Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  Wegener reported to us on the Blue Shield’s response to the Libyan conflict in 2011. After civil war broke out there, and the UN Security Council approved a no-fly zone over the country, a colleague at U.S. Blue Shield called her and said, “What are you doing? We should be doing something.” Wegener in turn called on Susan Kane, an archaeologist with experience in Libya, and the two began reaching out to their contacts. Their mission: to compile a no-strike list of Libya’s important archaeological sites, museums, and libraries, and to get the list into the hands of those who, ultimately, designated the bombing targets. “After The Hague Convention, each country is supposed to be doing this for itself,” Wegener said, working up its own list of its archaeological treasures, but few are able to. “Some sites are obvious,” she noted, like the five World Heritage sites in Libya, “but then it gets to be like asking people to pick their favorite kid. And I need it in twenty-four hours. You’re going to have to make some choices. This is why you want to do it ahead of time.” Kane drew in British archaeologists who had also worked in Iraq and who were collaborating with their Ministry of Defence. Once the lists were consolidated and coordinates checked, the archaeologists grouped and ranked the cultural sites.

  Putting together this list was one thing. Where to send it turned out to be the tricky part. “The military is not one monolithic organization,” Wegener said pointedly. She sent it to her high-ranking military contacts—including two of the men now sitting next to her here at this table—and to several of her Blue Shield colleagues in other countries, who shared it with their military liaisons.

  One of Wegener’s contacts was Richard Jackson, the man who bore a title too long for a business card, Special Assistant to the U.S. Army Judge . . . etc. He pointed out that no-strike lists of cultural sites were already part of military planning. “All the branches do the same thing in terms of intelligence preparation for the battlefield. We define the battlefield, including the cultural landscape. We have a joint targeting doctrine: public infrastructure is essential for civilians,” so hospitals and schools are on their no-strike list. Churches, mosques, and protected cultural property sites are also off-limits. “There has to be a very high level of approval to override that list,” Jackson added. “A general is only authorized to attack such places if [his troops are] receiving fire [from them].” When these no-strike lists work, they work well. “Garbage in, garbage out—if good information gets to [the targeters], we can have good results.” He mentioned a sensitive archaeological landmark, the Ziggurat of Ur, which was located on the edge of an Iraqi airfield in the first Gulf War. The ziggurat (a pyramid-shaped temple), which dated back twenty-three centuries, had been on their no-strike list, even though “Saddam purposely parked aircraft there. We didn’t target it because of collateral damage.”

  The archaeologists’ no-strike list for Libya was, predictably, more extensive than the military’s, and included sensitive information from professionals who had worked at sites around that country. They submitted it about twenty-four hours before the first NATO bombing runs in Libya. Did they get the list into the right hands? Had it made a difference? An International Blue Shield contingent that had toured the strike zone afterwards reported no significant damage to cultural sites, and none from bombing. So far, so good: NATO reports mentioned that the archaeologists’ no-strike list might serve as a model for future operations. At this point, Wegener paused to look around the table. One of the suits, Timothy Melancon, of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, cleared his throat and said, “It worked in Libya. We factored [the list] into the bombing.”

  There was a crackle in the air, the unmistakable sense that here, at last, was what the archaeologists had been working for since the Iraq debacle in 2003. They had succeeded in bringing the military to the table. They had rerouted those bombs. Melancon leaned forward. “Sites were not damaged,” he confirmed, “and not by accident.” He acknowledged that he and his team were the last ones to relay target information to the combatants taking aim. “I am the point of contact, yes. My shop—we focus primarily on stuff we don’t want to blow up, and we continually feed that database worldwide,” he said.

  This was the first time that Melancon and Wegener had met. Like the others here, they were too professional to exchange high-fives and huzzahs, but there were knowing smiles around the table.

  “We’ve been searching for you and we found you,” Wegener said to Melancon.

  “Is the journalist here?” asked one of the uniformed men, a cultural resources contact for the U.S. Air Force. What business I was in might be a matter of debate, but I squared my shoulders and raised my hand. Now what? But the man wanted only to make sure that I got it right. “You understand what’s happening here?” These people had taken me behind the scenes of a world conflict, recounting and reliving their roles as first-time collaborators. They had made a difference. The man in the suit gave me a nod: witnesses were welcome. Before the archaeologists had gotten involved, the Department of Defense had perhaps thirty cultural sites to protect in their database for Libya. Afterwards, the list contained 242. And after seven months of bombing, the sites survived.

  Other archaeologists had tried to share their knowledge to keep the bombs from destroying cultural heritage. I learned later that during the first Gulf War, a professor at the Oriental Institute in Chicago had been sending information about archaeological avoidance targets to the Department of Defense,* but his warnings had not reached the right agencies and went unheeded. The challenges involved in penetrating the military bureaucracy are formidable.

