War Post

Eugene Richards/VII, for The New York Times

Usually it has been Butler’s youngest factory workers and farmhands who have been called to arms. But that changed in the winter of 2004, when the local detachment of the Pennsylvania National Guard — Alpha Company, First Battalion, of the 112th Mechanized Infantry Regiment — was ordered to Iraq, part of the largest battlefield deployment of the National Guard since World War II. Among the 200-odd men of Alpha Company (unlike some other National Guard units, they were all men) fully two-thirds were married, more than half had children and at least 50 were over the age of 30. Even within this demographic, Chuck Norris was something of an anomaly: at 37, the father of three was one of the "old men" of Alpha Company.

This is an excerpt from the cover story of the Sunday Times magazine of a month ago. The mistake in calling up National Guardsmen in their 30s with wives and children to fight in the Sunni Triangle was not only tactical - these men are not the 20 year-old fighting specimens of the Marines - but unsympathetic: how do casual, family Army men who survived Iraq return home? One Guardsman, Ron Radaker, is quoted in the article on the trouble adjusting to home life:
"And I don’t mean to sound arrogant when I say this, but I miss the power," he says. "Over there…we were the king of the road, and they either respected or hated us for it. And now you’re back here and you ain’t king of nothing."

In 2004, the wives of these Guardsmen in Butler, PA created their own non-profit to support their deployed husbands called S.O.S. Butler, or Support Operation Soldier. A few soldier letters addressed to the organization are available on their website.

  April 6, 2005

Janice & Alecia and SOS Butler:

Please pass on to everyone involved and especially yourself; my thanks for the
numerous care packages that SOS Butler has sent me since being deployed.
It is like X-Mas every time I get one.

Thanks again….. SSG Talarico J.G.

Feb 26, 2005

SOS Butler:

Sorry it took me so long to write, but believe me, I have thought of your generosity
and that of the other ladies HUNDREDS OF TIMES! We appreciate your generosity!
So it has been a LONG 8 months, but the time has also gone by pretty fast. Sometime
in the next few weeks we will hit our half-way point, but since we don’t know EXACTLY
when we will be home we won’t know the half-way date. I still try to take it 1 day at a time. Have I mentioned that your generosity is appreciated? I have maintained the point that
we have way too many paperback novels and disposable shavers, but this is not a complaint. Bar soap, shaving cream, razor blades, hard candy and cloth wipes are snatched up quickly, but I suppose most have stocked away a small supply in their
room. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the time that you have devoted to our deployed soldiers! I am ALWAYS excited to receive mail, so I suspect others are too!

Thank you once and for all!

SFC H. Miller

Feb 10, 2005

Greetings, from the war torn country of Iraq. Thank you very much for your support
and Christmas packages.

SFC S. Fancella

Feb 1. 2005

Dear SOS Butler,

My name is SPC Nunn and I would like to take this time to thank you so very much
for all that you have done and for your support. Every little thing that you guys do for us means so very much and makes it easier to get through our long days here. We are
very busy and free time is rare, but I wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart
for everything.

Sincerely,

Spc Trenton Nunn

On the front page Thursday’s New York Times, Dexter Filkins reported on a funeral send-off in Ramadi, Iraq, capital of Anbar Province, that has occurred every day in Anbar this month. Filkins described in forceful, writerly detail American Sergeant Terry Michael Lisk’s death and the nighttime helicopter pickup of his coffin, bound for Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad, and ultimately the United States. Recapping the nearly silent military sendoff by men of the First Brigade is the whole article, and it is powerfully concise.

Filkins’ report is remarkable not because it led on the front page of the Times, but because of the weariness and intent in his voice if you listen to the audio slideshow that accompanies the piece online. Here is a physical story, with Filkins himself recapping it and relaying the reporters’ life in war, accompanying the soldiers. He’s tired, obviously, recording at 2am, and there’s an audible fire-fight in the background. Filkins isn’t searching for a story, (it’s too cynical to connect this war reporting with other motivations); he’s trying to present American soldiers as they are in Anbar right now. His Iraq writing for the Times has been very successful before, and prompts the wish that more front page war reporting could be as direct.

Here’s a small bit from his audio slideshow - simple reflection between reporting on a soldier’s death.

With so many soldiers being killed here, there’s an almost natural inclination to numb yourself to it and to imagine them as just names, or statistics. And I think the ceremony that I was able to witness here that took place near the landing zone was one of many ways that the military tries to remember the individual soldiers who have been killed here.

