Peace Kills

by P. J. O'Rourke

  We were greeted by the village elder who’d said the water main was broken. Without the formidable woman, he was more talkative. He said the American attack on the airport came through the middle of the French Quarter. The area had been defended by Iraqi secret police, but not very well, to judge by the slight shell and bullet damage. The village elder said he’d been a fire chief for thirty years. The French Quarter was not a cap to his career. After a secret-police vehicle was hit by an American rocket, a house caught fire, and the entire block burned down. Ten families were left homeless, but fortunately they were homeless already, having fled from the war.

  Tarik al-Wasty, a carpenter and pipe fitter at the airport, had spent the five days of the bombing and assault lying on the floor of his house with his wife and ten children. He showed me a hole where a tank round had come into his garden, and offered me tea. His two-year-old son was still terrified, would sleep only if curled beneath his father, and was coughing continually. A medical corpsman brought some drugs from the Iraqi cache. The corpsmen tried to explain to Tarik, whose English was not good, that steam could be used to help clear the child’s chest. Getting a blank stare, the corpsman attempted charades and was prevented from persuading Tarik to boil his toddler in a pot by the family’s nine-year-old son, whose English was excellent.

  The electrical-engineer lieutenant colonel had discovered fellow electrical engineers among the French Quarter residents. They were probing the innards of a transformer. The mechanical-engineer major had found additional engineers. They were inspecting the water main, which had been crushed by a tank. “I think I know where there’s a big piece of pipe I can scrounge,” the mechanical engineer said.

  Major Bob and I looked at the school. It was the one public building I saw in Iraq that hadn’t been looted. There were only a few bullet holes in the walls. The school was decorated with murals of Smurfs and Mickey Mouse drawn, it looked like, by the painter of the Chagalls at the Museum of Modern Art.

  The fire chief and some of his friends gave us a tour of the village. The houses were prefab, semidetached, and looked like modest European vacation cottages but with bomb shelters in their yards. Recreation facilities had been provided for the previous construction-worker tenants—a picnic area, a swimming pool, tennis and volleyball courts. The nets were gone. The poles were bent double. The swimming pool was half-filled with chunks of concrete. The picnic area was layered in trash. The fire chief said something about “repairs forbidden” and that the French Quarter had fallen out of favor with Saddam Hussein. If appearances were any indication, so had the rest of Iraq.

  “Having looked at the Mideast,” Major Bob said, “I realize how the Arabs came up with the concept of zero.”

  Will a strong Iraq emerge from the chaos? Let’s hope not. But will the Iraqi people become part of the modern, free, and prosperous world? That’s possible, though I have only one piece of anecdotal evidence to go by. I was riding through Baghdad in the last truck of an Army convoy, with a unit that will go unidentified because drinking was a punishable offense for U.S. troops in Iraq. We spotted a man selling beer on the street. “I’d better stop,” said the sergeant who was driving, “and check my windshield-wiper fluid level or something.”

  I jumped out of the truck. “Let me do this,” I said. “I’ve been coming to the Middle East for twenty years. I know how to haggle”

  “How much for the whole case?” I asked the vendor in pidgin and gesture.

  “Twenty bucks,” he said in English.

  Twenty dollars was a fortune in Baghdad at that moment. Also, I didn’t have twenty dollars. I had a ten and a bunch of Kuwaiti dinars. The vendor looked askance at the dinars. The soldiers weren’t carrying much money, either. They came up with another six dollars among them.

  I dickered with the beer merchant. He bargained. I chiseled. We bandied. A crowd gathered to watch. Some teenage Iraqi boys, seeing an Asian-American soldier in the truck, hollered, ” Thigh Cone Do!” and exhibited awkward kicks.

  The seller of beer and I concluded a deal of considerable financial complexity involving U.S. dollars and Kuwaitidinars, with change in Iraqi dinars at an exchange rate determined by consensus among the purchase’s spectators.

  Back in the truck, as we tried to catch up with our convoy, I did the math. I had bargained my way from $20 to a final price of $24.50. And the beer turned out to be nonalcoholic. Baghdad will be Houston with Enron.

