Weapons of Mass Destruction

by Margaret Vandenburg

  “I meant photographs,” Johnson said. “Not a lot of good photo ops.”

  Sinclair no longer resented Johnson’s presence in the platoon. They needed him now more than ever in the wake of the Australian camera crew debacle. Unauthorized Aussie reporters had secured a rooftop post in the Jolan District. They were shooting live, feeding footage directly to a CNN special report on terrorist cells in Fallujah. Aerial gunships were pummeling a middle-class neighborhood held hostage by Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda militia. Several interrogation sites, where coalition sympathizers were tortured and even beheaded, had been targeted. Al Jazeera managed to hijack the footage, which they stripped of context and characterized as an unprovoked attack on innocent civilians. American reporters were expected to provide counterevidence of the insurgency’s infiltration of so-called residential neighborhoods.

  Sometimes it felt like they were waging war against Al Jazeera. Inflammatory photographs of the bridge mutilations had been largely responsible for launching Operation Vigilant Resolve in the first place. In retaliation, rogue media outlets were broadcasting inflated civilian casualty figures designed to make Americans look like terrorists rather than peacekeepers. The international community was horrified. More to the point, Fallujans were turning against them. There was a notable difference already, in spite of Baghdad’s official support of the offensive. The insurgency was being aided and abetted by more and more former civilians every day.

  “You never answered my question,” Sinclair said.

  “Which one?”

  “The one about mice.”

  “You’re right.” Johnson tried to laugh it off. “Dead mice everywhere.”

  “Feisty little buggers. I could have sworn I heard grenades. And lots of cross fire.”

  Johnson was an ethical man. He believed in the power of journalism to safeguard the moral integrity of war. If someone had told him a week ago that he would cave under the pressure of propaganda, he would have decked them. The airwaves were swamped with images of leveled mosques and devastated neighborhoods. Nowhere, not even in the fine print, was there mention of insurgent snipers in minarets or terrorist cells in master bedrooms. The only thing more damning than footage of aerial strikes were photographs of civilian casualties. Johnson knew a booby trap when he saw one. Al Jazeera would have to get its own damned pictures of civilian casualties.

  Johnson didn’t know which was worse, the casualties themselves or his refusal to report them. Dozens of corpses were buried in his camera, most of which would stay there. Women. Several children. He couldn’t stop shooting. Radetzky had finally pulled him aside to ask what the hell he thought he was doing. Surely one or two shots would have sufficed. There were kids in the hallway and mujahideen in a bedroom behind them, lobbing grenades over their heads. The squad tried to shoot around them. The women tried to protect them with their bare hands.

  It felt like Vietnam all over again, back in the days when the war first started airing on television. Graphic shots of field hospitals. Villagers running from napalm. Kids on fire. Bleeding-heart liberals applauded the media, but the troops themselves felt betrayed. They put their asses on the line day in and day out. This was the thanks they got. But Johnson’s perspective on the role of media had changed since Vietnam. He was on the other side of the lens now, far more aware of the big picture. On balance, news coverage protected rather than indicted soldiers. It kept governments honest, or more honest. Someone had to hold them accountable for the missions they masterminded. Atrocities could almost always be prevented on the drawing board, and almost never in the field.

  “What’s going on down there?” Sinclair persisted.

  “Nothing much,” Johnson said. “The usual.”

  Confiding in Sinclair would have been cathartic. He probably would have interpreted the decision to suppress the photographs as prudent rather than unethical, an embed’s act of solidarity with his host platoon. Often as not in war, the very thing that made everyone feel better was exactly the wrong thing to do. Telling the truth would ultimately be bad for morale. Sinclair needed to be able to pull the trigger with a clear conscience. Killing was nerveracking enough without having to worry whether your next bullet would end up lodged in some kid’s gut. Snipers had a bad reputation for indiscriminate killing, yet another example of media hype. They were, in fact, the least likely of all soldiers to make mistakes.

