Reality in Eye-Rack: It Only Gets Worse /
So what’s it like over there?
Ask me that question from a comfortable vantage point of conscientious concern or ardent but shallow interest, and I’ll look at you from behind hooded eyes, angry or cowering inside, and give you not what you want to hear but some bone you can share with the pack, something to gnaw on but nothing really.
It’s hot over there, for instance, above 120 degrees for three months of the year and forget that weatherman palaver that it’s only dry heat, because it isn’t always and even when it is, 120 degrees is like weather from another world, one not intended for human habitation.
A soldier told me this so I tried it, and it’s true: If you pour yourself a bath, get a candy thermometer so you can make the bath water exactly 120 degrees, and then try to put your foot in the water, it will burn you so badly that you’ll marvel how people can live in such heat, sucking it deep into their chests 20 times a minute. And then imagine wrapping your upper torso in a Kevlar vest and slip a couple of carbon ceramic plates into the pouches front and rear, adding another 20 pounds to your weight, along with all the other stuff a soldier has to bear. One hundred and twenty degrees, and we’re not yet maxing out to, who knows, 125, 130 degrees Fahrenheit? That’s over 52 degrees Centigrade. No one carries thermometers that go that high.
There are one or two hotter places on the planet, but none with a metropolis of 5 million people and an unhappy foreign army of 150,000. Hot is not even the worst of it. That’s when with all that heat a sandstorm blows through the streets and pushes through gaps in doors and windows so that a yellow fog with an abrasive muzzle curls around inside and settles into everything. You brush the sand out of your teeth at night, and your stool turns gritty. At Baghdad International Airport, the U.S. Air Force ground crews, among the luckiest of the unlucky because for the first couple years of the war they pulled only four-month tours, would have frozen pizzas shipped in on contractors’ planes from Amman. They offloaded them first, slapping them down on the concrete tarmac and cooking them on the spot; seven minutes would do it.
You suck down air that burns from the inside out, coming back up cool and fresh by comparison, a mere 98.6 degrees you hope, but foul-smelling. What must this cost your body? All you want to do is give up and collapse in place. The heat is so intense that sometimes air conditioners cannot get indoor temperatures below the high 90s.
Mostly – and I’ve long since stopped saying this because people aren’t listening anymore, and no one wants to hear when reporters get strident – you climb into your hooch or your bunker or more likely now your trailer, with the air conditioner roaring, hang up the ballistic blast blanket, flip up the screen on a little DVD player and pop in a two-dollar pirated movie. Or you cozy down behind the sandbags and clamp on the earphones and forget that it’s Iraq and there’s a war on and it’s not going too damn well, Mom. We personally are not doing too well, neither we soldiers nor officials nor journalists, and the war hasn’t been going so well for most of its now many years, unless you happen to be a war profiteer.
Let’s be fair. The weather is only severely hot for four or five months of the year. Then it gets cold in the winter, and the heating rarely works. However “oil-rich” Iraq may be, natural gas is in short supply and so is kerosene, the two traditional forms of energy here. Electric heaters are plentiful, but electricity is not. Even into the sixth year of the war, most Iraqis get at best six hours of power a day. After the bone-chill of winter with its lashing rains that turn the perpetual desert dirt to mud, there is indeed a spring and an autumn, but they’re sandstorm seasons, each a few weeks long, with fine sand so insistent that it works its way between the cracks on walls, accumulates in keyboards, turns the air an ochre haze, and darkens the sun at midday. When sandstorms abate, there are sometimes fine days, as fine as any on the California coast. But, hey, a beautiful day is wasted on Iraq.
If outsiders have it tough, at least most of us can find our way out to far better lives at home. No one even knows how many Iraqis are now dead as a direct result of the war, if not by bullets or bombs then by disease and malnutrition. Iraq Body Count reported 85,000 to 92,000 by mid-2008, but that is only a confirmed minimum. Johns Hopkins epidemiologists, after fieldwork across Iraq, put the number above 650,000 by 2007. Five million are on the move, many destitute and disoriented. Young women who once wore short skirts to late-night parties now wrap up from head to toe in fear of beatings, or worse, by zealots.
Earlier on, American leaders managed to delude themselves and many of us as well. We have turned the corner, seen light at the end of the tunnel, got the enemy on the run, driven the insurgents to desperate acts that show they are in their last throes, put the Mogadishu rules behind us forever – all these things they’ve actually said in this war.
That light at the end of the tunnel was first reported by a top official, Gen. Jay Garner’s spokesman, as early as May of 2003 when the war was in its first days. The speaker was old enough to have been in Vietnam and might have known better; Garner was a week away from being dumped as the first civilian chief of occupied Iraq.
There is no way to win with or without dignity, no way to leave except in disgrace, and even that option may not be viable. Perhaps the last Americans will lift off from the Green Zone with desperate Iraqis clinging to helicopter skids. But it is unlikely America will abandon the mess it made to let Iraqis thrash it out themselves anytime soon. Iraq, it seems, is stuck with the United States, and Americans are stuck in a place that many, after so long and at such a price, still mispronounce as Eye-Rack.
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