[Mb-civic] The Grief of Baghdad

[Michael Butler]

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    The Grief of Baghdad
    By Evan Derkacz
    AlterNet

     Tuesday 05 October 2004
 The painful stories and pictures of some of the 16,000 American soldiers ­
like Cpl. Tyson Johnson ­ wounded in Iraq might move Americans to action.
Maybe that's why we don't see them in the mainstream media.


    After having seen a couple of his buddies turn up dead in a ditch during
high school, Tyson Johnson decided to leave his Prichard, Alabama home and
make something of himself "because I knew where my life was headed."

   

  

    So he joined the National Guard first, and then, for a bonus of $2999,
he joined the army.

     Now 22, he's back in Prichard, his life in ruins.

     Johnson's story is just one of many from Nina Berman's powerful new
book, "Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq'' (Trolley Ltd.). It contains short
testimonials and a photo essay illuminating one of the dark corners of the
war in Iraq: the stories and pictures of the permanently wounded men and
women home from the war. If the pumped-up "Army of One" recruiting campaign
is the "before" photo, "Purple Hearts" is the "after."

     Cpl. Johnson's photo in the book is subtly disturbing; it creeps up on
you. On a sunny Southern day, he leans gently against a chain-link fence,
eyes downcast. Baggy basketball shorts sit low, Hanes underwear defiantly
above the waistline. His trim torso is a collection of scars, the largest of
which snakes from the bottom of the breastbone, diving into his navel,
disappearing finally into that exposed Hanes waistband. Others emerge from
his back; there's a patch covering something over his heart; what appears to
be the work of sprayed shrapnel across his left side.

     Despite the message written on his body, it's his words that will haunt
you: "Well, uh, shrapnel down the back, shrapnel that came in and hit my
head, punctured my lungs. I broke both of my arms. I lost a kidney. My
intestines was messed up. They took an artery out of my left leg and put it
into this right arm. They pretty much took my life. Pretty much."

     He has trouble teaching his son how to count on his hands because, "You
can see my fingers is messed up." Cpl. Tyson Johnson is 100 percent
disabled, cannot support his family - and the National Guard wants its bonus
back.

     "Purple Hearts'" succinct introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a
meditation on the concept of the "hero" since 9/11, paraphrases the stories
within (though it serves as an adequate surrogate for the silenced stories
of all the American boys and girls injured as a result of the war):
 "Three of them were wounded in firefights. One was delivering ice. Another
walked off into the desert on a bathroom break and stepped on a mine...The
youngest of them all was wounded by a suicide bomber. Two of the solders who
look the least damaged are blind, far more damaged than the camera can
record. One soldier whose limbs are intact and who appears nearly normal is
brain-damaged. A metal chunk from a bomb pierced his brain and left him a
stranger to his family."

    Thanks Mr. Bush

    On the same day that the "Purple Hearts" exhibit opened at the Redux
Gallery in New York City in early September, a family in Geauga County, Ohio
(perhaps the mother of all battleground states), sent a huge message to
President Bush - literally. Ken and Betty Landrus, the parents of Staff Sgt.
Sean Landrus, who was killed in January, made an enormous sign which they
held up from their front yard for passersby - and eventually news cameras -
to see. The sign read: "Thanks Mr. Bush for the death of our son." The story
was reported by the local NBC affiliate, WKYC-TV.

     Interesting that during all its coverage of the war, the station hadn't
bothered to contact the family of a local casualty of the war, to report on
what it was like to have a child die in the war - to report on the
consequences of our nation's policies. They never asked Staff Sgt. Landrus'
widow and three kids what it was like either, though his youngest child,
having been born shortly before Landrus left for Iraq, admittedly wouldn't
have given a good interview.