  But persuading archaeologists to cooperate in compiling a massively sensitive database is no small feat, either. Some archaeologists don’t want to engage with the military for ethical reasons; even if their efforts might help contain the destruction, they don’t want to help those who make war. Or they have practical objections to such a collaboration. One of the biggest problems archaeologists face in the field is looting and plundering; in war zones, looting often helps finance the conflict. And in a leaky world, did archaeologists want the sites they knew about on some government list? It was like flagging your antiques for the movers, so they would take extra care of the valuable stuff. In the right hands, they did take care. In the wrong hands—well, what do you know, here was an excellent list of things to loot and plunder, conveniently ranked, most valuable first.

  The man from the Air Force acknowledged the sensitivity of this data to those of us around the table. “We’re cautious, very conservative right now, and pretty confident that we can control it,” he said. Wegener thought the success in Libya would help their efforts. “We do have good networks, but it will take time for trust to build,” she said.

  The idea of a shared cultural responsibility that persists through war and conflict is growing. “How can you worry about culture when there are all these people dead or homeless and suffering?” Wegener was often asked that question, she told Smithsonian.com, and when somebody asked “for the millionth time,” she realized, “it’s always an American who asks that. I have never been asked that by somebody on the ground when I’m working.”

  MY SMALL GROUP spent less than a minute and a half relishing its success, then turned to the task of consolidating gains and moving on to the next challenge. Tim Melancon said, “This train’s already moving. Any country in the news, we want the data.” The group agreed that Mali is a likely hot spot. Wegener said, “Let’s draft policy suggestions. We have a good relationship with Tim now, but what if a new person comes in and goes, ‘What culture?’” She wanted the channel that had been opened up to work when future conflicts arise. “We want it to say, Here, this is our responsibility.”

  Meanwhile, the others in the room were coordinating with their international counterparts and developing educational tools for soldiers. As one archaeologist said, “We don’t want to say as [the soldiers] get on the plane, ‘By the way, remember not to destroy cultural heritage!’” Some of these tools were ingenious, including se
ts of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country. Who dreamed this stuff up? I was about to find out.

  I had stumbled into the beating heart of a professional conspiracy—to save the world’s archaeological heritage in the most dangerous places on earth. I had witnessed a moment in history: archaeologists had offered their expertise to the military and, after years of patient groundwork, the offer had been accepted and acknowledged. I talked to the young woman who works with a nonprofit that makes massively detailed 3-D maps of at-risk heritage sites for the site stewards.* I collected the promise of a deck of playing cards. I also collected a fistful of business cards. The only person who hesitated before handing hers over was Cori Wegener, and her card, I couldn’t help noticing, featured a photo of a suit of Italian armor, faceless and impenetrable. The first American Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Officer since World War II had had some unpleasant experiences with the press, and still chafed at the overwrought coverage of the looting of the museum in Baghdad (“170,000 items reported stolen”—the number was more like 15,000; “the Americans opened the doors to looters”—they did no such thing; “looters whacked the heads off statues”—with one exception, those statues were headless when excavated; and so on). She used to send angry e-mails to the New York Times to correct their coverage; even ten years later, the newspaper of record still referred to the National Museum of Iraq, which “looters nearly emptied.” (The galleries were mostly empty because staff had hidden the portable artifacts.) Nor did Wegener appreciate “reporters climbing on displays in the Assyrian gallery to get a better vantage point.”

  She headed down the hotel corridor, frowning behind her rectangular black glasses, worrying about the cultural heritage of Haiti and Egypt and Syria. No sooner did she leave than the creator of the cultural heritage playing cards and dozens of other creative tools for training soldiers and archaeologists, Laurie Rush, fell into step with me as we headed out the door. She was in charge of cultural protection at a military fort with a mighty archaeology program that I might like to see.

  AVOIDANCE TARGETS

  Mission: respect

  BY THE time I met Laurie Rush, she had been working to build respect for cultural heritage among U.S. troops for almost eight years. The news report that spurred her into action came over her car radio in the summer of 2004. “I was driving to work, to Fort Drum, the morning the story of the destruction in Babylon hit,” Rush said, referring to the NPR story, “U.S. Base Damages Ancient Babylonian Temple.” A civilian archaeologist who worked for the Army, Rush listened with dismay: after the National Museum of Iraq fiasco a year earlier, U.S. troops had been assigned to protect Babylon, yet now they had situated their base on top of the ruins and bulldozed ancient temples into helicopter landing pads, causing “vastly more damage than we had suspected,” archaeologist John Russell, the Coalition’s cultural advisor in Iraq, told listeners. NPR’s Renee Montagne asked Russell if the damage was reversible. In a controlled voice, Russell explained, “You can’t repair damage to an archaeological site. Every time you put a shovel into an archaeological site, you’re destroying some evidence from the past. . . . All the damage is permanent.” He suspected the same or similar destruction was occurring elsewhere in Iraq—for instance, at the air base in Kirkuk, where an archaeological site had been plundered to fill sandbags.