  Suppressing the photographs. Johnson tried to think of a less incriminating way to frame his decision. Given Al Jazeera’s media stranglehold, the only way to combat trumped-up civilian casualty figures was to downplay them in the American press. Surely covering up something that wasn’t true to begin with no longer qualified as a cover-up. At the same time, all this equivocation made him suspicious of his own motives. Shirking responsibility was always a crime against humanity. Civilians were killed. Photographs were not forthcoming. A fundamental truth remained behind closed doors, quite literally in camera. Wars waged in kitchens and bedrooms inevitably resulted in dead women and children. This was the kind of simple spatial calculation the architects of the War on Terror overlooked, pretending instead to protect family values at home and abroad. Making the world safe for democracy for yet another blood-soaked century, God willing. Johnson was no fool. Pretending that the ethics of journalism were complicated didn’t change the stark clarity of facts on the ground. Erasing evidence didn’t erase accountability.

  It wasn’t the first time the specter of censorship had come back to haunt him. He remembered hearing one of those cultural critics interviewed on NPR, so far to the left he claimed the invasion of Iraq violated international law. If the guy hadn’t gotten tenure at some fancy university, he’d have ended up in jail for treason. Johnson listened to liberal stations for a laugh, just to see how outrageous their pundits could be. But professor so-and-so made a point that defied political classification. He could have been Republican or Democrat, even Sunni or Shia for that matter. They were talking about the proliferation of forensics shows on television. Cold Case. CSI. Without a Trace. In 2001 there was one. In 2006 there were eight, two of them Emmy winners. Something beyond the public’s perennial thirst for blood and gore must have accounted for this exponential leap.

  “Body bags,” the professor said cryptically.

  His attempt to simulate lecture-hall dramatics fell flat on the radio. The talk show host blathered on to break the silence. If Johnson hadn’t been a Vietnam vet, he would have changed the channel. He had his own unresolved issues with body bags. Peaceniks had trafficked in images of dead soldiers to advance their cause. Typical sixties hippie hype. So much for valor and heroism. Casualties were depicted as victims, not warriors. The more mutilated the bodies, the more college students protested and congressmen wagged their heads. Peace was brokered by trivializing the ultimate sacrifice.

  This time around the problem was the absence rather than presence of body bags in the media. Either the Vietnam War had saturated the American public’s capacity to process graphic facts, or journalists had succumbed to political pressure to suppress images that had formerly fueled antiwar demonstrations. One way or the other, dead soldiers remained out of sight, if not out of mind. A running count of casualties in Iraq was considered adequate coverage of the carnage.

  “What happens to all those dead bodies?”

  “Get to the point, goddamnit,” Johnson said aloud, glaring at his car radio.

  Rhetorical questions pissed him off. They were forbidden in journalism, for good reason. Reporters were trained to track down facts. They followed leads instead of asking leading questions. If professor so-and-so really gave a shit, he’d focus on the fate of the bodies themselves, not his own academic abstractions, how fallen heroes were transported home on commercial airliners without adequate provision for the military pomp and circumstance they deserved. Anything to save a buck. When they finally touched down on American soil, their bodies were unloaded like so much baggage. It was a disgrace.

  “They disappear into thin air,
” the professor said. He paused to underscore his punch line. “And reappear in the guise of the dead bodies on forensics shows.”

  At first Johnson had scoffed at the gratuitous ingeniousness of this hypothesis. Then something shifted in his mind, altering the locus of reality itself. In their absence, the bodies had become a larger-than-life media presence, the virtual stars of forensics shows. Their spectral role in America’s collective unconscious too closely resembled the simulacrum of weapons of mass destruction. Though nothing more than figments of the political imagination, they had allegedly justified the Iraq War. Saying it made it so.

  The fact that the first primetime forensics show aired in 2001 implicated 9/11. An inconceivable 2,753 bodies disappeared into thin air on that glorious September morning. A sky that blue was impossible to reconcile with a day that dark. Cognitive dissonance. Emergency medical facilities were put on red alert. Day after day they waited for bodies that were not forthcoming. A few passersby injured in the fallout were treated, but not a single one of the 2,753. From dust to dust.