THINK AGAIN, a political art collective that uses public images to convey public agony and to "challenge indifference," released a book of their art two years ago. And in the time since, prescriptions continue to be filled.

GBZI Sport Apparel is one of the premium sponsors for the military blog network MilBlogs.

I posted Captain Brown Hugh’s message on the comment section of a few military blogs (milblogs) yesterday, trying to solicit some reaction from the sites’ authors or readers on the scam soldier letter. One advised me, "freddy, I got that e mail too. I dismissed it as BS and promptly deleted it."

Okay, sure. I know. It’s BS— a 419 scam from Nigeria, most likely. But can there be no commentary on it beyond that it’s phony? After all it’s a fake soldier letter during wartime, with the simple promise of millions in exchange for attention and correspondence, really. And I can’t help thinking that this letter, as it’s bounced around the web, is getting more public screen time than authentic soldier letters.

"I can tell ya what that Capt. Brown Hugh stuff is…full of s..t" commented another milblog reader. "This is similar to many internet scams going on…too bad it’s so hokey…and plays on military morality! Stinks to high heaven!"

What is a play on military morality? After all, what is military morality, and how does one play on it, besides purporting to be in possession of millions of stashed dollars in Karbala? Marines possibly gunned down two dozen civilians in Haditha in only the most publicized recent report of Iraqi deaths, and Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo images of the American military acting on its unworldly rhetoric have long been embedded in the public view of this war. I hardly think "military morality," then, is so static, let alone certain. Did the commentator mean to suggest that "military morality" is considerate, even smart, like a smart bomb?

Then again, if I’ve taken anything from reading many military blogs recently, it is that they are a residence for the monolithic language of Operation Iraqi Freedom, of freedom and patriotism, and of justified war.

But at least this 419 scam has worked its way into the milblog lexicon. One reader thought a post applauding a recent Ralph Peters’ article in Armed Forces Journal was "good… (too good for [the blog’s author] to get a ‘Brown Hugh-o-gram’)." Apparently posting the phony email as a comment was an insult to this blog post on Peters, a retired army general who writes Op-Ed for the New York Post, and authors books like New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy.

This forwarded message arrived in my mailbox this morning; a potential sequel to Three Kings?

From: "Capt.Brown Hugh" <captbhugh09@gmail.com>
Subject: PLEASE CONTACT ME
 
 Please i am Captain Brown Smith of the US Marine currently serving in Iraq.
 
On Monday 19 June, 2006 we received an urgent call from northern Baghdad that some terrorist group  camped there.Consequestly,  my battallion were sent there to forestall their activities.
 
Sensing our presence, they opened fire on us.We returned fire on them,after which some of them were caught.After intense torture,they  took us  to Karbala near Baghdad.On reaching there they took us to a deserted building where they kept their weapons. Atfer intense  search one of them took us to one of the  rooms .
 
In the room were three metal boxes. I opened them  to my amazement, they were loaded with the US dollars. I was dumbfounded, I asked one of them he told me that they were into illegal crude oil sales and also that they do receive financial support from other islamic fundamentalist groups.
 
On return  to our base,i hid the metal boxes in my personal room as the squardon commandant.At night of the same day, I
counted the money it amounted to $7.6 million USD in $100 denomination.
 
Now, I need a reliable person  to  send this money to, please give me your name, contact address,phone number and bank account number so that I can send the money if you are interested. You have 30%, while I have the rest. I will come down there immediately you receive it .I will even reign from my job.
 
Above all, try to keep this information secret and confidential Don’t disclose it to anybody for security reasons and to protect my job with the US Marine.Please contact me with this email address:captbrownhugh@yahoo.com.
 
Yours sincerely,
Captain Brown Hugh .

Seven year Army veteran Brian Turner arrived in Iraq in November 2003 as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In November of last year, Turner published Here, Bullet, a book of poetry, and a record of his time as a foreign soldier in Iraq. Profiled on NPR earlier this year, Turner read selections of his poetry, which are still available on NPR’s website. Here is one of the poems reprinted there: "Eulogy," written after a soldier in his platoon took his own life.

