A DEATH IN THE DESERT
Every death is different.
My first was on the road into Basra. Late January 1991.
We were part of the second wave. So it was quiet.
Too quiet. All I remember was the dust, pluming
Behind us like a jet-stream, blotting out the sun.
Funny how you think – you know, before you’ve seen it –
You think the desert is sand. Well it might be somewhere,
But Iraqi desert’s not sand. Open a sack of builder’s
Rubble and pour it onto a field of grit. That’s Iraqi desert:
Stone and dust. That’s how it seemed to us as we took
Half-tracks and armoured trucks into Basra.
Stones in your face and dust in your throat.
About ten miles short of the city they’d put on
A show of resistance. You could see the hulks,
Burned-out tanks across the sky-line. As we got
Closer, we smelt it too – acrid smoke hanging
In the air and gassy vapours from the fuel dumps
And that sweet smell of gunfire gone bad.
My truck stopped twenty yards from one tank.
It was twisted out of shape, sharp and black,
Metal bunched up like an old sweet wrapper.
We got out and walked over. You could make out
The tracks, the gun, the hatch – and sticking up
Out of the hatch, something. At first
I thought it was another lump of metal, a shorn-off
Bit of tank. But then, getting close up, I could see.
A black skull, flesh burned off, grinning jaws and hands
Like claws. The teeth bared is what I really remember,
And the sockets where his eyes had been. Poor bastard,
My mate said. That’s when the penny dropped.
Some poor bastard of an Iraqi soldier, burnt to cinder
In a moment as his tank exploded under him. And the rest
Inside. All his mates. Inside. I turned round and threw up,
Left breakfast on the sand ten miles out of Basra.
That was my first death. The one we left behind with only
The little round brown wreath of my vomit as a memorial.
There were more deaths but that was Iraq for me.
This nineteen-year old grew up fast. When it came to deaths,
Saw some, made some happen, watched some near me,
The world goes slow when a man turns like a dancer,
The grip of a dum-dum wrenching him inside out. Like I said,
All deaths are different.
Three, four years after that tour they gave me a blue hat.
I still can’t remember just where we were, Bosnia, Croatia,
One of those places. I know all the civilians looked the same
To us, just poor bastards wanting to stay alive. But they knew
The difference – or at least the militias did, and the police,
And the informers, and the fanatics. Our job was just
To keep them apart and only shoot when we had to,
Which meant of course only shoot when you’d got written
Orders in triplicate signed off a thousand miles away.
By the time we’d got the piece of paper, another few hundred
Bosnians were dead. So I understand death, and the way it comes,
Sudden, outpacing every written order and outranking every
General, diplomat or politician. A gun in the hands of a fanatic
Outranks everything.
But what I really remember there wasn’t death by bullet or bomb.
There was this moment. We came to a town – a few scrubby fields
And the houses gathered round a dusty square.
Behind the police station there was a bit of open ground.
Like the territory by Basra it was only stone and dust.
But there was a fence round it, no open Iraqi desert.
And inside the fence, men, old and young. Hollow-eyed
With hunger they stood and looked at us, in our blue
Peace-keeping hats while armed Serbian police paraded
Up and down, laughing and joking with each other,
Chucking insults (and stones) at the men who put up
No resistance. They just stood and looked at us,
Hollow-eyed behind the fence.
One man – maybe sixty,
Or maybe younger, they were starved to the point
Where age is hard to calculate. Anyway this man was staring
Through a square of barbed wire, standing there bare-
Chested; you could count every rib. He had a cap on,
I remember the cap. Suddenly he grabbed his left arm, here,
Just below the shoulder, then opened both arms wide
And fell against the wire. I guess it was a heart attack.
But he hung there, on the wire, eyes open and seeing
Nothing, his fists clutched to the wire. Nobody moved.
He just hung there. You remember the squaddy’s song:
“I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him, hanging on the old barbed wire.”
Like he was crucified, or like a protester’s banner tied
To a boundary fence. That was Bosnia for me.
Now I’m old. Well, not old; but for a squaddy I’m old.
Got three stripes, which just means (a) I’ve survived
And (b) I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my life.
Forty years old and in another desert. Another desert,
Another death. But this time I’m not sure whether
It’s his or mine.
The difference between civilised people
And barbarians is that barbarians kill like barbarians
Because they know no different, but the civilised ones,
Like you and me, we kill the barbarians to give them a taste
Of their own medicine. We kill them to civilise them.
That’s the theory, and we’ve got good at the practice.
So here’s this barbarian – one who put himself outside
The pale of civilised discourse (that’s good, isn’t it? I heard
Some poncy politician put it like that to justify another
Explosion of shock and awe.) We string him up.
To teach them all a lesson. And, being squaddies, we like
To have some fun along the way. There’s only a thin line
Between mockery and torture. Torture, of course, is
Forbidden by the Geneva Convention and all civilised
Rules of Engagement. But having a bit of fun along the way?
And whose fault is it if a cigarette slips and burns a barbarian arm?
Or the knockabout closes an eye or takes a tooth out?
It’s a man’s world out there. And we have to civilise
The barbarians. Due process? Probably not. But he was up
Before the military governor and we take orders from him.
He needs to keep things quiet and if that means sometimes
Giving the puppet government what it wants, so be it.
So we take him to another desert, another one of those
Desolate places on the edge of a god-forsaken town.
Like the edge of Basra, like the rough land behind
A Bosnian police station. That’s where we do it. In full view,
To make sure everyone gets the message.
Squaddies live in Skull City.
Will we find salvation there? Are we the civilised ones?
Or are we the barbarians now?
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