  “The good news is that the American imagination won’t tolerate the disappearance of all these bodies.”

  “I’m assuming there’s a downside.” Even the talk show host was getting impatient.

  “The bad news is—”

  Johnson had switched off the radio. He wasn’t ready to hear that facts were obsolete in the new millennium. Violence was a spectacle, not an actual phenomenon, something you turned on and off at will on Netflix. YouTube. On Demand. News and entertainment were indistinguishable. Blogs replaced investigative journalism. Pundits jousted windmills rather than exposing the truth. Accountability evaporated into cyberspace. Johnson had always prided himself on being tough and ethical, and tough enough to be ethical. Age or Iraq must have worn him down. He was no longer idealistic enough to do his job.

  Sometimes he thought that carrying a camera was more perilous than carrying a gun, psychologically if not physically. In the US Marines, you lived and breathed and fought as a team, shielded from doubt by the powerful force of Semper Fidelis. Journalists were a breed apart. The troops were great once you gained their trust. But even embeds ultimately worked alone. There were times when he felt almost like one of the men themselves, and then there were times like this.

  Sinclair kept his sights trained on potential targets below. He welcomed the excuse not to look at Johnson. Guys needed privacy when they cracked up. He knew that if Trapp were there, he’d make Johnson tell him what was wrong. Trapp was a great believer in words, as though sucking it up were a problem rather than a solution. Sinclair assumed it was a Southern thing, a regional tendency to wear their hearts on their sleeves. A classic Westerner, Sinclair had about as much faith in words as in shrinks and their talking cures. They were a kind of last resort, a way to communicate things that didn’t really matter much anyway. Geography often determined how language was used or not used, as the case may be. New Yorkers talked a mile a minute. New Englanders talked down to you. People from sparsely populated areas tended to use language sparingly, communing more with nature than with each other. Sinclair’s inclination to remain silent accounted for the fact that Johnson was there in the first place, grappling with the ethical implications of his professional decision to remain silent.

  Out of nowhere, two police cars roared around a corner into an alleyway. Sinclair zoomed in on them. The fact that the drivers wore official uniforms gave him very little pause. The majority of the police force had already joined the insurgency. Plainclothes passengers in the backseat were either civilians or mercenaries, depending on whether the things they carried were lethal or not. The cars screeched to a stop, disgorging a dozen men toting AK-47s. Enemy snipers must have pinpointed the platoon’s location. Sinclair was expecting Wolf’s team to emerge from a nearby compound any minute, with Radetzky’s not far behind next door.

  “The alley is armed,” Sinclair said calmly into his headset.

  The more menacing the threat, the more measured he spoke. Sinclair’s buddies had learned to heed his composure as much as his words.

  “A full squad.”

  Sinclair’s training kicked in. He automatically referred to the enemy as a squad of soldiers rather than a gang of insurgents. The War on Terror used archaic language dating from the good old days when battles were waged by men authorized by their governments to bear arms and wear uniforms. He hardly knew what to call the targets in his crosshairs. Jihadis, feyadeen, muj fighters. They might have been terrorists imported from Syria or Pakistan. Chechen snipers, Filipino gunners, Afghan mortar men, Pakistani suicide bombers, Saudi arms runners. Their nationalities affected their maneuvers. It was like fighting a dozen armies on a single battlefield. Just when you thought you understood the tactical mentality of one faction, another one joined the insurgency.

  Sinclair managed to pick off one of the uniformed fighters before the rest took cover. For good measure, he blew his brains out. Insurgents had been known to commandeer bullet-proof vests along with uniforms. The target was smaller, but Sinclair felt confident enough to scope the head instead of the body. Some days were like that. He was in the zone and could afford to take tough shots.

  McCarthy and Trapp reappeared on the roof of a cleared compound. They lobbed grenades over the edge of the parapet. At least one hit home. The screams were so unrelenting it might have been two. Radetzky’s squad took advantage of the smoke screen, fanning across the courtyard under cover of Wolf’s team. Vasquez managed to flush out three gunners. He nailed one himself. Sinclair picked off the other two without even having to move the barrel of his rifle. They ran right into his sights. If only it were always that easy.

