The night before I was due to go with the others to the front line of the battle for Kulna, I had this dream of a small girl with a brown face and white hair and white eyes who stood in front of a fence and screamed at the top of her voice, and the face remained imprinted in the darkness after I had awoken. That face through the day that was still to come would serve me well as a useful symbol of a senseless death.
The taxi that the two French reporters and I rode in silence to the final checkpoint before the front line had taken four hours to go from the hotel door to the appointed place. There we were taken by Indian soldiers up onto a roof overlooking a deep forest where a jolly general with a hair-net round his beard was sitting at a desk and drinking tea and directing the battle by radio phone.
‘Go to the front?’ he said. ‘Certainly not. If I go to a place where that night I am planning to order an advance and three hundred television cameramen come with me, by that afternoon the whole world knows what I am going to do next, and that includes the Pakistanis. And they are not supposed to know what I am doing next because that is not playing the game.’
Prisoners? ‘No, I am not taking prisoners. I’ve come here to fight.’ Going slowly? ‘Of course I am going slowly. I do not want to get my men killed, why should I? I had a brother killed yesterday. But that is all in the game. God, what a lunatic Nixon is. He’s driving us into the arms of the Russians, and we never wanted to go, we never wanted to go.’ Will Bangladesh fail perhaps? ‘Perhaps it will. Perhaps it will be a terrible mess. But,’ and he rapped the table, ‘it will not be Pakistan!’ We drank the excellent tea. ‘I can talk to you gentlemen like this,’ he said, smiling, ‘because we are a democracy. We love to live this life we are living. We are free. Now you want to go to the front. I will see what I can do.’
I thought of a lot of the things I’d never realised I held dearly as we moved on forward down the straight road past the wrecked Chaffee tanks and the burnt-out huts and the howling ambulance trucks towards the loudening noise of the mortars, and I swore as death came near me and breathed in my face that never again would I hold so lightly the things I had by a right that so many men of equal brains but inferior luck had never even attained. We stopped by a corner of the road, and took photos.
‘How many men have died here?’ I asked the sergeant.
‘Yesterday we lost only seven chaps,’ he said. ‘Yesterday was quite good.’
The shells whined overhead and crumpled in the forest ahead. By the roadside lay three spent rockets. I went up to look at them.
‘Do not do that,’ said the sergeant. ‘I do not think they are exploded yet.’
I looked at the men on the backs of the speeding trucks who smiled strange smiles as they went off, perhaps, to die. And still I wasn’t sure it was really happening, a real war that like so few wars was being fought for a good cause with the bodies of men who vaguely knew what they were fighting for, and when they got around to thinking about it, really believed in it.
We went into a beautiful green and yellow field where the men on the big guns under the rope nets who were firing into the nameless distance at a foe they never saw had stopped their part of the war and were having lunch.
‘I would like to get some background sound for my radio broadcast,’ said one of the correspondents. ‘You know, to make it sound authentic. Would you mind?’
So the men put down their tea and went back to the big guns, and we blocked our ears, and they swung the big muzzles round in random directions and fired fifteen mortar shells across the forest into the laps of maybe three or four men who might otherwise have lived to a ripe old age. And the radio correspondent got his sound and he thanked them. I watched him playing it back, and despised him utterly, and all this jackal breed, and that included myself, and went away to be on my own for a while.
*
We drove back in the roaring night through five more checkpoints than we’d struck in the morning, past truck after truck of smiling soldiers travelling through the moonlight to what, in their Eastern ignorance, they thought was laid down in the book of heaven and could not be changed by the hand of man. They came past in such numbers that we thought there must be something happening tonight, like the last push on Dacca. It was the eleventh day of a war that no-one in the West would think of too deeply, although it was fought at least in part for that right to vote that all of us believed self-evident, and I had seen too little of it, gone into it too ignorantly and with too much cowardice perhaps to be of much use as an explicator or even as a witness. Yet I was glad that I had come, though in my very bones I felt a nausea rising at the thought that such things would always be.
Letters to the Future
THE TAMPA AND 9/11
FRIDAY, 31 AUGUST 2001
The month our PM had to shriek and scamper
To fight off weeping families on the Tampa
(Evil babies, girls and pregnant mothers
Fleeing gunmen who had killed their brothers,
Wily pirates, housed in damp containers,
Plotting futures heathen, foul and heinous),
People rescued on our coastguard’s orders,
But mutinously brought within our borders
By stout Norwegian captain Arne Rinnan,
Whom straight we told to take his dirty linen
And launder it in other restless oceans
Far beyond the reach of silly, bleeding-heart emotions.
Phlegmatic Arne grimly disagreed
(His bleeding heart had not yet ceased to bleed)
And calmly parked inside our coastal waters
Frantic husbands, mothers, sons and daughters.
Whereat John Howard, noting their distress,
Ordered they be boarded by the SAS
And told with vigour they were free to swim
To somewhere else more merciful, far from him.
