Part Four
I heard the Vice President say: "By any standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 or Patton's romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties."
I heard Colonel David Hackworth say: "Hey diddle diddle, it's straight up the middle!"
I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that ninety-five percent of the Iraqi casualties were "military-age males."
I heard an official from the Red Crescent say: "On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than fifty civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for ten or fifteen days before they were buried nearby by volunteers. That is what there will be for their relatives to come and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse."
I heard the director of a hospital in Baghdad say: "The whole hospital is an emergency room. The nature of the injuries is so severe-one body without a head, someone else with their abdomen ripped open." I heard him say: "Human beings are so frail in the face of these weapons of war."
I heard an American soldier say: "There's a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar [flak jacket]. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and now it's our turn.'"
I heard about Hashim, a fat, "painfully shy" fifteen-year-old, who liked to sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the Fourth Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the boy's death, the Division Commander said: "That person was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time."
I heard an American soldier say: "We get rocks thrown at us by kids. You wanna turn around and shoot one of the little fuckers, but you know you can' t do that."
I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that the US did not count civilian casualties: "Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy's capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths." I heard him say that, in any event, it would be impossible, because the Iraqi paramilitaries were fighting in civilian clothes, the military was using civilian human shields, and many of the civilian deaths were the result of Iraqi "unaimed anti-aircraft fire falling back to earth."
I heard an American soldier say: "The worst thing is to shoot one of them, then go help him," as regulations require. "Shit, I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the fuckers. There were some you let die. And there were some you doubletapped. Once you'd reached the objective, and once you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn't want any prisoners of war."
I heard Anmar Uday, the doctor who had cared for Private Jessica Lynch, say; "We heard the helicopters. We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military. There were no soldiers in the hospitals. It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'Go, go, go,' with guns and flares and the sound of explosions. They made a show-an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors. All the time with cameras rolling."
I heard Private Jessica Lynch say: "They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about." I heard her say, about the stories that she had bravely fought off her captors, and suffered bullet and stab wounds: "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do." I heard her say, about her dramatic "rescue": "I don't think it happened quite like that."
I heard the Red Cross say that casualties in Baghdad were so high, the hospitals had stopped counting.
I heard an old man say, after eleven members of his family- children and grandchildren-were killed when a tank blew up their minivan: "Our home is an empty place. We who are left are like wild animals. All we can do is cry out."
As the riots and looting broke out, I heard a man in the Baghdad market say: "Saddam Hussein's greatest crime is that he brought the American army to Iraq."
As the riots and looting broke out, I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "It's untidy, and freedom's untidy."
I heard him say: "I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny-'The sky is falling'. I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or ten headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot-one thing after another. It's just unbelievable."
And when the National Museum was emptied and the National Library burned down, I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"
I heard that 10,000 Iraqi civilians were dead.
I heard Colin Powell say: "I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now."
I heard the President say: "We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so."
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south, and north, somewhat." |
