by Tony Horwitz
“The victory is for you, oh Saddam.
With our blood and with our soul
We sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Saddam.“
Exactly how many Iraqi souls had been sacrificed in the eight-year war remained a mystery. Two hundred thousand dead was the most common estimate, a staggering toll in a nation of only sixteen million people. Certain streets of Baghdad looked the way I imagined Berlin or Paris did in the 1920s. Young amputees gathered at the Babel Cinema, leaning their stumps on crutches as they studied posters for Bruce Lee films. Veterans rolled through the souk in wheel-chairs, shopping piled on their plastic legs. Driving back from Babylon, I'd passed taxis with flag-draped coffins strapped to the roof. This was how bodies were ferried home from the front. At one point casualties were so high that the Iraqis stored corpses in freezers, releasing a few at a time to avoid panicking the public by flooding the capital with coffin-laden cabs.
To bolster morale, the Iraqis also tried to carry on as though the war hadn't disrupted everyday life. “The flight time to Basra is fifty minutes,” the pilot announced as we settled into the Iraq Air 737, “and our cruising altitude will be twenty-seven thousand feet.” Every passenger on board was a reporter or Iraqi official. No commercial planes had flown to Basra for years.
The veneer of normality evaporated as soon as we landed at Basra, Iraq's second city, near the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates. Green camouflage covered the terminal, and military aircraft crowded the runway. The Iraqis issued us helmets and loaded us into helicopters that swooped low over the desert to avoid detection by Iranian radar.
Wars have a way of finding inhospitable terrain. The plain east and north of Basra, the scene of most of the war's fighting, is a treeless expanse of grit and marsh, torched by searing winds. Winter was the season for slaughter. In summer, when the temperature hovered at 120 degrees, small arms became too hot to handle and tank drivers risked being cooked in their metal canisters.
Closer to the front, the landscape had been completely made over for the convenience of killing. Barrels of long-range artillery bristled out of the earth, pointing the way to Iran. Bulldozers pummeled the plain into ridges and trenches that swelled, like waves of dirt, one after another for miles. From the helicopter, the Iraqi lines resembled sand-castle fortifications that some ugly gray tide had washed over. The only scenery was a billboard showing Saddam in a pith helmet and carrying a gun, as if ready to go “over the top” and into the Iranian trenches.
The helicopters set down, and we piled into buses, then into jeeps, then hurtled toward the front. At ground level, clutching the death seat of an army jeep, the war suddenly became real. Cannons drummed the desert, each thu-tbump throbbing through the sand and rattling the jeep's thin floor. Columns of smoke rose from the distant horizon. The driver, a vacant-eyed Iraqi soldier, stared out through a tiny space in the windshield; the rest of the glass was smeared with mud so a flash of glare wouldn't lure the Iranian artillery.
Incoming shells had pockmarked the road. Every hundred yards or so, the driver slammed the brake to the floor, swerved around a blackened crater, then hit the accelerator again, reaching eighty in time to dodge the next crevasse. Tomorrow I may die, he said with his driving; today I may as well risk it all streaking down this fractured strip of tar.
He dropped two wheels onto the shoulder to pass a mangled jeep, splayed on the road like a run-over cat. There was a mechanical whirr as the photographers behind me loaded their cameras with film.
“Bodies, man ami” a French photographer said to the driver. “We must have bodies.”
The American beside him chimed in nonchalantly, “What we really need is a blown-out bunker with Iranians hanging out of it and Iraqis standing on top.” He checked his light meter with a quick scan of the desert. “You know, victor and vanquished in the same shot.”
The victors had told us nothing of the battle, except that it had taken place at a borderland of sand and marsh known as Majnoon. Majnoon is Arabic for “crazy,” a prewar name referring to the region's gushing oil wells. The Iranians had captured Majnoon in 1984, and now, apparently, the Iraqis had crawled out of their trenches in a rare summer assault to “liberate” the territory.
We reached the foremost Iraqi line, a tangle of trenches and bunkers topped by leaking sandbags. In front of the trenches, barbed wire and spiked metal tank traps had been laid out as a welcoming mat for oncoming Iranians. Whatever shrubs had once sprouted here had been gassed, shattered or uprooted. There was no shade from the blazing sun and nowhere to hide outside the trenches. It looked like Flanders field, without the mud.
A bridge lay over the trench, and we drove across it, into what had been, until a few hours before, a no-man's-land between the two armies. It was now a smoldering junkyard of burned rubber and blasted metal. Flat land mines lay strewn across the dust like runaway hubcaps. At points, it looked as though a giant lawn mower had run across the plain, chewing up and spitting out jagged bits of jeep, rifle, boot, helmet, canteen and bloodied uniform. The driver turned on his windshield wipers to see through the swirling smoke and dust. And in the backseat, the photographers cleaned their lenses, resuming their grisly refrain.
“This is all very scenic,” the American said, “but where are the goddamn bodies?”
The jeep clawed through a cut in the ramparts and deposited us just inside the captured Iranian line. The Iraqis had cleared their dead from the field, but the Iranians lay where they'd fallen. A lone gunner sprawled straight back from his forward post, a splotch of red blossoming across his chest and staining the sand. His eyes and mouth were open in an expression of bemusement, as though someone had just shouted “Bang, bang, you're dead!” and he'd soon leap to his feet and start playing soldier again.
A short distance away, the scene wasn't so ambiguous. One stretch of trench was a corridor of splattered flesh, bodies overlapping one another, cut down together in a torrent of gunfire. Some of the bodies were beginning to bloat, giving off a horrible stench, as if from an outhouse stuffed with rotting meat. Limbs twisted [in improbable, almost yogic contortions. One man had died clutching a gash in his groin, entrails oozing onto his thigh. Another's wounds were hidden; he seemed to be dozing comfortably with his head on the stomach of a friend, eyes closed and face tilted toward the midday sun.
Our Iraqi escorts had chosen their spot well. This bit of battlefield lay on a narrow isthmus of sand between expanses of marsh; there hadn't been much room for the Iranians to maneuver, and it was impossible to walk ten feet without coming upon more bodies. Bodies scattered amid loaves of bread, cans of Kraft cheese and an upturned teakettle, as though the predawn assault had caught the Iranians at breakfast; bodies flung like discarded clothing onto the tops of bunkers or halfway into the marsh; bodies curled up in foxholes; bodies that didn't look like bodies, just pieces fanning out from a bloody core where the shell or grenade had hit.
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 h
as 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 vvictory 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 Nairn 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.”
Nairn 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 Majnopn 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 yper-ite, 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 burns; groin is black, with areas where the skin has peeled. Wheezing can be heard in both lungs.” Most such victims later died.
We traveled 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 materiel 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 Communique 3230, announcing the “liberation of Majnoon” in “a large and lightning offensive supervised personally by President Saddam Hussein.” According to the communique, 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. Earler 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 birth-date 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.”
