Bomb Writing
The summer, my research war blog, and our civilian separation
By Frederick Deknatel
When I was a child I never wrote a message on a bomb.
Last summer Israeli girls wrote messages on artillery shells bound for Lebanon, and the Associated Press took photos.
The young girls in pigtails scrawled on the bombs in marker as IDF soldiers watched from tanks and their mothers showed healthy, soccer mom smiles. Living amid a war zone, far from America, the Israeli girls had been holed up in a bomb shelter for days, hiding from Katyusha rockets. I've never written a message on a bomb, but living in America I've also never had to hide in a bomb shelter calculating how many rockets will hit my town that day and how many bombs my country will drop on another town or another city, across a border.
“from Israel
and Daniele”
American soldiers had written messages on cruise missiles from aircraft carriers in the sad, self-assured weeks after 9/11. And we all know that the only atomic bombs in history ever dropped on cities were nicknamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Boy,” though I wonder if the crew of the Enola Gay wrote anything else on their bomb.
I don't think I'll ever write on a bomb with a felt marker unless I join the military.
What is it that allows for militarized America to separate war from the civilian population? In Israel, our militarized protégé, little girls write on artillery shells that will kill other little girls across a border and their mothers watch, maybe snapping a digital photo. Where are those moments in the American experience? Where is our chance to write a message on a bomb?
These Israeli girls present an unwanted evenness in our view of their conflict. These girls are not militant Palestinians, against peace with street rallies and Kalashnikovs. We see enough of them in America. These girls are young, democratic girls, white with pigtails, easily placed in New York or Los Angeles. But they also write on bombs like our soldiers did, and show the kind of shockingly youthful connection with war usually reserved for Palestinians on the front pages of American media. Are they obsessed with war?
I asked that when I first saw the AP photos of the girls writing on the shells. Such personal connection with conflict – signing bombs – had to relate a common absorption with war, I thought in July. It is the side effect to decades of conflict and a peace effort continually defined by violence. And in that cycle, if the children who write on artillery shells aren't obsessed, aren’t absorbed, the parents who smile and take pictures of them have to be.
How are we as American civilians instead divorced from war, separated from the moment when we emerge from a bomb shelter and find our soldiers loading artillery shells and are moved to write on them?
Try and negate geographic realities and the regional fire around Israel and consider that the girls are forced into war obsession and this bomb shelter/bomb signing moment because of how many people their government bombs, kills, and turns into refugees. But how many people has our government done that to? Where is our proportion?
Some might think that such callous questioning suggests war obsession. I wouldn’t deny them.
Last summer, as more American troops and many more Iraqis died, as hundreds of Lebanese civilians and their state’s infrastructure paid for the rockets of Hizbullah, as a fraction of Israeli civilians died by those rockets, as American newscasters stressed the incalculable number of Israeli citizens who were being terrorized, as Israel tarnished its invincibility while still dropping thousands of bombs a day, and as a few Israeli girls wrote on some of them, I ran a research blog for soldier letters from Iraq called War Post (warpost. those bombs blogsome.com). Through War Post, which I still update while studying in Cairo, I’ve thought I have been obsessed, absorbed with war.
Through the events of the summer, I was blogging about "Iraq: 90 Years Apart," contrasting the voices of Indian and British soldiers who fought to create Iraq during World War I with American soldiers fighting to free Iraq today. I found morbid contrast in Indian, British and American men who all fought to administer Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, and a similar excitement expressed by officials and soldiers during the 1920 RAF bombing of Kufa and other hotspots for Arab revolt and the leveling of Fallujah in 2004.
Through War Post, signs of the saturation of war in America became useful pieces of research, whether news stories, milblogs, or other media. Indian and British soldiers turn their horses into rations during a siege at Kut in 1916; in The War Tapes, American soldiers burn a dead cow on the side of the road in since it might be an IED. How do I give expression to that history, to such contrast? I’ve been looking for a milblog that really explains how a soldier kills and then goes and eats Burger King, but do I really want to quote the army’s worst, Steven D. Green? "I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’"
The outrage of Israeli girls writing on bombs has now expired, some four months and many news cycles after the fact. But the image relates to our forceful merge with war as a daily, however distant fact of American life. Our government responded to 9/11 with a war path. While we’re not bombing a neighbor, writing on shells, the narratives of our soldiers ought to be read to convey some of the same horror of the photos of girls writing on bombs.
We live in a war age, and unless our foreign policy changes, joined by a rapid shift in the American imagination of the Middle East and its infatuation with terrorists, we could be at war with this part of the world for decades. Without interest, without imagination, without notions of war obsession to convey real outrage and the extent of war’s ignored, allowed infringement on America, where will we be then? Writing a message on a bomb?