The forever war by Dexter Filkins

Author:Dexter Filkins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Current Events, Political Science, Political Freedom & Security, Persian Gulf War (1991), Political Freedom & Security - Terrorism, History, Military History - 1990-, Iraq War (2003-), 2003, General, Military - General, Military, History - Military, Iraq War, Terrorism, Iraq, War, Military - Persian Gulf War (1991)
ISBN: 9780307266392
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

THE WALLS OF THE HOUSE swayed and the windows rattled and the bathroom door slammed on its own. I set down my coffee and spilled it over the counter. It was 8: 20 a.m. The explosion was unfolding so close I could discern the intimacies of its sounds, its timbers, the cracks of the tumbling debris, the simultaneity of noise and wave. I ran out the door in my T-shirt and jeans.

It was a few blocks away. A crowd of Iraqi schoolgirls were running, mouths open, eyes wide. The bodies were spread across Al-Nidhal Street in a tableau, burned brown, blown apart, no clothes. The blast had flung a body into a metal fence, where a torso lay in the dirt. The blast had thrown a body into a brick wall, pushed the wall over and cracked the body’s skull. The blast had tossed a body into someone’s yard, thrown it like a dancer, and it had landed in the pose of a ballerina. A man crouched over a dirty body and looked for something to recognize in its face.

The sky blackened. The bomber had crammed his payload into an ambulance and sped down Al-Nidhal Street to his destination, the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Another driver in another car, a Good Samaritan, had spotted him, sped alongside to catch him and cut him off. The ambulance exploded and disappeared, and the car of the Good Samaritan lay in the street in the fire, the driver in his seat, his hands on the wheel, his head arched in a final fiery grimace. From the walls that still stood hung hunks of bleeding flesh.

The building lay in heaps and next to it a crater, and water gushed from a severed main. The street was filling, a spreading watery fire. In the smoke firemen splashed like phantoms. “Oh my God, help me, oh my God, help me,” an elderly woman cried, her face and clothes spattered red, her arms extended for the young men who were leading her away. At her feet lay a severed arm.

The Americans arrived, children in the horror world. Young in laundered uniforms, they surveyed the scene with unknowing eyes, but the order they brought was real and they did not waver. A soldier knelt with his gun next to a corpse that looked like a doll. The American’s face was round and pale and his eyes were blue, and he glanced over his shoulder and bit his lower lip. Past him medics carried something on a stretcher, a lump of red and black.

A thud echoed in the distance. Then another thud.

“There have been two more bombs,” an Iraqi police officer quietly said to his colleagues.

By the time we reached Shaab, a poor Shiite neighborhood a few miles away, another place had been blown up, a total of four in less than an hour. In Shaab it was a police station. When we pulled up we saw the burning building and hundreds of people gathered round.

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