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November 22, 2004
Roger That, Sir
This from Kevin Site's blog -- the cameraman who shot the famous video of the killing of an unarmed, wounded Iraqi inside a mosque:
We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"When we arrive at the front entrance, we see that another squad has already entered before us.
The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"
One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.
"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?
"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.
"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.
Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.
"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.
I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.
While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.
Then I hear him say this about one of the men:
"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."
Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.
However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.
Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.
"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.
I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.
But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.
For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.
At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.
The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic.
He says, "Yesterday I was shot... please... yesterday I was shot over there -- and talked to all of you on camera -- I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information."
Once again, what strikes me about both the video and Kevin Site's description of the event is the utter, banal ordinariness of it all. It's clear that it's just one more day and a few more dead. The only difference is that this was captured on camera.
Posted by zeynep at November 22, 2004 11:57 PM
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Comments
I don't mean to excuse. I don't mean to attempt to justify. All I can say is so, and maybe some persons will notice, and who knows what any of this is leading to, but here's what I can manage to say of it:
They've been there for a while.
Nerves run ragged, in a time of strife.
Commanders follow the orders that they have, or they'll probably be handed towards courtmarshal -- likewise, with the other soldiers within the units of their command.
Who knows how many corpsman have been drafted after the unreal, fictional experiences of video games? (Please, reader, note: I'm not implying as if they were looking at a battle as if it was a video game -- really impossible, that would be -- there are no "cheat codes" and no "extra lives", on the ground, and the bullets are real.)
Who knows how many regrets are being born of this war, of the soldiers ordered into it?
Worry, fear, and the want to stay alive may override the want to offer humanitarian aid, in the terms of an urgent, perceived conflict or of a perceived promise of conflict.
Who knows what the soldiers are really thinking of this war, beyond the smokescreens?
It may be that the Pentagon's line is all that we have, to even try to rely on, now, for trying to discern any thread of a sense of reason, about what's going on, over there. (Granted, it may be a thread of Brand Pentagon Reason.) and what significance, the footage of the "embedded reporters", in sum? chaotic snippets from a place where the viewer simply is not at -- that's all I can make of it.
(and we sure won't be asking Al Jazheera what they're seeing, of it; I don't doubt that they're still being debarred from Iraq, or however it went; "granted", I'm not entirely sure of any details or any terms -- if there were any -- of Al Jazheera's eviction from ... one area or another ... in Iraq)
As an expression of one person of this nation: I cannot even try to make sense of this conflict, any more, of anything that I've seen or will see of it, from here, afar.
"The modern history" may begin to seem like an out-winding spool of bewilderment.
As the final 1/10th of my 2 cents:
We, as a whole people of a nation, may need to stop and take a very hard look at the assumptions that "we" have been riding on, thus far.
We are probably not going to get much further, without more of open discourse.
Posted by: Sean Champ at November 24, 2004 07:19 AM