Read the Soldiers
On keeping a summer war blog for soldier’ letters
By Frederick Deknatel
On the Fourth of July last year, I sat like others Americans and read a front-page story about an ex-soldier being escorted out of a courthouse, accused of rape and murder in Iraq. A parade was going by outside and I wondered if Private Steven D. Green’s appalling narrative had played out there before, maybe 90 years ago when British and Indian troops invaded to create the modern state out of the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul.
I was a month into a summer research project that Independence Day. With an English professor at Vassar College in New York, I was comparing and contrasting soldier letters from the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force of 1914-1918 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The work is presented on a blog, War Post (warpost.blogsome.com).
In the midst of reading about Indian soldiers describing Mesopotamia as “the entire opposite of France,” with dry plains and a public “so thoughtless and careless that they do not make any attempt to till it,” separating their voices from American soldiers became harder. Whether in the letters, blogs, or books of self-described grunts, the narratives of war from Iraq related a thread of low-level despair. They fought on the same ground, cursed the same frayed heat. The battles and agonies were different, but there was something in the contrast of a milblog that candidly described a night raid followed by Burger King in the Green Zone and Indian letters about eating and resting in separate barracks than the British soldiers in a base along the Tigris.
Applying history to the present can be shaky, derided as personal interpretation over scholarship, but even when the soldiers’ narratives diverged, the usefulness of their contrast became clearer: read the soldiers to read the war, whether this one or World War I.
It is hard to believe think any of the war’s planners has ever read much of the soldiers.
“Stuff happens” and “bring it on” read more like crass, contemporary versions of Foreign Office memos from New Dehli in 1914. After an early success going upriver to Basra, the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was ordered to march on Baghdad, even though troop levels were low and supply lines noticeably vulnerable. A series of defeats south of Baghdad ended in a months-long siege at Kut in 1916, which cost over 20,000 British and some 10,000 Ottoman soldiers. About 8,000 Anglo-Indian soldiers surrendered to the Ottomans that spring. The siege and surrender at Kut, the greatest disaster ever for the British army, came around the same time as the Allied defeats at Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. Londoners read about both in the newspapers, as public outrage and military failures overshadowed any current, back-room schemes about how to carve up the post-Ottoman Middle East.
The rhetoric of “support our troops” and of a “surge” in troop levels seems noticeably divorced from the narratives of those fighting in Iraq. When it reaches the political heights of talk-radio and accusations of one politician being a patriot and the other treasonous, it seems even more apparent that the voices of soldiers are irrelevant in American war talk.
"I came over here because I wanted to kill people," an AFP story quoted Green as saying to Stars and Stripes last February. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be.” The opposition course against this Administration and this war is most often to stand along the aisle and decry the run-up to invasion and the at-the-top failings without a moment to frame dissent in the soldiers’ experience. American soldiers’ narratives seem a mix of felt patriotism, agony, disillusionment, and, in the case of Steven Green and others, vile examples either of how men crack or simply why foreign occupation fails.
In the preface of his Iraq memoir The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, John Crawford, a Florida National Guardsman, wrote “I awoke every time it was my turn and I crossed the threshold of our perimeter into the city streets, wondering if my luck would run out as it had for my good friend when he emptied his brains into his Kevlar helmet on the side of shit-infested street on the banks of the Tigris.” I’ve wondered if Indian soldiers emptied their brains into their helmets in 1916, knowing full well that thousands of them starved to death in a siege at Kut that same year and that thousands more later died as prisoners of war in long marches across the desert. When we study war through the soldiers, it becomes a lesson in comparable anguish, and that ought that to be enough to shape our view of conflict.
Interpreting how soldiers suffer floats between blaming war planners and too easily casting those with guns as the victims. This summer seemed defined by the latter, and War Post reflected the glut of ignoble soldier coverage that then continued through the fall. Steven Green and the other bad-seed summer soldiers quoted in news stories were, after all, useful in their brutal clarity.
A sniper with 60 kills said he heard classical music play in his head. A soldier threatened to kill other soldiers if they didn’t keep mum about the civilians they killed. A devout soldier from the Rocky Mountains, quoted in The New Yorker, wrote to her priest about having Sunday school memories as she flew in a helicopter over Basra, possibly near the biblical Garden of Eden. 90 years ago, the 15th Lancers, a fighting force made up primarily of Indian Muslims, landed in Basra and told their commanding British officers that they wouldn’t fight other Muslims so close to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Iraq is not a battlefield vacuum but a country that has seen foreign occupiers before. The British arrived as self-described liberators, some soldiers wrote in fascination of the ancient ground, and others wouldn’t fight. Will Steven Green and the other names in news summaries about rape and torture convictions partly define the American occupation as the 15th Lancers did the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force?
American soldier narratives are more extensive and accessible than Indian letters were 90 years ago, yet their coverage does not force an articulated public imagination in America around them. If the fighting men and women quoted in news stories are the footnotes to old headlines about a new “plan for victory,” we ought to frame that abstraction with the fact that Steven Green and some of his friends were drunk on whiskey when they raped and shot Iraqis. We ought to see “staying the course” through the rattled soldiers who end their life in Iraq by choice, or through the middle-aged National Guardsmen who return home lost, confined to their bed or couch by PTSD while some admit they want to go back to where they were “king of the road.”
The thick talk of last 5 years about supporting the troops and fighting terrorism really translates into bodies on American behalf somewhere across the globe, maybe there because they want to defend the country and kill people or more likely because the National Guard pulled them out of university and sent them. Reading the soldiers today and connecting them to the past do not suggest trans-historical truths about Iraq, foreign soldiers, and global war. More directly, contrasting Iraq 90 years apart gives due attention to the soldiers and the candidness of their view. The jingoism and empty political barrages fall away to death, IEDs, and the constant rotations of tours of duty. Soldiers’ narratives offer a more precise, more violent view of Iraq, grown out of its British imperial past into a brutal, continuous American present.