Eulogy

It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M.,
as tower guards eat sandwiches
and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River.
Prisoners tilt their heads to the west
though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.
The sound reverberates down concertina coils
the way piano wire thrums when given slack.
And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,
when Private Miller pulls the trigger
to take brass and fire into his mouth:
the sound lifts the birds up off the water,
a mongoose pauses under the orange trees,
and nothing can stop it now, no matter what
blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices
crackle over the radio in static confusion,
because if only for this moment the earth is stilled,
and Private Miller has found what low hush there is
down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.
   
                                                                                    PFC B. Miller
                                                              (1980-March 22, 2004)

SGT Steve Pink filming in front of a Humvee (SenArt Films / Scranton/Lacy Films)

Before their deployment to Iraq in late 2004, a few National Guardsmen were given digital video cameras by a small film studio. Their collected footage is The War Tapes, a documentary that won at the Tribeca Film Festival and that is currently showing in New York City, with a set of premieres around the country today. Recording their experience of war by handheld DV camera, from a base tent or from the seat of a Humvee, these soldiers are another example of the extending narrative of war, from print letters, to blogs, to footage shot by the soldiers.

Watch the full trailer here. Film clips are avaiable on the official website, but I’ve chosen to link to one clip—Hot Side of Beef—which depicts soldiers burning a dead cow on a the side of the road, a precaution against a possible roadside bomb.

P.S.
Richard Prouty on One-Way Street rightly contrasts the War Tapes cow-burning clip with Ginga Singh’s 1916 letter from Iraq: being forced to eat horses and mules during the Ottoman army’s five-month siege of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force at Kut-al-Amara, south of Baghdad. That siege ended in the surrender and harsh captivity of thousands of British-Indian soldiers. Here’s the letter, as posted last week.

Gunga Singh (Sikh) to Dafadar Jaswant Singh (attached to 6th Cavalry, France)

16th Cavalry Depot
Lucknow
21st April 1916

The 7th Brigade is surrounded in Mesopotamia. Attempts have been made to rescue them, but without success. There was a fight on 6th March and heavy losses to us in he attempt to relieve them. Some men of ours are in the besieged force, twenty in number. They have eaten their horses and mules. They have a quarter of a pound of flour each per diem. We are hopeful of being sent to join the relieving force. [Letter passed]

David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 178. 

The current issue of Harper’s features a sample of artist Steve Mumford’s drawings from Brooke Army Medical Center. Mumford’s book, Baghdad Journal, is a collection of his drawings from occupied Iraq, where he sketched both soldiers and civilians with a loose, active hand. Here’s is one drawing from that book, a sketch of Charlie 1-9 officers watching the TV show "Smalleville" in Baghdad (the official caption reads: "Officers and NCOs of Charlie 1-9 watch Smalleville while waiting to hear from snipers hidden on Haifa street in case of trouble.")

I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty list to see if by some chance anybody from his town had been killed. He didn’t even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. "I mean, can you see two guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?" he said.

This passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches, p. 182, presents a far different tale than Indian men from the Punjab during World War I: of 683,149 Indian recruits to the British army between August 1914 and November 1918, 349,688—some 60 percent—were from the Punjab, and the casualty rate among those new recruits was astronomcal (from Tan Tai-Yong’s article, "An Imperial Home-Front: Punjab and the First World War," in The Journal of Military History, 2000). And it was not always infantry. In a few-week period in April 1916, for example, nearly 9,000 Punjabis were enlisted to be camel and mule drivers for the armies overseas, often in Mesopotamia.

Today, of the 2,508 Americans killed in Iraq, California (258 deaths) and Texas (223) have buried more soldiers than any other states. Others—New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida—have each buried over 100 of their own residents. Such morbid number analysis doesn’t weigh one state over another, of course, but relates the spread of enlistments across the country, and the contributions of poor and often rural communities to America’s war in Iraq.

It also cruelly extends Herr’s passage to the present, when a rural resident of Texas, California, or Montana (10 deaths in Iraq) can once again get killed in a far-off country, along with a neighbor.

The Indian soldiers’ experience in World War I Mesopotamia forms half of the base of this site; American soldiers now in Iraq are the other half. Capturing narratives of those soldiers is the goal of this research. So far, against the sparsity of Indian letters, the personal record of American soldiers is that much more extensive and, in degrees, accessible. Indian mail was subject to censorship by British officials, or worse, to harsh combat and captivity in Kut, Baghdad, Mosul. Even if he survived the campaign, it wasn’t as though a soldier returned to the Punjab where a book deal was waiting.