  10

  POSTSCRIPT: IWO JIMA AND THE END OF MODERN WARFARE

  July 2003

  As a memorial to the astonishing war-slaughter of the modern age, I propose the island of Iwo Jima—for its ugliness, its uselessness, and its remoteness from all things of concern to the postmodern era.

  Iwo Jima can be visited only with military permission and, usually, only by military transport. A comfortless C-130 Hercules propeller craft flies from Okinawa over seven hundred miles of blank Pacific, moving as slowly as the planes of Iwo’s battle days. The island is five miles long, running northeast from a neck of sand at the base of the partly collapsed Mount Suribachi volcanic cone and spreading to a width of two and a half miles in the shape of a paint spill, with Mount Suribachi (really a 550-foot hill) as the can of paint. The colors are gray, gray-green, brown, and black—the hues of camouflage. From the air Iwo Jima looks as small as it is, a reminder of the insignificance of the great tactical objectives of war. The landscape at Ypres is banal. The beaches at Normandy are not as nice as those on Cape Cod. From the top of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg the prospect is less aweinspiring than the view from many interstate rest stops. And Iwo Jima protrudes unimpressively from an oceanic reminder of the insignificance of everything.

  I went to Iwo Jima with a director and a cameraman. We were working on a one-hour cable television documentary about the battle. Between February 19 and March 26, 1945, 6,821 Americans and about 20,000 Japanese were killed in the fight for the island. How could a one-hour anything—prayer, symphony, let alone cable television documentary—do justice to that? The director, the cameraman, and I had worried about it the night before in an Okinawa bar. We decided that 26,821 men would have told us to knock off the chickenshit worrying and drink.

  The three of us were guests on a trip that is offered periodically to young enlisted Marines, in recognition of exemplary performance and attitude. The journey is spoken of as a “morale booster.” It was summer. Iwo Jima is almost on the Tropic of Cancer, parboiled by the North Equatorial Current. In the sun its charcoal briquette rocks become a hibachi. The temperature remained over a hundred degrees at midnight. The humidity was 100 percent. When there was wind, it was an eructation. The volcanic vents on Iwo Jima are still active. The name means “Sulfur Island” in Japanese. The Marines were not allowed to smoke or swim or explore on their own. They slept on the ground. Reveille was at five A.M. They were led on hikes all day, covering the island’s 8.5 square miles. I was never in the military, but if this is what boosts morale, I want nothing to do with what causes morale to deteriorate.

  However, young men and women do not join the Marines to get comfortable. And going to Iwo Jima is a way for new Marines to imbue themselves with the spirit of the Corps. The battle for the island was fought by the largest force of Marines that had ever been assembled. The casualties were shocking. More than a third of the nearly seventy-five thousand Marines who landed on Iwo Jima were killed or wounded. The bravery, too, was shocking. Of the 353 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during World War II, twenty-seven were given for heroism on Iwo Jima, thirteen posthumously.

  “Iwo” became a byword for fighting while it was still being fought. The U.S. military had hoped the island could be taken in two weeks. The battle lasted thirty-six days. Japanese resistance was expected to be stubborn. It was ferocious. Only 1,083 of the approximately 21,000 Japanese defenders surrendered or were taken prisoner. The landing on Iwo Jima occurred as the war in Europe was ending. The Allies were on the Rhine. Warsaw had fallen. Attention turned to the P
acific theater. The Secretary of the Navy himself, James V. Forrestal, was on the beach at Iwo Jima on “D-day plus four.” When Secretary Forrestal saw the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, he said, “This means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

  And there is that flag-raising. The Associated Press photographer Abe Rosenthal’s shot is the best-known image of combat in World War II—perhaps the best-known image of combat in history. The word “icon,” blunted with use, can be applied precisely to the picture of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. Rendered in bronze at the Marine Corps War Memorial, with men thirty-two feet tall, the flag-raising is more impressive than the mountain where it happened.