     A Mother's Tears

    Meanwhile, a group of families who have lost loved ones in Iraq are
launching a national TV ad campaign called "Real Voices." In the first spot,
"A Mother's Tears," Cindy Sheehan addresses President Bush directly, the
sadness and pain welling up in her voice as she describes the death of her
son, Casey, and its aftermath:

     "And his sergeant said, 'Sheehan you don't have to go'... And Casey
said, 'Where my chief goes, I go'... And he died in his best friend's
arms... I imagined it would hurt if one of my kids was killed, but i never
thought it would hurt this bad. And especially someone so honest and brave
as Casey, my son; when you haven't been honest with us, when you and your
advisors rushed us into this war. How do you think we felt when we heard the
Senate report that said there was no link between Iraq and 9/11?"

     When was the last time you heard the mother of a dead soldier
interviewed on TV? Or the wife or husband or son or daughter? If there have
been any such interviews, they certainly haven't been as plentiful as, say,
analysts dryly discussing strategy and the prognosis for "stability."

     The group has three more commercials in production.

     Clean War 

    During much of the Vietnam war, disturbing images like these were
broadcast into American living rooms on a nightly basis. Along with
protesters and returning heroes, like John Kerry, who were able to testify
first hand as to the horror and chaos occurring "on the ground," these
images ultimately proved a deal-breaker for many Americans.

     That's the lesson that the Pentagon and the State Department took from
Vietnam: The way to maintain support for a war is to keep the pictures and
stories of the dead and the wounded from the American people. And so when
the first Gulf War came to an end, the elder Bush was able to say, "The
specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the
Arabian peninsula." It was clear that popular support for a war would be
achieved far more successfully in this day and age without the mess. The
"mess," of course, being the human cost and consequences of war, broadcast
on TV, and therefore into the daily consciousness of the American people.

     Coverage of that war did receive some criticism for portraying it with
all the sensitivity of a video game - in retrospect. But the most scathing
critiques were confined to the relatively short reach of the burgeoning
alternative press. In the buildup to the current Iraq War however, it became
apparent that new trends in the creation and distribution of information
were going to make the possibility of another sanitary war highly unlikely.
The execution of the war would be impossible should a large enough portion
of the population come to believe that the real story was being withheld.
Craftily anticipating this movement, the White House and the Pentagon
devised a plan to both control the flow of information and to simultaneously
give the impression that "unprecedented" access was available to American
consumers. "Embedded journalism" was born, providing what Seattle-based
media-culture Professor Robert Schuessler called, "live, spontaneous
propaganda."

     And in the beginning it was a "clean" war, a video game war. As smart
bombs rained down on Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, it looked, from those
"TV screens" (the same ones, President Bush informed us in last week's
debate, that keep him up to date on Iraq) like a painless, lossless, distant
victory we could all safely rally around.

     "How Can I Follow This Guy?"

    Uncontrolled images managed to make it through in any case. Who can
forget those arresting images of flag-draped coffins (you can barely
separate the words in that phrase anymore), previously prohibited, but
smuggled into the American consciousness via digital camera and the
Internet?

     "Fahrenheit 9/11," and "Uncovered" brought analysis, connections, and
information that readers of AlterNet, The Nation and other alternative
portals had previously seen, but which the majority of Americans relying on
TV and other mainstream sources hadn't.

     Television commercials, like the "Real Voices" series mentioned above,
concerned artists, like Purple Hearts photographer Nina Berman, and enraged
individuals everywhere threaten to bring the consequences of war into enough
living rooms a la Vietnam. And like Vietnam, it is sure to have an impact
both on perceptions of the war and on the outcome of the approaching
election.

     Michael Skrzypek of Oakland, Calif., put it this way: "Two straight
weeks of pictures of casualties on TV and the American public would probably
demand an end to the war. There's a reason the military/Bush doesn't allow
photos of military caskets."

