Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (8 page)

But you went to the West Bank or Gaza and saw the way the Palestinians lived, and it ruined everything. You realized it was rotten underneath; it was impossible. I could be in Herzliya, eating buttery sea bream and drinking mojitos on a terrace over the beach, watching the sun set the Mediterranean skies on fire and the children kick at the edge of blackening waters, hearing the voices of mothers, the shush of waves, the pulse of music playing somewhere. But inside of me was the corruption of memory, knowing the underbelly of the state, thinking about what all of the people around me were determined to ignore. It made everything filthy.

The bombings were huge and awful, but the suffering of the Palestinians was chronic, dripping through the days like acid. All the small horrors that get washed away from a distance, that never make the news but are the grains of earth in that place—the Palestinian cancer patients who are not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment; the Palestinian mothers who gave birth at checkpoints; the people who hadn’t seen their families for years; the shepherds who led their flocks accidentally into the wrong spot and got blown away; the Palestinian-American woman who came to visit her family one summer and got stuck because the Israelis wouldn’t give her a permit to drive back to the airport, because even Palestinians with American passports are treated like plain old Palestinians once they set foot inside Israel; the settlers who ransacked the olive groves; the market stalls and greenhouses torn down. The occupation was a cloud of punishment that raged in times of suicide bombings and in times of quiet, a few miles away, invisible.

At the time the Palestinians drew my attention most of all, because their culture was the most foreign; because they were killed far more often and yet their slaughter was treated more casually, packing lower news value; because they were trapped both by Israel and by their own leaders, their own killers.

But I am haunted now by Israelis. By the overlay of realities, the way they knew, and didn’t know. Like the people in Kfar Saba, they lived right next door, there and not there. They ignored it, or they told themselves stories that made it all right, horrible stories, and worst of all the stories were true—the injustice and blood of Jewish history.

And yes, Israel has a reason for everything, and there is a national myth that theirs is the most humane army in the world. But in Jerusalem I learned that good intentions and lofty ideals are among the most dangerous tools of all in a war, because they blind people to what they are doing, to the blood on their hands.

One morning I got to work early, and found nobody there except Abby, the office manager. Abby was hyperactive and giggly and screechy. She wore crazy socks and wild clothes in orange, purple, and lime green, and she bought us little treats like chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter. She had three kids at home but she never seemed tired or down. At least, she hadn’t until today.

Abby had seen a documentary on Israeli television the night before. It was about impoverished Palestinian children who picked a living out of a garbage dump near Hebron, waiting for trucks to haul in the trash of Israeli settlers. The kids combed the settlers’ garbage, looking for scraps of edible food, foraging for clothes, hunting for a living. The settler garbage was the best, the kids said, because the Palestinians don’t have much to throw away. Abby had tears in her eyes. Abby had never been in the territories, and she seldom talked about politics, but now she wanted to know if what she had seen was true.

“It was just like the ghetto,” she said quietly. “Is this true? Is this what we’ve come to? Our families left Poland because of these things, and now we are doing the same to other people?”

“Well,” I said uncomfortably. “I’ve never seen that place, but I’ve heard about it. The situation is not good there.”

“I know, I know,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “Oh my God. What’s going to happen to us?”

After September 11, many Israelis said to the Americans, now you know what terror means. And soon the United States, too, had an occupation of its own, and then a second occupation. We lived even farther away from our wars. Israel built a fence; we had an ocean. But the comparison was there. Some Israelis wanted badly to believe they
could be all right one day in spite of the anguish in their backyard, others were hardened beyond caring. They ignored it as best they could, sealed themselves into Israel, but it was always there. As the intifada grew more violent, the use of sedatives rose and more Israeli husbands battered and killed their wives. Soon a spike of suicide and rapes among American soldiers would tell the statistical story of our own trauma. You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done.

Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don’t die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do. You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can’t leave your actions over there. You can’t build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of that poison seeps back into our soil.

