Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs

Michael Massing has reviewed several books at New York Review, and has written a long piece in the most recent issue called Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs. It’s well worth a read.

Here in the US, we don’t see much of the Iraq War except those parts we are intended to see. There have been horrible attacks on Nasiriyah and Fallujah that virtually destroyed those cities and killed tens of thousands, yet all we knew here was a sanitized version, if anything at all. An air war has been waged from the beginning, yet all we hear are reports of bombing raids killing this or that “Al Qaeda” operative.

Massing reports on four books, focusing on two: One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick and Generation Kill, by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright. Wright travels as an embed on a journey through Iraq during the invasion in 2003. He was with only a small group of marines, yet the devastation they wrought was significant, killing Iraqi civilians in the teens, but also countless unseen others as they lofted barrage after barrage of munitions into Nasiriyah.

One small group of soldiers left behind a swatch of death and violence. Along come groups like Hopkins and ORB to detail the carnage, and Americans are incredulous. The reason is simple: It’s all been hidden from us by a government intent on controlling images (the lesson of Vietnam), and a media embedded with that government.

The article is long, and I don’t have the inclination today to supplement Massing’s eloquent prose with my own of lesser caliber. But I will offer a couple of glimpses of what Iraqis have witnessed that Americans have not.

First a little carnage. Hide your young. Massing quotes from House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, by Staff Sergeant David Bellavia—a gung-ho supporter of the Iraq war as he casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.

Candy, anyone?

From Evan Wright:

During their initial thrust into Iraq, the Marines encounter little resistance. Speeding along Iraq’s highways, they are cheered on by excited Iraqi children. By the third day, the platoon has pushed to within twenty kilometers of the southern city of Nasiriyah. Along with 10,000 other Marines, they park on the road, waiting for orders. Even while idle, they leave their mark, in the form of garbage and—a subject rarely broached by the mainstream media—bodily waste. “Taking a shit is always a big production in a war zone,” Wright observes.

In the civilian world, of course, utmost care is taken to perform bodily functions in private. Public defecation is an act of shame, or even insanity. In a war zone, it’s the opposite. You don’t want to wander off by yourself. You could get shot by enemy snipers, or by Marines when you’re coming back into friendly lines. So everyone just squats in the open a few meters from the road, often perching on empty wooden grenade crates used as portable “shitters.” Trash from thousands of discarded MRE packs litters the area. With everyone lounging around, eating, sleeping, sunning, pooping, it looks like some weird combat version of an outdoor rock festival.

In a cluster of mud-hut homes across from the platoon’s position, old ladies in black robes stand outside, “staring at the pale, white ass of a Marine” who, naked from the waist down, is “taking a dump in their front yard.” A Marine says to Wright, “Can you imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was crapping in everyone’s front lawns? It’s fucking wild.”

Just a glimpse. It’s all going on over there right now, and here we sit, with occasional reports of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, or of Iraqis killing Americans as we try to protect them. Scorn and ridicule are heaped on those who are trying to smuggle the truth to us.

What a country.