War Post

"Soldiers’ videos and photos show how obscene games and simulated violent acts became part of everyday life and led to a culture of abuse in Iraq’s detention facilities."

From The American Prospect.

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.

 

Max Rodenbeck asks "How Terrible Is It?" in the newest NY Review of Books, reviewing two recent National Security Strategies and three book: this one by Harvard prof. Louise Richardson, Winning the Un-War by Carlos Peña, and Overblown by John Mueller.

Five years after George Bush launched America on a global crusade to "rid the world of evil," it is safe to say that the tide has turned. No, America is not winning, although some argue that it might be politic, at this juncture, to declare victory.^[1] Nor is America necessarily losing, as others have asserted. What has happened instead is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

This is not surprising. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for Americans to notice.

Rodenbeck’s review is some of the best, most basic criticism of this long rhetorical war that I have read in a while. The hollow foreign policy views that the US government publishes in National Security Strategies are easy fodder for rational disagreement: that a nuclear  Iran would never actually strike the US "because it would risk annihilation in response," that "America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States;" and that "perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran’s oppressive and unpopular government." Or that Iraq and Afghanistan are "no more a ‘war on terror’ than were the American invasions of Grenada and Panama."

Rodenbeck summarizes many of the key points of Richardson’s terror scholarship. Here are two:

1. Terrorism is anything but new. Violence by nonstate actors against civilians to achieve political aims has been going on for a long, long time. The biblical Zealots known as the Sicarii used it against the Romans, as well as against fellow Jews, in the vain hope of provoking the Imperium to so extreme a response that they would foment a mass uprising. Following the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, the German radical Karl Heinzen published a tract, simply titled Murder, which advocated selective homicide as a spark to general revolt. Various groups soon put such ideas into practice. The Clerkenwell bombing of 1867, carried out by the Fenians, an Irish nationalist group, prompted a surge of hysteria in London reminiscent of the response provoked by September 11.

So, in later decades, did the wave of anarchist terrorism that swept Europe and the United States. Revolutionaries assassinated seven heads of state between 1881 and 1914. Paris suffered bomb attacks no fewer than eleven times between 1892 and 1894. In the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, Menachem Begin’s Irgun organization slaughtered scores of Palestinian civilians and British soldiers. The Israeli leader went on to share a Nobel Peace Prize.

11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve. When Britain sent its army into Northern Ireland in 1969 in response to the Troubles, it took just two years for the majority of Catholics, who were at first relieved by their presence, to turn against them. The turnaround for the US in Iraq was far shorter. During the seven months between September 2003 and April 2004, as Charles Peña reminds us in Winning the Un-War, the proportion of Iraqis saying that attacks on foreign troops were somewhat or fully justified leapt from 8 percent to 61 percent. This was exactly the period when a sudden surge in attacks on US forces, following the initial post-invasion calm, prompted vigorous counterinsurgency measures. That is all the time it took, it seems, for Iraqis to decide they did not like being searched, beaten up, shot at, jailed, and humiliated by American troops, whatever the reasons given. Recent polls show some 61 percent of Iraqis still approve of attacking the Americans, and 78 percent believe the US presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing."

Willem Marx’s article about his summer as an intern for a US "media" company in Iraq appeared in Harper’s in September. I read it on the plane to Cairo. I shared his reasons, which were nearly confessions, for why he wanted to be a journalist.

"[John] Simpson recounts his many adventures as a BBC reporter: lying in a gutter at Tiananmen Square in 1989, his camera rolling as bullets zipped by; being arrested during the revolution in Romania; and broadcasting from Baghdad in 1991, with U.S. bombs exploding around him. Inspired, I began writing for my high school paper…"

The entirety of "Misinformation Intern" is now available online.

"It was easy to find Iraqi reporters who would write U.S. military‒friendly op-ed pieces for a little extra cash. But hiring those who would go to the dangerous Anbar province was altogether a different matter. The reporters, cameramen, and sound operators we spoke with all said the same thing: they would work in Ramadi and Fallujah as part of a Rapid Response Cell only if they were embedded with U.S. troops. But because the whole point was that they were to report news that at least appeared to be independent of the military, this was impossible. We even explored whether we could embed our reporters with Iraqi troops there. But this also proved to be untenable."

From Harper’s:

Green Zone

 

Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006. From emails between Robert J. Stein, Philip Bloom, and Army Reserve officers implicated as co-conspirators in an indictment against Stein, an employee of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Stein was responsible for $82 million in CPA reconstruction funds. In February he pleaded guilty to five felony counts, admitting he stole more than $2 million and funneled $9 million in contracts to Bloom. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, June 2006.