In contrast, then, American letters, emails, blogs, and books standout for their instant permanence. The New Yorker devotes a recent issue to soldier letters (having already profiled a soldier-poet), while the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming trains soldiers to be writers, blog posts from Iraq supplement intermittent letters, and bookstores stack and sell amped-up soldier memoirs.

Not that all of this forces a public imagination. Even with all the modern information and narrative, this war is often ignored or briefly forgotten day-to-day with front page dispatches from Baghdad a regular, consistent sight. What allows for this separation between war information and an articulated public attention to it? Is it the commonly thought of numbness to a glut of war coverage? Or, something more? Journalists file daily print and video reports, but the new fact is that soldiers are writing. Part of my question is who is reading them; the other part is the effect of reading narratives of war.  

On Thursday, I wondered where the voices to the major events of Britain’s Mesopotamian campaign were, acknowledging the value of David Omissi’s collection of letters against the stacks of history books that detail and dissect the war via the Government of India, London, and the memoirs of British generals and high officers on the ground.

Here are more excepts from Omissi’s book, three that give at least some voice to the thousands of Indian soldiers besieged at Kut along with commanding General Townshend, soldiers who then became Ottoman prisoners of war. Their experience as prisoners is vague. Again, British accounts exist of captivity after Kut, but their authors are mostly officers who received far better treatment than the ranks of the Poona Division (the 6th Indian Division). Over half of the soldier who surrendered at Kut died in captivity afterwards, some in prisons in Baghdad, Mosul, and elsewhere, and others in the desert between those cities, casualties of grueling marches. General Townshend, meanwhile, was sent to live in comfortable "captivity" near Constantinople. He was knighted by George V in 1917 while still a prisoner, for his service at Kut.

Gunga Singh (Sikh) to Dafadar Jaswant Singh (attached to 6th Cavalry, France)

16th Cavalry Depot
Lucknow
21st April 1916

The 7th Brigade is surrounded in Mesopotamia. Attempts have been made to rescue them, but without success. There was a fight on 6th March and heavy losses to us in he attempt to relieve them. Some men of ours are in the besieged force, twenty in number. They have eaten their horses and mules. They have a quarter of a pound of flour each per diem. We are hopeful of being sent to join the relieving force. [Letter passed]

David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 178.

Risaldar-Major Kalandar Khan Bahadur to Risaldar Khurshed Ali Khan (Hindustani Muslim, 20th Deccan Horse, France)

7th Lancers
Poona Division (6th Indian Division)
Bombay, 5th Mary 1916

It is with great regreat that I tell you that our besieged for in Kut-al-Amara (of which our squadron formed a part) surrendered on 28th April after a five months’ siege, owing to want of provisions. They fought to the last with the greatest gallantry. There were 9,000 of them. It was a great grief to all that relief could not reach them and that all our efforts were in vain. The greatest regret of all is that our squadron with all the Sirdars are prisoners. Risaldar [Ressaidar?] Ajaib Singh and Jemadar Manna Singh were with them, as they were in hospital with wounds and the hospital was taken. [Letter passed]

Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 181.

Karm Singh (Sikh) to Kalyan Singh (Jhelum District, Punjab)
Machine Gun Section
Sialkot Cavalry Brigade
France, 8th June, 1916

It is a matter of very great regret that our brother Chet Singh has been taken prisoner at Kut-al-Amara. Other men from Dhudial [Jhelum District, Punjab] who were with him have also been captured. Well, we should no grieve; nothing is to be gained by grieving. At the end of the war, they will return home alive. [In fact, many of them did not.] All those brave fellows did their duty faithfully to the very end. They deserve the highest praise. This event was written in their fate, and no one could have prevented it.

Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 194-195.

Something new from inter-library loan: Briton Cooper Busch’s Britain, India, and the Arabs: 1914-1921, a history of British and Indian (that is, the British Government of India’s) policies in the Middle East during the First World War. Busch argues that the Indian Office had far more of an effect on British war and post-war policy in the region than it’s usually credited for. The imperial Government of India was skeptical and argued with London when British diplomats like Henry McMahon were negotiating with Hussein ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, or Ibn Sa’ud, eventual king of Saudi Arabia, on Arab state indepedence. To officials in New Delhi, the idea of Arab Muslim independece was unsettling. Indian Muslim opinion was a concern (some of the war strategy in Mesopotamia often considered possibile Muslim reaction in India), but it existed for the sake of British control over India. In the end, of course, Britain was never actually genuine about those negotiations.

