Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  A Turkish journalist on his fifth visit to the front flipped open his notebook and lectured on the art of reporting war.

  “First thing, always study the corpses,” he said, nudging his toe against the crushed skull of an Iranian teenager. “Are they fresh? Bullets in front or back?” He inspected the blood dribbling from the corpse’s nose. “I think it is fresh. If the body is black and burst-open, then maybe it is old.”

  He scribbled in his notebook. Bullets in front. Bodies fresh.

  “Number two. Are there signs of gas?” He plucked a mask from the dust and opened a frayed U.S. Army manual, a relic of the days when America supplied the shah’s army. The manual showed G.I. Joe with buzz cut and fatigues, demonstrating how to wear the mask. “The Iranians expected gas,” the Turk continued, “but bullets were enough.” He slapped his notebook shut. “With corpses you must study these things.”

  Letters and journals fluttered across the field, and I collected a few for a Farsi-speaking colleague to translate. Mostly, they recorded the tedium of trench warfare. “At 15:00 the enemy has added two rows of barbed wire in front of his position,” read a log filled with similar entries. One soldier had passed the time doing Farsi crosswords and doodling pigs. Another filled his log with crude sketches of a woman with luxuriant curls cascading down her shoulders; an un-Islamic daydream in a country of heavily veiled females. In the margin he’d scribbled what seemed to be verses to the girl he’d left behind. “I have seen your picture and puffed your perfume and wish I could be with you always enjoying your beauty and your beautiful smell.”

  In a letter from Tehran to a young soldier name Jalil, each family member contributed a thought, with a sister composing a poem and a brother adding the final words. “I hope that this war is going to finish in favor of truth,” he wrote. “Then all the youngsters will once again come back to the warmth of their families. And you too.” The letter lay beside the body of a teenager who might well have been Jalil, face up on the sand, his close-cropped hair and patchy beard matted with blood. Flies crawled in his one open eye.

  Many of the corpses were those of men my own age, killed in the final days of a pointless war. But I found it hard to feel any connection. What I did feel was a mad compulsion to stare. Look how fragile the flesh is! How easily a skull collapses! The whole scene wasn’t so much nightmarish as numbing. What a piece of work is man! Putrid flesh and crushed bones; lunchmeat for maggots, mold for the loam.

  I wasn’t given long to wax Shakespearean. Soon after we arrived, Iraqi bulldozers and trucks moved in to dig fresh trenches and turn the Iranian guns around. There was no room to maneuver, and no sentiment spared for enemy dead. One huge vehicle and then another rolled over the bodies. The corpses lurched up and jerked their arms under the weight of the wheels, as if in a final protest, before collapsing in an even spread of brains, bones, organs. A truck bogged for a moment and then churned on, leaving tread marks on the pancake of flesh.

  As soon as the convoy passed, a group of Iraqi soldiers crowded atop the gore, firing guns in the air and flashing victory signs for the cameras.

  “Mister, picture! Mister, picture!”

  The photographers jostled for position. They had what they’d come for: victor and vanquished in the same shot.

  “Shadow!” the American yelled at the Frenchman. “Get your goddamn shadow off the goddamn corpse!”

  Away from the tumult, two Iraqi soldiers slumped against a bunker, sharing a cigarette. They looked exhausted but elated, suffused with the high of battlefield survivors. Their eyes glowed, their chapped lips curved into glazed, involuntary smiles. “We attacked for six, maybe eight hours,” said one of the men, whose name was Mahmoud. “Then the Persians just got up and ran away.” He nodded toward the corpses. Present company excluded.

  Beside Mahmoud, a gray-haired man named Naim nursed a wound in his hand. His olive-drab uniform was mottled with blood, and each crease of his face was a pocket of grime. As he spoke, he spit dirt from between his teeth. “I am tired, but I am not so scared of the enemy as I was,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “They don’t fight like Iranians anymore.”

  Naim peered inside a pillbox, checking for corpses, then crawled halfway in to shield himself from the sun. “I do not like to see so much blood,” he said. “But when the bodies are Iranian, I do not mind so much.” He tipped his helmet over his eyes and didn’t even stir at the celebratory bursts of gunfire unleashed for the photographers a few feet away.