     William Saletan, writing for Slate, adds a slightly more complex
psychological dimension to the equation. One of the emerging themes over the
past month, and certainly a factor in the recent presidential debate, is
"reality" and Bush's ability to acknowledge it. For Bush and his handlers,
their inability to face what the CIA, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and
several prominent Republican senators have all characterized as a downward
spiral in Iraq, can perhaps be chalked up to spin and self-interest. But
there has to be more than spin and self-interest behind the reluctance of
many other Americans to face this reality. Saletan writes:
 "We don't want to believe that we were wrong, that we've committed $200
billion and sacrificed more than 1,000 American lives in error. We can't
imagine asking thousands more to die for a mistake. Bush can't imagine it,
either. So, he offers himself - and you - a way out. Ignore the bad news, he
says. Ignore the evidence that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs
had deteriorated. Ignore the evidence that Saddam had no operational
relationship with al-Qaida. Ignore the rising casualties. Ignore the
hollowness and disintegration of the American-led 'coalition.'"

    Is there some collective psychosis at play? Are we working together to
suppress something too awful to consider? Surely it isn't surprising that
those who simply can't maintain the fantasy, those who experience the cost
of war most viscerally and on a daily basis are eager for others to be aware
of the cost of war.

     Like Captain George Sakakini, for example, the physician in charge of
"greeting" the wounded at the Landstuhn Hospital in Germany (through which
nearly every one of the 16,000 wounded American soldiers passes). An article
in last week's Newsday profiled him and other hospital workers:
 "Like his staff, who brim with frustration at what they see as the
irresponsible disinclination of the American people to understand the costs
of the war to thousands of American soldiers, the hospital's chief surgeon
feels that most Americans have their minds on other things.

     'It is my impression that they're not thinking about it a whole lot at
all,' said Lt. Col. Ronald Place. As he spoke, the man who has probably seen
more of America's war wounded than anyone since the Vietnam War sobbed as he
sat at a table in his office."

    Saletan believes that this is ultimately a failure of leadership.
Referring to last week's debate, he pointed out just where Bush, despite
himself, comes clean:
 "Tonight he scoffed, 'If I were to ever say, "This is the wrong war at the
wrong time at the wrong place," the troops would wonder, "How can I follow
this guy?"'

     Exactly, Mr. President. If you were ever to give them the correct
assessment, they would ask the correct question."

    I'm Burning 

    Toward the end of Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun," Joe Bonham, a
WWI soldier who has lost all his limbs, his sight, hearing, most of his face
in fact, is finally able to communicate by tapping out Morse code messages
with his head. When an official then asks what it is he wants, he begins to
turn the question over and over in his mind, passing over its absurdity to
arrive at an acceptable answer. He wants to be on display across the nation:

     "This will be the goddamndest dime's worth a man ever had. This will be
a sensation in the show world and whoever sponsors my tour will be a new
Barnum and have fine notices in all the newspapers because I am something
you can really holler about. I am something you can push with a money-back
guarantee. I am the dead-man-who-is-alive... I am the man who made the world
safe for democracy. If they won't fall for that, then for Christ's sake
they're no men. Let them join the army because the army makes men."

     Note that he doesn't request an anti-war message to be plastered across
his chest; only that people are able to see what war does bring.

     The response from the impartial official: "What you ask is against
regulations."

     This 65-year-old episode happens to function as a pretty good metaphor
for much of the media's reaction to the returning boys and girls of the Iraq
war thus far: "We just can't report your stories; what you ask is against
regulations."

     All the more important then that John Kerry finally stepped up in last
week's debate to challenge Bush's unconscionable distortion of reality. And
the news media may well follow his lead. Just this past weekend, gruesome
footage of Iraqi children being pulled from the site of an American strike
was broadcast on national TV.

     But before Kerry was able to safely challenge the fantasy of a
bloodless war, it was the artists, filmmakers and citizens with the courage
to do what the media hasn't, that led the way. What would happen indeed if
the nightly news began to cover stories of American heroes like Cpl. Tyson
Johnson's, for example, closing its newscast with him moaning, as he does in
"Purple Hearts": "I'm burning on the inside. I'm burning."?

  

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