War Journal by Richard Engel

Author:Richard Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

15

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The spring and summer of 2005 raced by in a blur of murders, bombings, shootings, and kidnappings. There were mortars at dawn every morning, car bombs by 11 A.M., drive-by shootings for tea, and mortars again at dusk to kiss the Green Zone good night. Kidnappers and death squads were mostly nocturnal, hunting invisibly in the darkness. It was hard to tell the days apart. If it rained every day for six months, how could you distinguish if one day was wetter than another?

The “aftermath pix,” as we called them, all looked the same. A burned-out car or Humvee. Kids climbing on the debris. Women in loose black dresses wailing on a curbside. A shirtless injured man in his thirties with a mustache on a bloody hospital bed. If only they spoke English, perhaps the viewers would have cared. To many of our viewers, and many of the American soldiers in Iraq, it all looked like “Arab savages” killing one another for no good reason. American news broadcasts, including ours, often summed up the chaos with tired, generic throwaway lines like, “Good evening, more senseless violence today in Iraq” or “More random violence in Baghdad.” Then I’d have one minute and fifty seconds to moan about attacks in towns no one had ever heard of that killed people nobody wanted to know about.

But there was little senseless or random about the violence. It was a civil war, although it was still mostly one-sided. Sunnis wanted power, blamed the Shiites for having won the elections, and were determined to punish them. In the spring, summer, and fall of 2005, Sunni radicals and Zarqawi’s paradise-obsessed martyrs ferociously attacked Shiites in markets, mosques, and movie theaters, and even at their funerals.

Restaurants were especially popular targets, particularly cheap, greasy kebaab houses—Baghdad’s version of donut shops popular with Iraqi cops and soldiers. I arrived at one on Abu Nawaz Street along the Tigris about a half hour after it was attacked. Nearly thirty police and other customers were killed as they ate breakfast.

I saw pools of blood on the white tile floor when I arrived. Metal tables were overturned and the walls were pockmarked with shrapnel. Blah-blah-blah. It looked like more of the same, more aftermath pix. But on the ceiling, I saw something different: a perfectly intact face. It had been ripped off someone’s skull (witnesses suspected it was the bomber’s face), thrown in the air like a pizza, and glued to the plaster ceiling. It was staring down at me like some macabre modern art installation.

As I approached it with a certain degree of scientific curiosity (I hadn’t imagined that a face could peel off like a mask), I accidentally stepped into a soupy pool of blood and chunks of flesh. I instinctively raised my hands in the universal “I surrender” position and flashed an apologetic and completely inappropriate nervous smile. It was how I would have reacted if I’d walked over a floor in a hotel lobby without realizing that a workman was still waxing it.

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