  To the young—very young—Marines who were looking at that mountain when I was there, the flag-raising must seem to have happened a full Secretary Forrestal five-hundred-years ago. For someone born in 1984, the war between Japan and the United States is almost as long past as the war between Japan and Czarist Russia is for me. During that protracted meander of chronology, Iwo Jima acquired a slight, untoward comic tinge. There were numerous parodic representations of the monument, the photo, the pose. There were Johnny Carson’s “Mount Suribachi” tag lines. There was a period of years when every drunk of a certain age who’d ever been a Marine claimed to have fought at Iwo, my uncle Mike included. (Uncle Mike’s World War II Marine Corps stint was spent in a stateside hospital with an infected toe.) John Wayne didn’t fight there, either, but he gave a clumsy imitation of doing so in Sands of Iwo Jima. When televisions became common, that movie appeared on them constantly. The photograph itself did not show the first American flag atop Suribachi but, rather, its replacement with a second, larger Stars and Stripes. It is an image of combat in which no combat is involved. One or two too many men are trying to shove an iron pipe into a pile of rocks. And the flag-raising was not a signal of victory. It happened on the fifth day of the invasion, when most of the fighting and dying were yet to come.

  The Marines of 2003 woke up on their first morning on Iwo Jima and hiked four miles from their campground to the top of Suribachi. They did it so quickly that they were there for sunrise, at 5:45. They hung their dog tags at Suribachi’s peak, on a bas-relief of the flag-raising mounted on a granite plinth. The monument is decorated with hundreds of dog tags, many bearing dates of birth more recent than my last dentist appointment. But if there was anything that struck the young Marines as antique or absurd about this battlefield, they didn’t show it. Some of them will be sent to deal with the antique absurdities of Afghanistan and Iraq.

  The director, the cameraman, and I—antiques in our forties and fifties—proceeded on our own absurd errand. Bearing camera, tripod, battery packs, tapes, and so forth, we trudged through a satire of tropical paradise. The beaches were black, not white. The sea looked like agitated dishwater. The sky was cloudless, but dull with heat haze. Palm trees did not sway, nor did bougainvillea flower in the botanically anonymous uninterrupted scrub. The weather didn’t warm the blood, it broiled the bald spot and baked the feet. In place of grass shacks and tiki huts were the ruins of Japanese pillboxes and gun emplacements.

  The three of us carried our stuff across the island and up Suribachi and down. We didn’t faint in the heat or get too dizzy and sick. Iwo Jima is not a place, we complained to one another, where you feel you’re allowed to complain. We went out into the deep, steep-pitched sucking sand of the D-day landing beaches. Thirty thousand men were put ashore that morning in a space hardly adequate for a UCLA panhellenic luau. Tanks, amphibious vehicles, and Marines themselves sank to immobility. On D-day, 2,420 Americans were killed or wounded.

  Combat now is a less crowded affair and more dependent on sophisticated electronic equipment. We were lugging some. It didn’t compare in heft to what a Marine carried on a World War II amphibious landing. In 1945 one man’s weapons, ammunition, and gear might have weighed as much as 122 pounds. Killing is not as physical as it once was. It’s time for young, hopeful people to be relieved of fighting duties. War should be fought by the middle-aged men who, anyway, decide that war should be fought. We don’t have our whole lives in front of us. We’re already staring down the barrel of heart disease and SEC investigations. Being wrenched from home, family, and job wouldn’t be that wrenching for many of us. We wouldn’t need these morale-boosting trips.

  The irony of unarmed old guys didn’t appear to register on the young Marines. They had brought pocketsful of small Ziploc bags and were filling these with sands of Iwo Jima.

  Perhaps that movie deserves another, unironic look. Sands of Iwo Jima, released in 1949, doesn’t have much to do with the battle, although the final scenes are set on Iwo and incorporate harrowing footage shot by Marine combat cameramen. The movie’s real subject is a change in America, a nationwide 150-million-person shift in values. John Wayne, a Marine sergeant, is tough as nails. John Agar, a private in Wayne’s platoon, is sensitive and has been to college. They clash. “I want my son to be intelligent, not tough,” Agar tells Wayne, who is shown to be pretty damn sensitive himself and more intelligent than you’d think. Then Wayne gets shot, and Agar realizes that sometimes the sensitive, intelligent thing to do is to be tough as nails. Sands of Iwo Jima thus traces U.S. foreign policy from Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick through Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to George Bush’s Whatever-It-Turns-Out-to-Be.

