America and Iran by John Ghazvinian

Author:John Ghazvinian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

20

Dulce et Decorum Est

In the 1980s, the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at occasionally offered its readers, sitting in the cushy confines of Tehran, a glimpse into the horrors of front-line combat in the war against Iraq. The world they were missing:

We had child-volunteers—fourteen, fifteen and sixteen-year-olds. They went into the minefields. Their eyes saw nothing; their ears heard nothing. And then, a few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again, there was nothing more to be seen of them. Somewhere, widely scattered in the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone. . . . Before entering the minefields, the children wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to their graves.

This, for the rest of the 1980s, was what became of Iran. Locked into a brutal, unforgiving war with Iraq that neither side could win, the country’s leaders desperately threw wave after wave of wild-eyed recruits into the trenches to defend the homeland and the revolution from Saddam Hussein. Thousands of boys—their heads filled with ideas about the glory of sacrifice, and their lungs filled with the noxious vapors of mustard gas and nerve agents from Saddam’s ever-expanding arsenal of chemical weapons—gave their lives to the cause. Thousands more rushed to the front lines to volunteer, lying about their age or running away from home for the chance to serve in God’s grand army. Across every rapacious, hungry battlefield, peach-fuzz teenagers cheered and howled with delight as they searched for land mines with their bare feet—ecstatic at the prospect of a life more noble than the ones they had left behind in the slums and villages of Old Iran. “It was sometimes like a race,” recalled one veteran, as he remembered the way he and his friends would run onto the battlefield looking for land mines. “Even without the commander’s orders everyone wanted to be first.”

Trench warfare, chemical weapons, transcendent ideologies, casualties in the millions, a front line that barely moved an inch during eight long years—this was the kind of war that the old gray heads of Europe and the West knew all too well. In 1916, along the banks of the Somme, General Haig had lined up his boys—the brightest and best young men England had ever produced—and talked to them of Christ and God and Country—just before he led 400,000 to their deaths. All across Europe, then, young men had learned they were fighting a “war to end all wars,” as they dutifully memorized the Latin line Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—“How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.” The result, then, had been an abomination—a merciless, insatiable war of attrition that left a cold, dark crescent of death across the heart of the European continent.

In the 1980s, it was Iran’s turn.

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