Certain Melbourne lawyers, meanwhile, ventured forth
And argued human rights to Justice North
Who all weekend with cold, unyielding face
Considered what he might do; watch this space …
TUESDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 2001
‘The orders of the court,’ said Justice North, speaking live on television at about three p.m. on Tuesday, 11 September, ‘will require that the respondents release the rescuees onto the mainland of Australia.’ Many present in the courtroom cheered and were not required to cease. Justice North, a youthful, wigless, dark-haired figure in spectacles, who in the movie might be played by Anthony LaPaglia, then painted a picture of a fledgling police state in action, with commissars Howard, Reith and Ruddock arrogating to themselves powers they did not have.
The Howard government was now in deep trouble, accused by a judge – or accused in effect – of piracy, kidnapping and the cruel and needless traumatising of innocent foundlings of the sea. They had three days to appeal. If that failed, the HMAS Manoora, now steaming towards Port Moresby, would be turned around, and the faces of the women and children thus far hidden from view – all that had been seen of them were two hundred small smudged figures sitting in silent desolation on the broad deck of the Tampa – would be appearing in court and giving interviews outside it. Justice North concluded his judgement and left the courtroom.
Across the world in Boston it was midnight, and Mohamed Atta in his bedroom was completing his final devotions.
WEDNESDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 2001
The dark of the suburbs went by, unthreateningly. I was driving back from a screening of Newsfront at Film Australia in Lindfield – its initial, discarded director Howard Rubie and I answered questions from an audience of elderly, leathery, red-faced, white-haired news cameramen remembering with affectionate bitterness better days – when I heard on the car radio a garbled report of a plane that had struck – was it an accident? or somehow not an accident? – a skyscraper in New York. It was about 11.40, Sydney time. By 11.50 as I was passing St Ives, a second, adjacent building had been struck, and a kind of baffled wonderment plain in the voice
of the announcer, who said the words: a suspected terrorist attack.
In a bar in The Hague, my son Jack watched on television, coming live, the impact of the second aircraft as it hit the right-hand side – the first broadcast shot, not the later, more famous one – and made a bulge in the left-hand side of the World Trade Center. In New York, on the street below, director of Newsfront, Phil Noyce, saw as in a movie multitudes running with howling faces towards him and above them swirling white objects that seemed to be bits of paper but proved as they fell to be chunks of concrete. His appointment in the building – to show to some executives his film The Quiet American from the novel by Graham Greene, about America getting it wrong in Asia, yet again – would not be kept. He ran back to his hotel and watched the television, as I did when I got home at about 12.30.
Already the hyperbole was beginning. Talk of perhaps one hundred thousand killed – forty thousand who would be there at work and ninety thousand who passed through each day. The biggest attack on America since Pearl Harbor with the greatest number of casualties since the Civil War. ‘Terrorism against our nation,’ a gobsmacked President Bush told a schoolroom in Florida, ‘will not stand.’
The first tower slowly, gracefully collapsed in a widening welter of upflung dust. In the second one, crazed by heat, people started jumping out of windows. A bald man crying on the street said twelve, fourteen people had done so. Some were couples, holding hands. All the way down. Images of some who fell were broadcast live, then never broadcast again. Then a third plane hit the Pentagon, and a fourth, perhaps on its way to the White House, crashed in Pennsylvania …
George Bush on his way to the presidential bunker in Nebraska – from which, it was reported, he would conduct on television hook-up a National Security Council meeting – uttered, as he had to, lest any motive for this act of war unsettle American smugness, his first Big Lie of what, with its usual casualties, would be a war. ‘Freedom itself was attacked,’ he said, ‘by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended … We will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.’ They’ve been punished, I thought. They’re dead already. Dead in battle …
On the roof of the second building, a young Australian man called Andrew Knox was talking on his mobile, describing to some friends his last hour on earth as the choking smoke rose up around him. Firemen inside the building were climbing the stairs. I woke Annie and we had coffee and watched through the night fascinated, appalled …
The collapse of the second building had a dignified feel to it, heroic even, its aerial proudly vertical all the way to the ground. Soon dust-whitened pedestrians were stumbling about like the Undead, articulating disbelief. It can’t be like this. This is the capital of the world. A British correspondent, Stephen Evans, was saying, ‘The terribleness, the hugeness of what’s happened …’ when the second building collapsed behind him.
‘Here it comes, I hope I live, I hope I live,’ said an onlooker to his video camera. ‘Behind the car, I’m getting behind the car. I hope I live.’
Goodbye Babylon
A MIRROR SCENARIO
WEDNESDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 2001
President Gore stood on a pile of ash and rubble that was once the Twin Towers of New York. ‘This was a terrible crime,’ he said to many microphones and cameras, ‘and the nineteen young men who committed it are dead. They have accomplices yet living, however, and they will be found and, like the Lockerbie bombers and the Oklahoma bombers, brought to trial. Interpol, Scotland Yard, MI5, the CIA, Mossad and the secret services of India and Pakistan are on their track, are seeking them out, and will find them.
