Life During Wartime

[Hissyspit]

"Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I'm getting used to it now..."

Talking Heads -Life During Wartime

Horror stories, more horror stories, I should say, found their way onto the front page of this Monday's Washington Post under the headline "In Iraqi Hamlet, 'A Funeral Service In Every House." The article is sub-headed: "For some, all kin perished."

Khider Walli Ahmad has nobody left. Not his wife or his 4-year-old son, not his father or mother or sister. They were killed Saturday when a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives in a crowded market.

In the rubble of their mud-brick house and small shop, Ahmad found fragments of their bodies. His 69-year-old father, who sold cigarettes and dairy products, was closest to the blast.

What was left of my father were bits and pieces, which I and some of the neighbors collected into a bag while we wept," Ahmad, 39, said Sunday, the trauma plastered across his face. Last year, he said, Sunni militants killed his brother Ali and his nephew during a pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

Meanwhile Sen. Lindsey Graham says the U.S. military escalation, aka "The Surge," is working beyond his expectations. And Karl Rove, speaking in beautiful Aspen, Colorado, on Sunday, said, in response to a question concerning whether he felt personal responsibility for the war: "Look, I make no apologies." That statement comes as no surprise from a man who at the same event took the tactic of making use of the particularly galling, egregious and despicable talking-point distortion, the one is repeated and repeated in the aftermath of the fiasco that is the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. "We all thought he (Saddam) had weapons of mass destruction. The whole world did."

The horrors of life during wartime Iraq described in the article found on today's WaPo front page reminded me of a radio broadcast that I tuned into the week before I headed off for some R&R the extended holiday week of July 4th, 2007.

Public radio station WUNC in Chapel Hill produces an interview radio feature program titled The Story. Hosted by journalist Dick Gordon, on the Friday before the Fourth of July, Gordon profiled and spoke by phone with Ahmed Abdullah, Gordon's former fixer and translator in Baghdad. A sculptor pre-invasion and insurgence, Abdullah makes his living now as a photographer and reporter and has created a series of audio diaries for The Story. Gordon interviewed him on the event of a gold medal being awarded from the New York Festival of Radio Broadcasting to Ahmed for his diaries and reports.

In particular, what stayed with me after listening to the broadcast were two reports of experience of life - and death - during wartime, two that crystallized the reality of wartime: the description of Baghdad's current state of social and civic infrastructure, and a resulting remembrance that that description brought from the show's host, Gordon.

Ahmed reported that he and his family make do now, not with water only 4 or 3 or 2 hours a day, but in his neighborhood, NO WATER, not a few hours of power delivered to his home, but NO POWER, 24 hours a day - NO GASOLINE.

This is the life - and death - during wartime for which Rove refuses to make apology. A war he helped create and sell, the consent for which he helped manufacture. Four years on it is worse than ever.

Ahmed's discussion of the situation by which he finds his existence defined, with regards to his wife, from whom he has separated and who is now out of the country, and his children, who are with him in Baghdad, brought a response from Gordon, who had previously in his career reported from war-torn Sarajevo:

During the bombing siege of Sarajevo, said Gordon, he interviewed a woman who had brought her daughter with her to a market. With the bombing that was going on, Gordon asked, why do you risk bringing your daughter to the market with you?

The woman replied. I have two daughters. I take one to the market with me and leave one at home in the apartment. If the market is bombed, one my daughters will survive. If the apartment building is bombed, one of my daughters will survive.

"Oh my god. Oh my god." Ahmed replied, essentially imprisoned in a Baghdad, in similar circumstances, a Baghdad that holds for him, as he described it, only two options: to stay and see a thriving and living Baghdad, or to be killed there.

You can listen to Ahmed's diaries here: http://thestory.org/special-features/ahmed-s-diary

Today's "For Better Or For Worse" comic:

http://www.imgred.com/

[babylonsister]

1. Rec'd! Oh my gosh, that poor woman who has to decide which daughter

to bring to market/who might die today, is heartwrenching! No one should ever have to make that choice.
And Khider Walli Ahmad-losing his entire family in a flash-can we even fathom that kind of pain?

[Hissyspit]

2. .