Sources

From: Bob
To: Phil

FYI, [redacted] and I got the contract through for ground prep at the police academy. I will give you 200K sometime tomorrow afternoon.

I love to give you money!

From: Bob
To: Phil

I was talking to [redacted] about your next set of projects. He is ready to award everything to you but asked me if there was any way we could use a name other than your company’s? He wants to make sure it doesn’t look like all the work is going to you. If you can, put your bid on new letterhead. I can award it tomorrow. Sorry to be so businesslike. I would love to slow down just for a few days and relax but I need to take care of all this stuff.

From: Phil
To: Bob

I will do that. Since we are paid in cash it doesn’t really matter tax-wise . . . See you tomorrow.

From: Bob
To: Phil

Curious about what [redacted] had to say. I will warn you to be very careful what you say around him. If he ever knows what we are doing he will want “his cut”! Remember what I told you, he is a player trying to get whatever he can. If he ever knows something about a person he will use it to his advantage. We have come only a short way and we have much further to go. The fewer people who know what we are doing the better.

From: Bob
To: Phil

Thanks for the booze. That will give me some bargaining material here and there. I am not worried.

From: Bob
To: Phil

The watches arrived last night and [redacted] is happy for now. He told me you are going to get a Rolex for his wife. That’s fine. [Redacted] saw them and liked them. I’ll probably give him my watch and just get another one for me. I want to keep him happy and on our side.

From: [Redacted]
To: Phil

Hi Phil, Here is the info you requested on the SUV I’d like, a 2004 GMC Yukon Denali All- Wheel Drive. Let me know how I can help you with the local stuff.

From: [Redacted]
To: Phil

The truck is Great!!! People I work with cannot stop commenting on how much they love it. It drives real smooth like a sedan.

As you know, Bob and I keep in touch. He told me the way these State Dept. guys are jerking you around. A friend who is working for them said they have a huge number of vacancies for Baghdad and Kuwait. The State Dept. can’t get anyone to serve there. That means they’ll have to start closing these places. They can’t keep them staffed. So don’t worry about the State Dept. jerks. If there were any smoking guns, they would have been found months ago.

Take care of yourself and make sure you stay safe. Nothing in Iraq is worth dying for.

 

Runaway Raft on the Tigris (via Harper’s).

I’ve been going through Andrew Carroll’s two anthologies of war letters recently, trying to decide which letters to except and add to the archive here. Having just read Ken Silverstein’s feature in the newest Harper’s on the rise of Shi’a Iraqi death squads, this letter stood out. A Marine writes to his priest back home a month after Shock and Awe:

Father Bob,

With religious banners flying, truckload after truckload of cheering Iraqis pass our position. After decades of religious oppression, the Shi’a muslims are now free to worship as they wish. Old men have tears of joy and the younger generation try to thank us the best they can in their broken English. "Thank You America" and "Mr. Bush… good" are about all the Marines can understand, but the sight of the liberated people is an incredible gift to all of us on this most wonderful Easter.

Andrew Carroll, editor, Behind the Lines, (New York: 2006) p. 211.

Lieut. General Sir Stanley Maude issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Baghdad on March 19, 1917, after the city finally fell to the British-Indian forces and just over a week after their ceremonial entrance into Baghdad (depicted in the photograph in the header).  The proclamation began:

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.

And included the following:

Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom, at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. It is the determination of the Government of Great Britain and the great Powers allied to Great Britain that these noble Arabs shall not have suffered in vain. It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth, and that it shall bind itself together to this end in unity and concord

Maude hoped for a smooth colonial administration embodying just enough of the ideals expressed in the proclamation to keep the native population calm. That did not happen. What resulted instead was a Shi’a-Sunni-united rebellion against the British in 1920, known widely as the Arab Revolt, though memorialized in Iraq as the Great Iraqi Revolution.

Imperial British proclamations in newly-captured Baghdad can’t be compared directly to a soldier writing to his priest in 2003, relaying the joy of people free to worship. Some of Paul Bremer’s speeches are the more obvious comparisons to Maude. But in their contrast, the 1917 proclamation and this letter together express to how far things fell in Iraq in the years following both "successful" invasions. That, and the limits of "liberators."

Indian Cavalry Transport, September 1916, on the Albert-Amiens Road, France. Via the Wilfred-Owen Digital Archive and the Imperial War Museum.