  Rush, the cultural resources manager for Fort Drum, in northern New York State, near the Canadian border, manages the archaeology and historic properties on its twenty-five square miles. She is employed by the Department of Defense, which she has described as “one of the most robust and proactive cultural resources programs in the world.” She noted that “archaeologists working for all branches of the services have inventoried hundreds of thousands of acres, have discovered tens of thousands of archaeological sites, have set aside thousands of sites for preservation, and have made many significant archaeological discoveries on the North American continent and Hawaii.” Protecting cultural resources is “a fundamental part of the Department of Defense’s primary mission,” Fort Drum’s website declares, and the DoD spends more on cultural heritage protection than almost any other entity in the United States. It budgets billions for environmental management, which includes cultural preservation. This is a matter of pride to the archaeologists who work for the military and their fellow federal archaeologists at branches like the National Park Service—and a shock to almost everyone else, including me. The Department of Defense has archaeologists?

  The DoD’s record in the United States was of particular pride to Laurie Rush and her team, who had brought a parade of honors and commendations to Fort Drum. “When I began working for the DoD, I expected that I might be pressured to rubber-stamp project proposals without regard for archaeological integrity,” Rush has written. “My experience has been in direct opposition to my expectations.” In fact, she enjoyed something alien to most archaeologists—enthusiastic support. “My bosses say, ‘This is so exciting,’ or ‘My wife is Native American,’ or ‘We watch the Discovery Channel at home,’” Rush said. When she asked her Fort Drum superiors to set aside part of an artillery range because it held a sacred Native American site, they agreed. She is in an extraordinary position for an archaeologist: she doesn’t have to beg.

  So she and her colleagues were particularly embarrassed. “It is difficult to imagine a group of professionals who could have been more dismayed than U.S. military archaeologists when the news of the damage done to Babylon hit the global media.”

  The soldiers didn’t mean to mess up the 4,000- and 5,000-year-old ruins—that was the part that most bothered Laurie Rush. The archaeologist who reviewed the damage had noted that a “minimal level of background about the significance of mounds in Iraq” would have made the difference. A minimal level. The simplest lessons about history and preservation could have saved the ruins of Babylon from permanent harm. Convinced that “a better educated force would not have made those kinds of mistakes,” Rush decided to take on the problem: “We have got to teach our deploying soldiers. I said to myself, I have the skills needed to fix this.”

  “Traditionally, in the U.S., the most important archaeological properties on military lands are put off-limits to military personnel as a preservation measure,” Rush wrote. Perhaps the agency had been too protective. “If you manage cultural property at home by not letting soldiers anywhere near it, you can’t expect them to spontaneously know how to occupy a cultural site overseas.”

  The morning that the U.S. military got beaten up by the press over Babylon, Rush pulled into the back gate of Fort Drum Army Garrison and headed for the computer in the Cultural Resources Building. She knew relatively little about Mesopotamia, so before she pulled her staff together and approached the command about providing direct cultural training to soldiers, she Googled the archaeology of Iraq. “I found a website and was reading about ziggurats; then I got to the bottom of the page and it said, ‘The platforms are excellent for landing UFOs.’ Noooo! It was a site sponsored by some crystal skull place!” Rush laughed, a genuine laugh that sounded like it came from a much bigger person. She laughed surprisingly often for someone who worked on a cold, bleak military post on complex and intractable problems.

  Part of Rush’s appeal was her physical presence: small and sturdy, relaxed, no makeup, a wispy, blunt-cut blond pageboy, and a grin that split her face into two joyful parts. Her white shirts were crisp, chinos relaxed, shoes comfortable. “I’m a clunky-shoe person,” Rush said. When she sent me some admiring profiles of herself that had appeared in Fort Drum’s on-base newspaper, the Mountaineer, focusing on her accomplishments and awards—most recently the Rome Prize, a fellowship usually given to academics—she joked about being an egotist, but her self-deprecating attitude and frequent praise for her colleag
ues contradicted that. She insisted that the trust that the command at Fort Drum had placed in her was the key to everything. “I have the two best bosses in the world,” she said. When Rush told one, a retired colonel, about her idea to give cultural training to deploying soldiers, “He looked at me and said, ‘If I’d had that kind of information, that would have made all the difference in the Balkans.’” He told everybody else on the base, “‘Anything she needs trumps anything we need for Fort Drum.’”

  Outside Fort Drum, archaeologists, preservationists, and military people were coming to the same conclusion Rush had—that knowledge of archaeology was of vital importance to the military—but they tended to be isolated, not organized. The bewildering bureaucracy of the military prevented any number of archaeologists from communicating their expertise and alarm. Archaeology itself is not easy to navigate; it is a broad and complicated profession, and the archaeologists of the Old World (who study Iraq and the ancient civilizations of the East and Middle East, including classical Rome and Greece) tend to go to different conferences and read different journals from the archaeologists who work in the New World of the Americas. But Rush is a proud product of American archaeology, which locates itself firmly in departments of anthropology, the study of humans (unlike in Europe, for instance, where archaeology is a branch of history). She is trained to bridge cultural gaps.

  First Rush applied for, and won, a DoD Legacy grant to develop that deck of playing cards that would teach deployed soldiers the basic archaeology of Iraq and Afghanistan. Then she began adapting archaeological sites for cultural-heritage training at Fort Drum. By the time I visited her base, she was wired to a deep and impressive range of colleagues from archaeology and the military; and everywhere I went to read more about this issue, there was the name Laurie Rush.