a kill box had been superimposed over their home.

Zambrania and the neighboring village of Talkana have lost 19 people because of U.S. fighter planes. In Manaria, a village 30 miles south of Baghdad, 22 people have died and 53 have been injured in air raids. Most of the dead and wounded are children and women. Many of the wounds look suspiciously like those caused by cluster bombs, anti-personnel weapons that release a spray of deadly shrapnel that can cut through flesh, bone and even the soft, mud-brick walls of Iraqi houses. The U.N. has condemned the use of cluster bombs, a key component of the U.S. arsenal, because so many more civilians are killed by cluster bombs than any other kind of ordnance except land mines. And like a land mine, a cluster bomblet can lie unexploded, waiting for a victim to brush by it or a curious child to pick it up.