Map from The Times (London), Monday, May 1, 1916. Times Digital Archive. 

But onto the better point from this read: where are the Indian voices? The author states outright that his research was of government archives in London and New Dehli—like the recommended articles of a few days ago—but it is a shame that the history of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, though pretty widely and extensively told, relies so heavily on memos, telegrams, and minutes from Whitehall and New Dehli. A number of first-hand accounts of the British-Indian war in Mesopotamia do exist, from generals and majors, on down to more common army captains. None of these are Indian soldier accounts, though; publishing opportunities for a Punjabi soldier, it seems, were barely available in British India and among an army where even the highest-ranking Indian officer was subordinate to a British officer. 

The value of a book like David Omissi’s, then, only increases as the variously-titled histories of Britain’s early Iraq war pile up. Because without the likes of Indian Voices of the Great War, which itself only includes a handful of Mesopotamian letters, steady examples like this remain voiceless, hardly quoting or conveying the soldiers’ experience then:

In December 1915 the hopes and plans of total victory in Iraq had been undermined, then destroyed, by Townshend’s retreat and the siege at Kut al-’Amara. Every relief attempt failed, and in April 1916 Townshend’s men marched into captivity, many never to be heard from again. The story is a gruesome one of incompetence and overoptimism, and survivors’ accounts bear witness to near-criminal negligence in matters of supply, transport, and medical facilities. Kut’s surrender had only one virtue: it made perfectly clear that India [the British Government of India] was incompetent to conduct an overseas campaign of this scope.

- Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs: 1914-1921 (Los Angeles: 1971), 110.

More from David Omissi’s fine collection of Indian soldiers’ letters.

Ressaidar Hushyar Singh (Sikh, 34) to Jemadar Harband Singh (9th Hodson’s Horse, France, 24)
16th Cavalry, Mesopotamia, 30 January 1916

We have got a fine opportunity of fighting. No doubt you are right in thinking that you too are fighting; but you are having a very different time from us, for you have everything you can want while the country here is absolutely uninhabited and desolate. Never mind: when we are winning we are equally indifferent to comfort and inconvenience. [Letter passed]

- David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1918 (London: 1999), 144.

Abdul Rauf Khan to Lance Dafadar Abdul Jabar Khan (Hindustani Muslim, 6th Cavalry, France)
21st Combined Field Ambulance, Mesopotamia, 7th March 1916

You know very well that I am not in India. I am here with Force D. You must know very well where Force D is [Mesopotamia]. Since coming here I have met many men who were formerly in France. From them we have heard all about France. In truth you must be very comfortable there, since the ‘public’ there are so civilized, and money, too, is plentiful. The particular part of the world where I am is a strange place. The seasons here are quite different from what you experience anywhere else. We have already had experience of the cold and wet. Now the heat is threatening us from afar. It rains very heavily and the entire surface of the land becomes a quagmire in which the slush is knee deep. When I used to march in this slush, I used to remember God! Since I left India I have not seen a metalled road. Except for date trees which one sees here and there along the course of the river, there is not another tree to swear by. We drink river water. Wells cannot be dug here. Except for the barren, naked plain, there is nothing to see. The soil certainly is fertile, but the ‘public’ here are so thoughtless and careless that they do not make any attempt to till it. The lice infest one’s clothes to such an extent that our hope [of release from them] is in God alone. The summer is coming on gradually. It is stated here that the mosquitoes are enormous, and I have been afraid of them from the beginning.

- Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 160-161.

Adbul Najid Khan (Muslim) to Suliman Khan (3rd Skinner’s Horse, France)
Rohtak, Punjab, 18th March 1916

I had a letter received today from my brother Sadikall Khan from Basrah, three days ago. He says he is constantly ill, and that every few days his health changes. He says also that the heat is unbearable and that the country [Mesopotamia] is the very opposite of France; that he is neither fit to fight nor ill enough to return to India; that, except for dates and the heat, nothing is to be found. Where, he asks, is that France, and those courteous people; where those fine open roads; where all those nice things? In short, this country, he says, is the entire opposite of France. [Letter passed]

- Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 165.