And it makes us lie to ourselves, precisely because we want to believe that we are good, we do not want to interrupt a noble national narrative. But there are things we try to obscure by talking about terrorism: things we do to others, and to ourselves. Only the most hawkish Israelis say that they are oppressing people in order to take away their land. There are other stories to tell; other ways to frame and explain military campaigns. Israelis are looking for security; they are fighting terror; it is ugly but they have no choice. Every nation needs its stories, never more so than in times of war. And so the Israelis tell themselves they are making the desert bloom, that they are the only democracy in the Middle East, a humane land that is sometimes forced to behave inhumanely, and we Americans tell ourselves that we are fighting tyranny and toppling dictators. And we say this word,
terrorism
, because it has become the best excuse of all. We push into other lands, we chase the ghosts of a concept, because it is too hard to admit that evil is already in our own hearts and blood is on our hands.

A
nd then the war came that would tangle America in time and blood, and make us forget, for a time, the other wars, Afghanistan and Israel. In the corpus of the Arab world, Iraq is a nerve center and a soul. Baghdad was magnificent at a time when Arabs were glorious and powerful, and so it is a place that still matters; its history and legends are cherished by millions. The ancient Babylonians developed mathematics and split the day into twenty-four hours centuries before Christ; the Abbasids built their round city in the eighth century; the Shiite scholars at Najaf still interpret Islam for millions of followers. If you invaded Iraq, you invaded all of the history and meaning, too—you plunged into the heart of how a people sees itself, its complexes of defeat and dictatorship, the whiff of dissipated, dusted-over greatness. The United States was determined to take Baghdad, and they did it fast. Just twenty days after the war began, American tanks had churned into Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s statue was off the pedestal, and the dictator himself had fled.

I would leave Amman in the middle of the night to reach Iraq at first light. The hotel phone screeched and the driver announced in
broken English that he had come to take me to Baghdad. Night was coming unspooled in the lobby. Wilting wedding guests dragged themselves over the floors, old men muttered into cigarettes, and late-night playboys in dark suits chased their own laughter into the darkness. I walked into the cold night and climbed into the backseat of an SUV. The bellhops in their monkey suits slid the door shut behind me. I was being escorted off to war.

“Okay?” the driver asked.

“Okay.”

The hours flew past like billboards on the black, dull road east. The driver slurped at a thermos of hot tea. A truck stop, the sharp smell of diesel, the drone of cassette-tape Koran. More darkness then, drawing close to the border. A hand takes my passport and melts into night. We inch along, from one administrative building to the next, out of Jordan and into Iraq. The border offices loom frozen in the dimness, painted against the velvet screen of a coming dawn. A figure materializes from the night and swings himself into the passenger seat.

“My cousin,” the driver says.

“Okay.” This wasn’t part of the deal.

“Hello,” says the cousin, twisting around. Street lamps on their stalks waver in his pupils.

“Hello.” He is a young man and suddenly I want him there. He looks too healthy to get hurt.

Darkness thinned and faded as we rolled through the desert of western Iraq, desperately awake. Delivered into something we could not control, we hurtled along in a machine; wheels ate the highway, and I was comfortable knowing that I was just a passenger, I was not responsible for what might come. I closed my eyes and watched waking dreams like movies. The road disappeared behind us. We spat it out and hurtled forward.

A hot dawn came, the air in the car tight and edged with body smells. The dust storm smelled, too, stirring in the yellow sky. In the desert you learn that dust has a smell, a little like washed cotton sheets or baking bread with the texture of scratchy silk in the back of the throat. Arab springs always bring winds and the smell of dust. We were almost to Baghdad now. I played with the name like a small charm, jingling it in my palm like a jack. A mystical, shadowy city. Babylon,
the House of Wisdom,
One Thousand and One Nights
. As we drew closer through the desert, little shards of wonder spiked through the slur of my thoughts. I sat up and looked out the window. Everything was mustard and ocher, weary and wilted. A landscape so unremarkable you forgot it before you stopped looking; stretches of sand and dust without the startling scale of a great desert. This was a petty desert, mean and brown, spotted with rotting structures, the listless monuments of disinterested men.