The stories of soldiers returning home from Iraq to divorces, separations, depression, and PTSD are not unique to the current conflict, perhaps, only the latest version in the narrative of the soldier-husband going off to fight, writing to his wife, and returning home only to find that it all has changed. Hold up the experience of going to and returning from Iraq now to other wars of the last few hundred years - the "summer soldier," Civil War Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs, and Indian men fighting in France and Iraq for the British army.  Where do their stories converge and contrast? Iraq veteran/writer John Crawford, whom I just mentioned below, told an interviewer in Stop Smiling about his return home:

"Your relationships go to shit, nobody has a job, nobody’s going to school, so you’re just getting trashed every night…
…You’re talking to someone you know real well, but you’re a total stranger. You’re not having any of the same experiences. You’re not watching any of the same TV or listening to the same music. She’s talking about a traffic jam, and you’re talking about a firefight."

Historian David Omissi’s other fine book on the Indian Army during the Great War, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army 1860-1940, presents pieces of Indian soldier narrative not far off from the now-familiar agonies of American men returning from Iraq. The following is an excerpt on Indian soldier morale both in France and Mesopotamia.

More and more letters from men in the trenches betrayed ‘undeniable evidence of depression,’ while those written by the wounded from British hospital were often hopeless in tone. ‘Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry,’ remarked the censor, ‘which I am inclined to regard as a sign of mental disquietude. Of 220 letters from injured soldiers examined by the censor in January 1915, only fifteen displayed what he termed ‘an admirable spirit.’ Twenty-eight had been written by despairing men who clearly regarded themselves as dead already; many of the remainder gave a ‘melancholy impression of fatalistic resignation.’ Morale picked up a little in the summer of 1915, but another general collapse was clearly imminent in the autumn as the weather cooed and victory seemd as distant as ever. Rather than expose the troops to a second morale-battering winter on the Western Front, the authorities sent the two infantry divisions to Mesopotamia where the fighting was arguably less fierce and its outcome less vital…

…Bad news from India compounded the worries of the men. They learned of the plague which afflicted the Punjab in the spring of 1915. Men grew anxious for the well-being of their families when they heard, second hand, that ‘the rain has spoiled the crops, and in the Doab the dacoits have ruined the place.’ One soldier’s wife told him bluntly, ‘I have been starving for lack of food.’ Long separations strained marriages, and by July 1915 many letters were filled with conjugal reproaches. One man was warned, ‘your honour is in danger. If you are a Pathan, and have any pride, look to you wife.’ Betrothals were broken off, and some wives, despairing that their men would ever return, took new husbands. ‘When our thoughts turn to our homes our hearts become soft like wax,’ wrote one Muslim trooper.

David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860-1940 (London, 1994), 115-116.

 

In the magazine Stop Smiling (Issue 25) there is an interview with John Crawford, another National Guardsmen plucked for Iraq who wrote extensively while stationed in Baghdad from late 2002-2003. Crawford was two credits away from graduating from Florida State when he was called up, and while in Baghdad an embedded journalist who read bits of Crawford’s writing put the soldier in touch with a literary agent. Crawford’s book is The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq, and while I wait on interlibrary-loan, here’s a bit from the Stop Smiling interview. Crawford expresses the mentality of hate and frustration felt as a foreign soldier in Iraq when he answers a question about the portrayal of Iraqis in his book.

I majored in anthropology so I thought I was kind of going to be immune from the feelings that you’re 8,000 miles away and you’re just mad. You don’t want to be there and you’re pissed, and, unfortunately, it just manifests itself more often in anger at the people you’re supposed to be helping, the people that are right in front of you.

I knew that it was wrong to be so angry, but I really wanted to show the feelings that you have there. Obviously all Iraqis aren’t terrible people. I ust wanted to show the insanity that you start to feel. When soldiers go over there, some literally didn’t get feelings of anger and could still get along with the locals, but those were the minority. You have to blame someone for being over there, and you blame the locals, whether it’s right or wrong.

There were moments of levity. You get really bad gallows humor - I’ve heard that when they do the crime scene detective films they show in court they have to take the sound out because the cops are making uncomfortable jokes. It’s the same sort of thing - you’re in this uncomfortable situation and you end up making jokes. Like when my friend Creed said to me about the guy who had his head taken off by the .50-cal: "What do you think the last thing that went through his head was?" and we couldn’t stop laughing about that.

It kind of shows the human side - American tend to think their soldiers are somehow perfect, and I think that does them a disservice, because when you have someone who’s perfect and something bad happens, all of the sudden you have to blame them. You’re not giving credit to the emotional spectrum that’s taking them on this ride every day. I think that’s the huge point of my book. All those jokes were just to show that we were human beings in this extraordinary situation, and that’s how we reacted. Of course everybody laughs. People laugh at ridiculous times.  

Listen to Crawford on NPR.

(The painting above is George Grosz, "The Convict": Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung’s Attempt to Get Him Up on His Feet, 1920.)