In 1919, Major E. W. C. Sandes published his account of war as an officer with the Sixth Indian Division of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division includes field sketches of the early battles of 1914 in southern Iraq—victories for the British/Indian forces—to the November 1915 battle at Ctesiphon, site of an ancient Mesopotamian city marked by the massive, ruined arch of the same name. Because of heavy losses at Ctesiphon, where some 11,000 British and Indian troops fought over 30,000 soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, the MEP retreated to Kut, where they were besieged for months leading into 1916, until a final surrender to Ottoman troops in April, 1916.

Sandes account is that of a British officer, and it reads as such, full of strategic military language and long-winded explanations of troops movements along the Tigris and Euphrates that account for the length of this old source. For the sake of this site, though, Sandes account of his soldiers’ experience is useful in the details of war: food shortages during and after the siege at Kut, transport up-river to Baghdad as Ottoman prisoners of war, and a grueling northward desert march to Mosul, which eventually led all to the way to Anatolia.

After the surrender at Kut, in the first days as Turkish prisoners, Sande wrote:

    The great problem naturally was to feed the British and Indian troops rapidly assembling on this bare plain seven  or eight miles from Kut. The Turkish camp, a mile farther up river, held all the available supplies, and the only food sent to us during the first day was some Turkish biscuits which were thrown on the ground and lay there in a dusty heap till distributed to us at 6 p.m. by our own Supply and Transport officers.

    The Turkish army biscuit is a curiosity in its way. Imagine an enormous slab of rock-like material, brown in colour, about 5 inches in diameter and 3/4 inch thick, made of the coarsest flour interspersed with bits of husk and a goodly proportion of earth, and you have a tolerable idea of the staple article of diet on which the Turkish soldier seems to thrive…There is no doubt that the Turkish biscuit, whatever its ingredients may be, is a nourishing form of food for a cast-iron interior, but does not agree with people weakened by a five-months siege.

-Major E.W.C. Sandes, In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division (London: 1919), 269-270.

 
 From the National Archives: "This photograph shows an emaciated Indian army soldier who survived the siege of Kut (December 1915-April 1916). It was probably taken in July 1916, after he and other British POWs had been released from Turkish captivity in Baghdad during a prisoner exchange. The soldier’s skeletal frame indicates not only the appalling conditions inside Kut during the siege, but also the harsh treatment meted out to ‘other ranks’ while in enemy hands afterwards."

After being transported with thousands of British and Indian men of the Sixth Indian Division up the Tigris, Sandes described their landing in Baghdad and their procession through the city as prisoners of war:

      Guards with fixed bayonets were placed at intervals along our line, and we turned to the left and started our march through Baghdad, where we were apparently to be exhibited exactly as in a Roman triumph, except that we wore no chains and had our full complement of clothes. We were marched through the most densely populated area of Baghdad. There was no necessity for this. For some reason best known to the Turks, the Indian officers were put at the head of the procession, followed by the British officers in  order of seniority of rank. Whether this was done to annoy us, or whether through ignorance, I do not know; but it is almost incredible that the Turks could be wholly ignorant of the fact that all Indian officers of whatever rank are junior to the land-joined British subaltern. We passed out into the streets, turned to the left, and entered the mercantile and bazaar portions of the city….

        …We traversed all the main bazaar roads of the city, where interested crowds thronged the route to see us…We tried to keep up a cheerful appearance before the crowd, and found the unique bazaar with its vaulted roof quite interesting and comparatively cool after the glare outside. From several windows in the upper floors of houses pretty faces looked down on us in curiously—and I think even in pity—for a large portion of the populace was very unfriendly to the Turk.

 - Sandes, In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division, 283-284.

    Britain’s build-up to war in Mesopotamia was a back-and-forth affair, with interests ranging from the Admiralty’s desire for oil for battleships (a war aim expressed in agreement quite late in the campaign) to the belief that the vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul would be the great breadbasket for India, as well a home for an expanding, spill-over population.

     Some very good sources on the development and deployment of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force were published in The Historical Journal and the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in the 1970s. V.H. Rothwell’s "Mesopotamia in British War Aims, 1914-1918" in The Historical Journal charts British interests and tactics, both in the India Office and on the ground in Iraq, following certain military and political figures (Lord Hardinge, Viceroy of India, and Percy Cox, the chief political officer with the MEP, among others). Douglas Goold’s "Lord Hardinge and the Mesopotamian Expedition and Inquiry, 1914-1917," also in the The Historical Journal, focuses more specifically on Hardinge, who had a major hand in drafting British policy in Iraq, and had to answer for its failures (namely the surrender of 9,000 MEP soldiers - 3,000 British; 6,000 Indian - to Ottoman forces at Kut, outside Baghdad, in April 1916) during an inquiry in London. Finally, Stuart Cohen’s "Mesopotamia in British Strategy, 1904-1914" in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies relates pre-war British tactics in Iraq and argues that "the extension of the Mesopotamian campaign contradicted previous British strategy toward the region."