‘Though a bigger crime in the numbers of dead than the Lockerbie bombing, or the Oklahoma bombing, or the Atlanta bombing, it is of the same order, and we are on the case and justice will be done. I ask you to go home, and grieve for your loved ones, and celebrate their lives in the ways your cultures and family traditions find comforting. The American story is not ended, nor was it by this awful day made pointless. It goes on, and it will prevail.
‘Let us rejoice in the good times we can remember. Let us plan for a future we know is bright. Let us weep for a time, and bury our dead, and remember them dearly as long as we can, and proceed with our lives thereafter as best we can. Our story is not ended. The story continues.
‘May God bless you all, and God bless America.’
… That night the President had a troubling dream. The Towers once again crumbled as they had in reality, and the ash-people wandered through the stricken streets of Manhattan as they had in reality, but after that there was a War, and then another War, and over a hundred thousand people were killed, including children, and America became reviled among the nations, and its word was not trusted anymore.
He sat up and turned on the light. He looked around at the unchanged room. ‘Thank God,’ said President Gore. ‘It was only a dream.’
Night Thoughts in Time of War
OBAMA, 2002
My son Tom found a quote from Obama on the internet. Speaking against the Iraq War in October 2002, five months before it started, he said:
I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbours, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
Good use of the adjective ‘dumb’. It evokes George Bush, and was meant to. Obama might make it. He just might …
And So It Went
THE HOODED MAN
SUNDAY, 25 APRIL 2004, 12.05 A.M.
Sound carries more at night. The tiniest ripples on Pittwater, the small growl of launches wending home, the soft crunch of waves on the surf beach, the night birds, the almost soundless wing-brush of an owl going by the window. It all seems apart from time, in another dimension, but time soon draws us into its tale, its tapestry, its mural, its roll-call of history.
And history doesn’t end just when I or Francis Fukuyama want it to. I thought this book was done, but bigger and bigger events kept hurling punchlines at me and the story of these times.
It’s been the hottest April in forty years, and the driest, and once again the cruellest month. A hundred and nine Americans dead from April Fool’s to Anzac Day, and over a thousand Iraqis, in the smoking wrecks of armoured vehicles, police stations, markets, petrol tankers, oil terminals and mosques. Foreign peaceworkers kidnapped, foreign troops and companies pulling out. Two major cities besieged by angry bewildered Americans, why don’t they like us, we’re their friends, Iraqi policemen refusing to shoot their neighbours, or changing sides, and Shi’ites and Sunnis colluding in timed uprisings all over the country.
The Americans, reeling, agreed to abandon the Ruling Council, many of whose numbers had in any case resigned, and let the UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi choose a new colonial junta by June 30th. Ba’ath Party members fired, disgraced and impoverished a year ago were given their jobs back, Saddam’s disbanded army put back in uniform, pensions restored to angry civil service retirees, tours of duty extended (as in Catch-22), and Coalition partners begged to send more t
roops in, send them fast, because things here, guys, are going to hell.
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, sworn in, quickly said Spain would pull out ‘as soon as possible’ and so did Spanish-speaking Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Thailand said one death and we’re leaving, Poland looked uncertain, and three Japanese volunteer peaceworkers, kidnapped and released, were abused when they got home for selfishly causing their country anxiety. Four kidnapped Italians, meanwhile, were tormented on videotape, and one, shouting, ‘This is how an Italian dies!’, shot in the brain. Four Halliburton workers were kidnapped, killed and burnt, and foreign corporations, angry with America’s jumpy habit of blamming away at anything that moved, began flying their people out.
And the economic reasoning behind the war began to dissipate. Where were the profits? Burning up by the roadside. Where are our top salesmen? Pleading for their lives on television.
In Fallujah – where a year ago Americans fired on the demonstrating jobless, killing maybe eighteen – a truck with Americans in it was rocket-bombed, a burning, howling survivor dragged out and kicked to death, and four bodies dismembered, hung on a bridge and hit with boots while other Americans elsewhere in Fallujah refused to intervene and video cameras rolled. Images of this, and the rejoicing teenagers round the dragged and buffeted corpses, caused Fox News to call for ‘capital punishment’ for all involved. Brigadier General Kimmitt, a tall and steely grey-blond oaf, then demanded Fallujah hand over the murderers to ‘justice’, or there would be, he said, an American response. ‘It will be methodical,’ he said, ‘it will be precise, and it will be overwhelming.’ He did not ask how this could be done, how Fallujah’s mayor would know who the murderers were, or how to find them, or how to capture them without himself being murdered, burnt and dismembered, or how to survive their relatives’ immediate armed vengeance. And when no handover occurred, Operation Vigilant Resolve began.
Bob Ellis Page 15