Cars packed the roads on the edge of town, inching along. Nobody bothered with the confines of lanes, and every bit of pavement was packed tight with humans and their machines. The cars lurched, staggering elephants lashed with marauded booty—embroidered sofas, farm animals, paintings. Looters hauled their stashes. Families fled toward the city and away from it. The cars braided the intersections like pick-up sticks; nobody gave the right of way and so they were all locked into place, paralyzed by the mute jam of collective stubbornness. A man with a swinging potbelly hopped from his car to holler at another driver. The faces of women were framed in the glass, sour and small. Horns squalled. There was no power in Iraq. No electricity and nobody in charge. All the traffic lights were dead. Without the commands from the dangling lights, the Iraqi drivers got themselves stuck in deadlocks and quarrels.

I imagined people treated like animals for years—ignored when they kept their heads down, kicked when they straggled out of formation, expected to wag their tails for a pat on the head. And now every last system was gone, and smothered humanity exploded, unbound, over a grid of cracked infrastructure teeming with testy American soldiers. I rubbed the grit from my eyes and watched. Men and women boiled raw, hitting against each other, free to react in dangerous compounds.

I rolled down the window, got a lungful of dust, and sank back, coughing.

The lobby of the Palestine Hotel swelled with life, a dim womb packed with bodies and drained of electricity. The elevators were dead, and so were the phones that called up to the rooms. I was supposed to find
John, the
Los Angeles Times
correspondent who’d been there through the war. He’d arranged accommodations for us. I found his room number on a hand-scrawled registration log and climbed up the dark stairs, along hot caverns of corridors. I knocked on the door, and nobody came. So I decided to take a walk, to write down some notes. Dust still blotted out the world, biblical and sobering, scattering locusts, foretelling the plague.

Marines had surrounded the hotel and sealed off the side roads. Beyond the checkpoints and razor wire, masses of Iraqis swarmed. They had come for help, sniffing around for jobs, or to stand and glower at foreigners. Everything had collapsed, and there were Americans inside the hotel, so they clumped as close as they could get and stared, looking for clues to the new Iraq. The Iraqi army had melted away like wax brushed against a flame. Saddam was on the run. They had been left to their own devices.

I waded into that crowd with a notebook, looking for an English speaker to hire as a temporary translator. I couldn’t get a question out of my mouth before they pounced on me and closed in, ranting.

“All the world was putting its hands on its eyes when Saddam killed us. Why now? Where is the food? Where is the medicine?”

“They’ve been fifty years in London, drinking and eating. They don’t represent the Iraqi people. We want somebody from here, who suffered with us.”

“Bush wanted to make this a civil war. They make no safety. They intend to. They know everything.”

“Iraqi people, we know nothing about democracy. Until now we’ve had a knife over our head by Saddam Hussein.”

It was all there: the tortures of the past; the irritable chaos of the invasion; every woe that was about to crash down. At the time, these rough men in their sweat-stained clothes sounded paranoid. I would soon interview professors and merchants who were less aggrieved and more reasonable, who sounded more correct, predicting that security would soon return, that early spasms of violence were just a mob reaction to sudden, total change. These were comforting things to hear; they matched what U.S. officials seemed to expect. Many of those merchants and professors are gone now, dead or fled. The vision of the mayhem to come was in the collective howl of the street, among people
who’d learned to expect nothing. The poor people were the ones who got stuck there, and they were the ones who saw it coming. Strung out on sleeplessness and adrenaline, I was clobbered by the first wave of a feeling that kept coming back for days: that it was all a mistake, that none of us should be there, the soldiers or aid workers or me. It was all a misunderstanding, and now we were lost abroad and the Iraqis were lost at home, and from this chaos absolutely anything could be born.