  It’s tempting to believe that the Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima weren’t as sensitive as Americans. The Japanese fought for the island mostly from underground, hiding in sixteen miles of tunnels and caves. They died in there from flamethrower attacks, satchel charge explosions, and suffocation. Many Japanese dead remain in these catacombs. Narrow, scary orifices of the tunnel system open all over the island. Visiting relatives have placed small altars by the holes. Offerings of cigarettes and sake sit beside incense burners. Broken and rusted weapons are arranged gracefully. It’s just not possible for a sensitive American peering into the dreadful apertures to think that every person inside was as miserable and frightened as I would have been.

  In fact, the Japanese military men on Iwo Jima, or at least the officers, were arguably more sensitive—and more intelligent—than their American counterparts. The island’s commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, was an accomplished artist. He was fluent in English. He spent several years as a military attaché in the United States and Canada, writing letters home to his wife and child, the pages filled with humorous cartoons. And he openly opposed going to war with America. The head of naval forces, Rear Admiral Toshinosuke Ichimaru, wrote poetry in Japanese and classical Chinese and was famous for his calligraphy. Lieutenant Colonel Takeichi Nishi was sensitive to opportunities for fun. He was a baron, of the gossip-column-boldface variety, who won a gold medal in horse-jumping in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. He partied in Hollywood, had affairs with actresses, and knew Spencer Tracy. All three officers fought to the death.

  Across the northern fan of Iwo Jima a volcanic plateau is half eroded into disorderly hills. Mostly their names are nothing but their heights in feet: Hill 382, Hill 362A, and so on. Every hill caused hundreds of people to die; so did every ravine between them. Any clump of rocks providing cover was a source of death, as were all open spaces providing none. Almost five men to an acre were killed for this island, a corpse in each subdivision house lot. On D-day Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Shepard, Jr., the commander of the Third Battalion, Twenty-eighth Marine Regiment, told his men that their objective was “to secure this lousy piece of real estate so we can get the hell off it.” William Manchester, in his memoir of the Pacific war, Goodbye, Darkness, described Iwo Jima as “an ugly, smelly glob of cold lava squatting in a surly ocean.”

  By coincidence, just a month earlier, I’d been looking at other smelly globs on the far side of the same surly ocean, in the equally isolated Galapagos Islands. My fellow tourists and I ooohed at the black sands, aaahed at the sulfurous volcano vents, and told one another how beautiful the sunset was behind mounts of exactly
Suribachi’s shape. Iwo Jima does not have the strange life-forms found in the Galapagos. But what form of life could be stranger than that which was lived on Iwo Jima from February 19 to March 26, 1945? The Galapagos Islands are internationally protected, to preserve the history of biological evolution. On Iwo Jima the history of moral evolution is preserved. The litter of battle is lying where it was dropped. A seven-story Japanese fortification inside Mount Suribachi has never been reentered.

  After Iwo Jima a few more big World War II battles took place, notably in Berlin and on Okinawa. But it wasn’t long before sensitive, intelligent nations evolved beyond such things—even if Hiroshima, one of those cataclysmic events common to evolutionary history, was required to spark the progress. Since then military hordes swarming in all-out attack and military masses falling in desperate defense have been rare. When they do happen, evolutionary throwbacks are involved—Kim II Sung, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein.

  People have not gotten better, of course—-just more sensitive and, maybe, intelligent. One of the things they are intelligent about is strategy. Iwo Jima is 660 miles from Tokyo. At the beginning of 1945 Americans had Pacific air bases that were within range of the Japanese mainland for bombers but not for fighter escorts. If the Americans could take Iwo Jima, B-29s would fly over Tokyo fully protected. If the Japanese could keep Iwo Jima, B-29s would not. Today ninety-six thousand soldiers aren’t thrown into one such small space on a map. There are so many other kinds of space to fight over—outer space, cyberspace, the space between most people’s ears.

  We gave Iwo Jima back to Japan in 1968. It is now, as it was in February 1945, a Japanese military base. At sunset when I was there, the Japanese national anthem was played over loudspeakers near the Marine campground. Every U.S. Marine turned toward the Japanese flag, stood at attention, and saluted. A Marine sergeant said under his breath, “My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave if he saw this.”