  * * *

  By the standards of the eight-year war, this corner of the Majnoon battlefield was unremarkable. When the Iraqi advances stalled early in the war, the Iranians had counterattacked with “human waves” of young soldiers—many of them children—armed by the ayatollah with plastic keys to heaven’s gate. In battle after battle, they clambered over their own dead and into the Iraqi trenches. Outnumbering the Iraqis three to one, the Iranians appeared headed for victory. But gradually the war bogged down in a Somme-like deadlock, a dreary exchange of the same few miles of desert ground. At Christmas of 1986, in one of many attacks that the Iranians termed their “final offensive,” the Iraqis mowed down wave after wave of Iranians until the tide stalled two miles short of Basra. The slaughter was so stunning that it entered Iraqi war lore as “the Great Harvest.”

  In Baghdad, I later met an Iraqi who had survived the grim reaping near Basra. His name was Ali and he’d been driving a tank when an Iranian opened the hatch and tossed in a grenade. The explosive blew off part of Ali’s skull and killed the other three men in his tank. Ali was shot in the hip as he struggled from the tank. He survived, he said, by “playing dead” until the Iranian assault petered out.

  “It was January the twenty-second and I see this with my own eyes,” he said, as though the intervening two years hadn’t happened. “There were so many bodies I could not touch the ground.” He crawled across the carpet of corpses until he reached the tank of a friend. “I banged and banged on the hatch, shouting, ‘Hatem, it is me! Hatem, it is Ali!’” Finally Hatem let him in.

  Ali spent six months in hospital and emerged limping but healthy. Once a star soccer player, he couldn’t run anymore, but he’d taken up body-building instead. He rolled up his sleeve to show off bulging biceps. And he seemed proud of the soft spot in his head where a piece of his skull was missing.

  But after boasting of his recovery, Ali had a confession. “I have dreams, whole weeks of dreams,” he said. “I am in the tank, I look up, I see a hand, I see the grenade falling.” Usually, that was when he woke up. But sometimes the nightmare continued until he found himself pounding on the hatch of Hatem’s tank. In the dream, Hatem didn’t let him in.

  He paused, sweating, then dismissed the nightmare with a wave of his hand. “I should not complain,” he said, limping off into the night. “I am alive. I am so lucky.”

  * * *

  The Great Harvest had cooled Iranians’ kamikaze fervor. So had Iraq’s use of poison gas. A few days after Majnoon, a United Nations team inspected the dead and wounded on the Iranian side of the border battlefield we had visited. They found that preceding the early-morning assault, the Iraqis had lobbed gas-filled shells on the Iranian rear. The poisons included a crude form of mustard gas known as yperite, named for the World War I battle at Ypres where it was first deployed by the Germans.

  The first symptoms consist of “a burning in the eyes,” the UN report stated. “The burning is followed by blurred vision, vomiting and blisters that ooze an amber-colored fluid. Then the gas blackens and ulcerates the body’s moist crevices: armpits, buttocks, groin.”

  The report included an inspection of a nineteen-year-old named Ali. “The skin all over the body is dark and cracking,” it said. “Armpits black, with lesions resembling second-degree bums; groin is black, with areas where the skin has peeled. Wheezing can be heard in both lungs.” Most such victims later died.

  * * *

  We tr
aveled back from Majnoon through the gathering dusk as the spoils of battle were carted to the Iraqi rear. The profligate ruin not just of men but of matériel seemed suddenly astonishing. The road was clogged with bent steam shovels, burned bulldozers, overturned tractors and twisted claws of machines I couldn’t identify. A picture of Ali, the seventh-century Shiite martyr, was emblazoned on the front of captured Iranian tanks. The tank’s Iraqi driver poked his head from the turret, his face wrapped Palestinian-style in a checkered keffiya, to keep out the dust.