  The enemy’s lack of training kicked in. They panicked. The second uniformed driver sprinted back to his patrol car. One of his passengers managed to pile back in before he screeched off. The dead driver had left keys in the ignition of the other car. A frantic insurgent managed to climb behind the wheel without getting gunned down. The car sped off, leaving the rest stranded. Radetzky’s squad mowed down every last one of them before they had a chance to regroup. Nine kills scored without suffering a scratch. When the platoon was fighting as one, they were almost invincible.

  Sinclair was appalled not by the carnage but by the cowardice. A marine would rather die ten times over than desert one of his own on the battlefield. Valor and heroism all stemmed from one fundamental martial virtue. Loyalty. Dishonorable discharges always resulted from one unthinkable vice. Betrayal. They had all sworn to uphold a code of ethics, to be sure. But loyalty to your buddies was all that really mattered. The rest was just window dressing.

  Sinclair had always had a horror of betrayal. He was slow to learn that what you hate and fear will never let you rest in peace. Grandpa always said that everyone was predisposed to be their own worst enemy, something Sinclair never understood until he got to Iraq. Call it fate or a psychological complex, your nemesis ultimately tracks you down. His first run-in with the idea of betrayal was in church, of all places. His mother used to force them to attend services to commemorate Christ’s birth and death. Judging from her lax approach to the rest of the ecclesiastical calendar, she was far less interested in the savior’s actual life. Christmas was torture, an unmitigated bore from start to finish. At least Easter had plenty of gruesome stories to spice things up. Gethsemane and Golgotha were worth the price of admission, no doubt about that. But all that crap about cocks crowing three times was infuriating. Sinclair would have stormed right out of church if his mother hadn’t told him, in so many words, to keep his butt glued to the pew, or else.

  First of all, cocks didn’t crow on cue. They crowed when they were damned good and ready, usually when you were trying to sleep in. Sinclair was willing to forgive incidental factual errors here and there. Even Grandpa had been known to stretch things a little for the sake of a good story. But the betrayal itself was unfathomable, not to mention out of character. Judas was a born liar and Christ never should have trusted him t
o begin with. But Peter was his right-hand man. They fished together and would have gone hunting, too, if there’d been animals in that godforsaken desert. When they were alone, Jesus probably called him Pete, the loyalest name on the planet. The rock. There was no way Peter ever made those lousy cocks crow. Not once, not three times, not ever. He’d have crucified himself, pounded the nails into his own wrists and feet, before he’d betray a fellow apostle, let alone Christ.

  Loyalty was unconditional, like love only much less fickle. You could conceivably be loyal to more than one person at a time, provided conflicts of interest didn’t intervene. Platoons were like that, aggregates of the kind of pure, unwavering devotion Sinclair shared with Pete from day one, or at the very least day six. They were born within a week of one another, pulled by the same midwife into what Sinclair always assumed would be parallel lives. Till death do us part. Everybody blamed everybody else for Pete’s suicide. The last letter Sinclair’s sister ever wrote to him was one long outrageous accusation. She said he’d let Pete down. Truth be told, it was the other way around. Suicide was the ultimate betrayal.

  If there were warning signs, they were miniscule in comparison with the magnitude of the crime. Being moody hardly qualified as a red flag. Sinclair assumed Pete was just itching to graduate. They both were. But the only thing that improved over the course of the summer was the weather. For some reason, Pete decided to hire himself out rather than work on the ranch. He was juggling several jobs, thinning fruit and baling hay on neighboring farms. By the time he got home, it was too late to even go fishing, not that he seemed to care. When Sinclair asked why he was wasting his time for chump change, Pete said he should ask his father.

  “I’m asking you.”

  “I’m not at liberty to talk about it.”

  “Cut the crap, Pete. You sound like a TV show.”