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

- Rudyard Kipling, "Mesopotamia," 1917 

Tomas Young, Iraq veteran, profiled by Eugene Richards in The Nation. 

Many of the soldiers who return from this war survive injured in veteran hospitals, on edge at home (a former Time magazine Marine of the Year who fired his shotgun at a crowd from his home, "under attack"), on a Delta flight, (where one veteran now has been detained for charging the cockpit door as the flight prepared to land). Magazine stories, soldier’s memoirs, and now, even, breaking nightly news fill some of the answer to how soldier live after Iraq.

Indian cavalry on the march on the flooded Shaiba road, Mesopotamia.

50,000 Indians died during World War I - nearly half or more of them buried across Iraq or north towards Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands returned to India as veterans. With American veterans in mind, the image of an Indian man stepping of a ship in Bombay after his service in Mesopotamia is now filled with thoughts of similar agony. As he wandered down the city streets to arrange transporation northward to the Punjab (the home of a majority of Britain’s Indian recruits), how did he cope with his return? He did not have an airplane cockpit door to charge, or, likely, a shotgun to fire at party-goers outside his suburban home when thoughts of his Iraq war frayed his senses. How did he return home? What did he do?

Mark Twain wrote an article, "The War Prayer," for Harper’s Bazaar in 1905 on outrage at the United States’ intevention in the Phillipines. Unsuitable for a women’s magazine, so the editors said, Twain’s article went unpublished until 1923, 13 years after his death. Harper & Brothers had exclusive rights to Twain, and he told a friend after the 1905 rejection, "I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth."

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to
battle — be thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth
from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord,
Our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot
dead; help us to drown the thunder of their guns with the shrieks of their
wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a
hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows
with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little
children to wander unfriended the wastes of the desolated land in rags and
hunger and thirst.
Mark Twain, "The War Prayer," 1905

Via Dilip D’Souza. Read the full text here.

Photojournalist Eugene Richards has an ongoing project at The Nation, pairing his black and white photos of Americans affected by the war at home with their own personal reflections and agony. "War Is Personal" has profiled three people so far: Tomas Young, a 26 year-old Missourian recounting an ambush in Iraq where he asked his fellow soldiers to kill him, his injuries that painful; Carlos Arrendondo, a 45 year-old Massachusetts father grieving his young, slain Marine son; and, most recently, Mona Parsons, a 52 year-old mother from Ohio trying to persuade her son not to return to Iraq.

How do we read and react to the exposure of war at home? To supremely detailed accounts of families, veterans, and caskets in America?

When a few Marines surprise you on your birthday to announce your son’s death in Iraq, and when your heart drops, thinking that the surprise was going to be Alex, in person, home from war, should asking Marines to leave your house be such an ordeal? Should asking them to leave lead to dousing yourself in gasoline, in agony? Should it lead to an explosion?

For Carlos Arrendondo, it did just that. Asking the Marines to leave was torment, but the thought of it seemed somehow productive, beyond asking "Are you sure that was Alex? Are you sure?"

As he says: 

I run back into the house, grab Alex’s picture to give it to my mom. Then seeing the uniforms, ask the Marines to please leave, leave. "Can you please leave." Perhaps I thought that if they did leave, then none of this was happening.

The voices of this war will be men like Arrendondo, I believe, if only because the articulated efforts to "Bring our Troops Home!" or to "Support Our Troops!" swirl in politics, amid disingenous suits and media-exploded figures whose sincerity is either watered down or quickly undermined by the noise machine that trumps them in the first place. Cindy Sheehan’s effort to memorialize her son with a vigil in Crawford, TX is what now? We remember it because it was on every newschannel and in every paper, crudely dissected one way or the other. But I don’t remember her voice. If anything, it was too clear: my son has died and it’s George Bush’s fault. I don’t disagree with the ultimate reasoning, just the simplicity of it. Her vigil was too buzzworthy, too easily picked-up and tossed, in its simplicity, left and right.

Try and heave Carlos Arrendondo’s reflection of his son’s death into the political climate. Try plugging it into the noise machine and getting a clear sound. That you can’t is why his voice rings for me. Whatever fact exists in his son’s death in Iraq is muddied by the lurid details of war over there and at home in Massachusetts, where Arrendondo lit himself on fire in despair. He lay in a stretcher during his son’s wake, morphine muddying his senses and his memory.

Wanting to reach him I was lifted off the stretcher and climb up to kiss him, to touch his head, his hands, his fingers, his shoulders, his legs, to see if they were still there. I lay on top of the casket, on top of my son, apologizing to him because I did nothing for him to avoid this moment. Nothing.

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.")

 

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.  

   

    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.