  As the traffic stalled, the Turkish reporter turned on his radio and picked up War Communiqué 3230, announcing the “liberation of Majnoon” in “a large and lightning offensive supervised personally by President Saddam Hussein.” According to the communiqué, the operation was part of a larger assault known as Tawakalna-al-Allah, On God We Rely. The news ended, and a chorus of voices began the ubiquitous refrain.

  “We will challenge them if they cross the border, oh Saddam.

  “The victory is for you, oh Saddam . . .”

  That was the most we were ever to learn of the battle. As night fell, we stopped five miles behind the Iraqi lines for a military briefing, “brief” being the operative word.

  “It was quite an easy engagement,” said the Iraqi commander, who wore a Saddam-style haircut and thick mustache. “We attacked and the Iranians withdrew.”

  “How many dead?” asked the Turk.

  “Many,” the officer said. “Gentlemen, please. Let us have tea.” It was the first refreshment we’d had in sixteen hours, except for a few swigs from soldiers’ canteens.

  When the tea was done we visited a wire cage where several hundred Iranian prisoners huddled beneath blinding floodlights. Earlier in the war, Iranians had remained defiant even in captivity, chanting “Khomeini!” and biting their Iraqi guards. But at war’s end, with estimates of the Iranian dead ranging as high as a million, their spirit had drained away, leaving a broken and silent rabble of teenagers and old men.

  As we entered the cage, Iraqi guards brandished submachine guns and ordered the prisoners to sit down. It was a gratuitous gesture. Most of the men were already curled on the concrete, asleep or writhing from gruesome wounds. A shirtless youth rested his head on a sneaker, eyes wide with terror, hands clutching bloody swathes of cotton piled on his crotch. A friend tried to calm him by bringing a cigarette to his lips. One gray-haired man with a wound in his throat kept getting up and trying to say something to a guard, pointing feverishly at his trachea. His voice was almost inaudible, and the Iraqi, who evidently spoke no Farsi, kept ordering the man back to the ground.

  As I wandered through the cage, one young soldier grabbed my sleeve and looked pleadingly at me with the dark, almond-shaped eyes of a prince in a Persian miniature. “From where you are?” he asked.

  “America.”

  “Ever you go Iran?”

  “Someday, I hope.”

  He asked for my notebook and scribbled his name in a mix of Arabic and Roman script. Then he added his birthdate according to the Islamic calendar: 1387. He was twenty-two and had been at the front for three years.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by the gesture. But as the Iraqis herded us out of the cage, another prisoner called out in English. I turned to record a last-minute Iranian comment on the war. He gave me his name, then added in a weary voice: “Please, I have brother. He is principal of high school in Tehran. Please tell him you have seen me here.”

  It was midnight when we gathered for the two-hour drive back to Basra. Artillery still pounded in the distance, a gunpowder heartbeat. An Iraqi flare lofted into the sky to illuminate the enemy position; another concussion of shellfire shuddered through the sand. Then flares began whooshing and popping every which way across the desert. Machine-gun fire erupted all around us as soldiers emptied their automatic weapons into the air. The Iraqis were celebrating their victory.

  I stood there, slack-jawed, marveling at how much the display looked like July Fourth fireworks. Then the Turk grabbed my arm and dragged me into a bunker.

  “Third lesson of war reporting,” he said. “All that lead has to land somewhere. Let us make sure it is not on our heads.”

  9

  THE JORDAN RIVER

  I Came for the Waters

  River is deep and the river is wide.

  Milk and honey on the other side.

  —Southern black spiritual

  Khalaf Ghoblan, his face framed by a black-checked keffiya, stood gazing across the Jordan River. Bare limestone hills climbed the West Bank above a thin band of green snaking along the valley’s floor. Shielding his eyes against the setting sun, the eighty-seven-year-old bedouin pointed to the spot where his clan had once camped in long sheepskin tents by the river.

  “There was a wooden bridge just there,” he said, gesturing at the near bank, obscured by reeds. Israeli and Jordanian sentries now straddled the river bend, staring at each other through binoculars. “It cost half a Turkish penny to cross.”

