Roy Scranton - War Porn

And the tanks—the tanks will come too. They’ll rumble through Baghdad like… He remembers a tank clanking down a city street, its malevolent cannon swinging side to side, pointing now at a bakery, now at a bookshop, so huge it takes up almost the whole road. Its tracks chew blacktop and sidewalks. A gang of children tumble from around the corner and launch rocks at it. The rocks clatter off the tank’s hull and it jerks to a halt. The gun swings around, its gaping death-eye searching for something to annihilate. Then the tank lurches into reverse, crunching up the road at them. Run, kids, Othman thinks, and they do, dashing around the corner. Was it in black and white, this memory, or color? Was it even a memory, something he saw on Al Jazeera or in Saving Private Ryan, or was it something he just made up?

Six hours.

And will it be worth it?

It had to be. We have to get rid of Saddam and his goatcunt sons. Donald Rumsfeld says it’ll be short. Just a few weeks of insanity, just a few weeks of war, then the Americans will give us peace and democracy. We’ll be a great nation again, like Germany or Japan. We have the oil, we have the drive, we have the brains and dedication, all we need is freedom and we’ll be as great as Baghdad ever was. We’ll be greater than Cairo, Damascus, greater than Beirut or Tehran. We’ll rival Berlin, Tokyo, New York, London… The name Baghdad will sing on the tongues of wealthy men and their fabulous women, the name Iraq will jingle like gold coins. We’ll fix all the damage from the last war, from the last ten years, and we can socialize the oil profits to do it. Then we’ll clean up the ghettos, fix the streets, finish the highways left half built. We’ll raze Saddam’s palaces and monuments and hire Iraqi architects to build real monuments to the Iraqi people, monuments to rival the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. We’ll build Iraqi skyscrapers, better than in Dubai, and we’ll become the new economic center of the Arab world.

And our literature! It’ll flourish like flowers after the rain. No longer will we have to mutter our lines into our hands, hunched in the dingy corners of the Writers Union. They used to say Egypt writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads, but soon they’ll say Baghdad does it all! We’ll shout our poetry in the streets. We’ll have publishers and book fairs. I’ll finally finish my epic. Adonis will come, and Darwish, and Mahfouz, and Munif, they’ll all come and speak, and they’ll stay because we’ll have what no other Arabs have, not even the Jordanians and not even the Egyptians—we’ll have freedom. Freedom in a free Arab state, self-determination, national solidarity. It’ll be like the Republic, only better. Think of it! To write whatever you want, to shout “Down with Saddam!” and not have to worry about having your arms broken or your manhood burnt off. And all we have to do is go through a little war, a little trouble.

Five and a half hours.

He had to put on a movie. He couldn’t keep watching the news. He lit another Miami and flipped through the DVDs. Five and a half hours would be two, maybe three movies. Something the kids would like, maybe Shrek? We could watch Shrek again. Or, what’s this, Air Force One? Han Solo. Very good. Han Solo and his big silver jet.

Mohammed came in, wiping his hands on his dishdasha. “I just finished changing his bandage,” he said. “It’s still bad.”

“It’s only been two days,” said Othman.

“He should be better.”

“Or what? What can we do? Take him to the hospital again?”

“We should do something,” said Mohammed.

“Give it another day.”

“Where are Ratib and his boys?”

“Ratib’s on the roof. The boys are sleeping upstairs.”

“Good.”

“They said…” Othman started. He couldn’t carry this knowledge alone. Someone else had to help him. “They said we have a little more than five hours.”

“Until what?”

“Nine B-52s left Britain three-quarters of an hour ago. It takes them six hours to fly to Baghdad.”

“It’s no more than we expected.”

“I just thought you should know.”

“God protects all.”

Othman thrust Air Force One at Mohammed. “Is this any good?”

“It’s okay. You know. Action movie… Are you well, my brother?”

“No,” Othman said. “No, I’m not. I’m furious. All we do is sit and wait. Wait for more bombs and tanks and… Whether it’s good or bad, or both… We should do something.”

Mohammed smiled. “What can we do? Shout into the wind? Would you wrestle the Leviathan? You know how it is. Life’s like a cucumber.”

Othman grinned in spite of himself.

“That’s right. One day in it’s in your hand, the next day it’s up your ass. As for today… Well. Shitty days are only good for sleeping. Maybe you should get some rest. I’m going to take a nap now myself, then let’s go see if Uglah has opened his bakery.”

“Yes. You’re right. That’s good. I’ll, uh, I’ll watch Han Solo here. Come get me when you’re going.”

Othman turned back to the TV. He eyed the blue void of the screen while he fumbled with the DVD. He’d remembered where the image came from: the kids were Palestinian, and the tank was Israeli. It had been on the news. He thought of other pictures, pictures of Israeli soldiers storming Palestinian neighborhoods with M16s, Israeli-owned American attack helicopters launching rockets at Palestinian cars, Israeli-owned American fighter jets bombing Palestinian houses.

Five hours, more or less. He pushed play.

He was in a cave again, dark and cool. Lights flickered dim in the distance, sometimes one way and sometimes another, illuminating winding paths in half-seen flashes. This time Faruq was there, standing behind him, off to the side, in front. Faruq was young, much younger than Qasim remembered, with full black hair and a thick mustache.

“You’ve got to kick the ball, Qasim. You can’t be afraid.”

“I can’t kick.”

“Listen,” Faruq said, squatting beside Qasim, now a child. “Whatever you do in life.”

“But I did!”

“No, listen. Do you see the angels?”

Qasim looked to the sky, where indeed he saw the angels his father spoke of. “Yes.”

“They have come to burn all this away.”

“Like the chemotherapy?”

Faruq lay on the ground. “Like the wind. Listen.”

Qasim listened, but all he could hear was his father’s respirator and the beep of the EKG. He seemed so old, so wasted, lying there in the hospital bed. It was as if some evil spirit had sucked all the meat from his body except the stringy cord of his soul. Faruq watched him but couldn’t speak because of the oxygen mask. His eyes were pale and bloodshot, stern and piercing.

Mohammed stood smoking next to the bed. “You see, boy,” he said. “You see what life is? This is the recitation.”

“There’s more,” Qasim said.

“This is all there is.”

“There’s more. There’s more if I can find it.”

Mohammed inhaled on his cigarette, covering Faruq’s face with the sheet. “That was his mistake,” Mohammed said. “He tricked you. Now you’ve killed him for it.”

“There is more.”

“Look,” Mohammed said, pointing down the hospital corridor. A pack of dogs ran at them. “Stand!” Mohammed shouted.

Qasim turned and ran. Yet it seemed no matter how hard he pumped his legs, he couldn’t move, and the dogs, impossibly slowly, gained by inches, their jaws snapping at his calves. His heart pounded, and he felt their paws on his back, slamming him down, their breath on his neck, their teeth.

Day and night, bombs crashed into Baghdad. You watched it on TV, you heard it on the radio, you saw it from the roof and when you ventured out into the street: soldiers and civilians, arms and legs roasting, broken by falling stone, intestines spilling onto concrete; homes and barracks, walls ripped open; Baathists and Islamists, Communists and Social Democrats, grocers, tailors, construction workers, nurses, teachers all scurrying to hide in dim burrows, where they would wait to die, as many died, some slowly from disease and infection, others quick in bursts of light, thickets of tumbling steel, halos of dust, crushed by the world’s greatest army.