     There are many other sources, but these three articles offer substantial insight to the British invasion strategy, relating what effect India Office memos and minutes had on the eventual lives of British and Indian soldiers soon to be deployed in Iraq.

    The current New Yorker features a cover of entrenched soldiers, one reading by flashlight, and inside 12 pages of soldiers’ letters anchor their "Life During Wartime" issue. A selection from "Dispatches from Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories" can be heard on The New Yorker’s website; if audio tracks of war letters are of interest, more can be heard at the Gilder Lehrman Institute—letters from the American Revolution to the current war.

   From this New Yorker: in 2003, Captain Donna Kahout wrote to members of her Colorado church about fighting on religious land:

   One clear day, I looked down at the rich greens of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates and pondered over the fact that these were the Tigris and Euphrates that I’d learned about in chruch and school my whole life. Genesis describes the Garden of Eden standing at the headwater of four rivers, two of which are the Tigris and Euphrates. That places the Garden just north of Basa, within sight of where I flew almost daily.

   Abraham, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, the whole displaced Israelite nation, and perhaps even Adam and Eve all trod the ground I was looking down on daily. And I was living in the same desert where the Israelities wandered. We complain about being there for three months—it’s so barren, flat, windy, hot, sandy, and dry—it’s no wonder the Israelites complained during the forty years that they followed God around the Sinai Peninsula between their exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land, near Jerusalem.

Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers on stretchers outside a dressing station, Mesopotamia, 1914-1918.

    While current soldiers remark at a combat zone with Biblical connection, some of the Indian soldiers in Iraq in the 1910s, trodding the same ground, refused to fight against the local population for their own religious reasons. A 1916 letter from a Punjabi Muslim named Fateh Ullah to his friend, Fateh Ahmed, who was stationed in France, relates a friend’s refusal to fight in Mesopotamia:

    We have learnt from Nasir Khan’s letter that his brother Raja Khan has been sentenced by court martial to fourteen years’ imprisonment. This has caused us much grief. The details which he gives are that when the 15th Lancers reach Basra they were ordered to fight against the Turks. They, however, declined to take up arms against their brother Muslims and asked to be sent to some other theatre of war. A court martial was convened and 400 men were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

- David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War (London, 1999), p. 199.

    The British-led Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force landed near Basra in November, 1914, just after Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul were Ottoman-controlled provinces then, with a disparate population of Sunnis, Shi’as, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. Dispatched from India, the Expeditionary Force counted thousands of Indian soldiers among its ranks. During all of World War I, India provided over 1.25 milion men to the war effort, including 827,000 combatants; 250,000 Indian men were serving abroad at any one time, whether in France, Egypt, East Africa, though mostly Mesopotomia– Turkish Arabia in contemporary British language. Their experience in France was well-presented David Omissi’s book Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1918, but how Indian soldiers reacted to duty in Mesopotamia is less documented.

Indian cavalry advancing near Basra, 1914-1918

This site will seek to present the experience of the Indian soldier in the Mesopotamian Expedtionary Force during World War I as part of a greater effort to approach and imagine the expererience of foreign soldiers in Iraq. The March 2003 American-led invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom, is still underway, and while reaching a kind of transhistorical truth about Iraq and foreign soldiers is not the goal of comparing 1916 to 2006, the narrative of the soldier, whether an Indian cavalryman near Basra or an American Marine calling in an smart-bomb airstrike outside Fallujah, seems crucial to imagining the current war. Knowing whose boots pounded the desert before American soldiers does not offer the same rapid hit as contemporary political talk. Perhaps that’s the point. While the daily dispatches from field reporters are vital to understanding this war, the unguided political commentary could stand to be replaced by other ideas: the history of the region, visual contrasts of desert combat across a century, and a new imagination of Iraq not as a place translated by cable news, but instead by its historical record, even if that record exists partly in India Office reports and letters home to Bombay.

Charlie Company, First Marine Battalion, Eighth Regiment, Fallujah, December 2004. Photograph by Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times.