  Ghoblan chuckled, a raspy, old man’s laugh. To dodge the toll, he often swam across instead. “Half a penny was a lot in those days.” The river was mightier then, and crowded with boats. Black African slaves, imported by the Turks, poled downstream on rafts filled with sheep. Russian Orthodox pilgrims canoed the other way, headed to a site near Jericho, revered as the site of Jesus’ baptism.

  When the young Ghoblan reached the other bank, he would buy cotton shirts from Jewish seamstresses, among the first of the Zionist settlers. To keep the clothes dry, he paid the half-penny toll on the return trip to his home in what is now Jordan. “I felt the Jews were fellow Semites and the river was ours to share,” he said.

  Then came the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, after which a stretch of the river became a tense border between Jordan and the new state of Israel. Still, Ghoblan recalled occasional instances of neighborly contact. When kibbutz-owned cows strayed through the shallow water, Jordanian farmers returned them and received chocolate as a reward.

  But after the Six-Day War in 1967, the only thing Arab and Jew exchanged across the river was gunfire. Bridges closed. Barbed wire and minefields sprouted on both banks. And anyone who tried, like Michael of spiritual song, to row his boat ashore risked being shot by border guards. “I cry for the old times,” Ghoblan said, turning his back on the river. “War is the only language Jews understand.”

  We wandered back to his house, a two-story stucco villa which had replaced the tent in which he was raised. He served me coffee flavored with cardamom, then ducked into his bedroom and returned carrying an enormous Turkish musket. “I used to shoot at the Jews many times in the wars,” he said. With shaky fingers, he lifted the flintlock to his shoulder and aimed it across the river. “Thank God,” he said, “I never hit anyone.”

  * * *

  I arrived at the Jordan River in November 1987, five weeks before the start of the Palestinian intifada. Like most journalists, I had no inkling that the tranquil, balmy autumn was the end of an era in Middle East affairs. Many Israelis still blithely supposed the Palestinian problem would somehow melt away. And Arabs returned the insult by pretending that the Jewish state simply didn’t exist.

  Astonishing effort went into sustaining this fiction. At a government office in Abu Dhabi, I’d studied a map of the Middle East with the name “Israel” carefully blacked out with magic marker. Officially, the word itself was unmentionable; on the news, Israel was “occupied Palestine,” or the “Zionist entity.” Western journalists in Cairo acceded to the taboo, confiding in hushed tones that they were off to visit “Dixie.” The code name dated from the days when Middle East correspondents were based in Beirut and a trip to Israel had meant heading south of the border, to Dixie. It was considered offensive to Arab ears—and therefore ill-advised professionally—to utter the unmentionable word, even in Egypt.

  I traveled to Dixie by land, through Jordan, a country that was the most Western of Arab
states, yet the most insistent in blotting out the country occupying its entire western border. On the television news, the weather report skipped from the Jordanian cities of Aqaba and Salt to a mysterious locale called “the Western Heights,” which included Jerusalem. One morning, I read in the International Herald Tribune that an Israeli tennis player had reached the finals of a major tournament. The Jordanian sports report that night included only the result of the women’s matches.

  In Amman, I shared a taxi with a Palestinian couple headed to the Allenby Bridge, a tightly controlled crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank. Israel didn’t exist there either. Jordanian border guards checked the passports of incoming travelers and turned back anyone with an Israeli stamp. There was no other country the traveler could have just come from. But appearances had to be maintained. Journalists and other frequent border-crossers carried two passports, or asked on entering Israel that their documents be spared the offending imprint.

  It was the Jordan River I intended to write about. Unfortunately, like most travelers before me, I was woefully misinformed about the waters I had come to view.

  “When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide,” Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. In fact, he soon discovered, “It is not any wider than Broadway in New York.”

  A century later, having been diverted for irrigation and poisoned by fertilizer, the Jordan wasn’t any wider than Wall Street. As the border bus bumped across the wood-slatted floor of the Allenby Bridge, I aimed my camera out the window. A murky trickle came into view, but I didn’t have time to focus before the River Jordan was gone. The Allenby Bridge is fifteen yards long.