The White Plank

The seasons change like a punch in the mouth.  One minute you are hunched over, eyes squinting in the light, shamal blowing dust in your eyes, bowed before the sun.  The next minute you are shaken by thunder, wind, and mud that falls from the sky.  Not sure what is really happening, you are half dressed, exhausted fingers desperately groping for your rifle at 4 am when a massive thunderclap explodes overhead, only moments later to stumble outside in a stupor to realize with everyone else in the place that the strong smell of rain and ozone is not the effect of mortar or rocket attack, just weather and nerves.  We laugh about it in the morning over coffee and beef jerky.  It seems like every day you stand humbled in the heat saying “any fucking day now the weather will change” but when it does its still a surprise.  We walk to the chow hall now using new skills.  Instead of bent and gasping for breath between hot blasts of AC exhaust and dirty gusts of desert wind that turn your tears to mud, we now dodge puddles and dripping pools on rooftops water flowing through the thousands of holes that time and war have created.  Thick air filling every breath with the humid, earthen, and overpowering fragrance of dirt.

Its still Ramadan here and our compound has had bad news piled upon heartbreak lately.  Five attacks on the mobile teams from our compound in just under 2 weeks.  Three men dead, a handful more seriously injured.  I sit there reading when out of nowhere the place jumps to life.  Radios squawk frantic commands, the sound of helicopters coming in unscheduled, groups of frenzied voices clamor out doors and down hallways, all of them rushing, hurrying towards something, but what?  What can it be? What has happened?  Everyone already knows the answer but they ask the question anyway as they dash for their front row seat.  Hushed crowds of whispers, rumors and speculation, giggle and snicker while trying not to retch.  There has been another attack.  The latest casualties pulled out of the vehicle like sopping wet clothes out of a failed washing machine.  Blown to shreds, bloody rags and meat, falling apart, slippery, grotesque, being wrenched through a small jagged metal hole until they spill out onto a stretcher of all things like a sick joke.  The stretcher almost seems out of place, maybe they use it to preserve the illusion of humanity, a trash bag would work better though.  You can feel the electricity in camp, like just after one of those massive lightning strikes, everyone wide-eyed, on edge, trembling with excitement and fear.  The faces change after these events, pale complexions and wide eyes hang like fearful masks where ego and bravado once was.  A new attitude has spread, a new idea, expressed for the first time when people see the lifeless shredded piles of human parts and globs of unidentifiable meat.  Vulnerability.  It creeps in like a disease, eats away motivation and replaces it with fear.  The gym and chow hall are nearly vacant for a few days.  Incidences of shadow-boxing and playful headlocks increase.  People stand together in groups whenever possible even when there is nothing to talk about.  The guys who once walked around with puffed out chests mocking the weaker men now offer their help like scared children.  There is a constant need to feel like you are doing something.  Idle hands tremble and only remind you of your fears.  Men volunteer to fill sandbags and string concertina wire and other previously loathed errands.

A few hours after an attack they haul the vehicles back in.  Some able to be towed, others lifted onto the backs of large trucks.  Covered in tarps and tied up with cargo straps they bring the them in like cadavers.  People congregate around the burnt out skeletons of armored cars and humvees.  Take pictures, talk about the tactics used, say little prayers for the dead men.  I went out there to snap a few photos and check out the wreckage of the latest attack and caught a couple colombos taking pictures of each other in front of the destroyed car.  I grabbed one by the shoulder and barked at him.  “This ain’t a fucking celebration, asshole!”  I wanted to kick the shit out of both of them but I didn’t.  Couldn’t even bring myself to smash their camera, I just told them to get lost.  Some army guys saw me confront the men and thanked me as I walked away.  The army guys are not used to confronting problems, only avoiding them.  So the attacks continue.

We still roll out regularly.  Bouncing down a jagged collection of potholes.  The rain drenches everything, burying the stink in a muddy brown haze.  The caked on layers of dust all slowly wash away to reveal the cracked bones and aging skeleton of a half dead city underneath.  We splash through milky brown puddles of hepatitis-b while a hundred brown rivulets surge down the windows as our vehicle anxiously presses its way through traffic.  I sit there listening to the AC hum as I see the disfigured images through the water glazed glass.  Like a funhouse mirror the marketplace bends and warps into a lurid collage of reconstituted trash and mud.  Dirty brown savages twitch feverishly beneath waterlogged cardboard awnings and corrugated aluminum all of them focusing their unwaivering attention to us as soon as they recognize our alien presence.

Things are changing quickly around here.  People talk about the coming civil war, wonder whether it will happen or not, but the truth is that its already here.  Its not just a struggle between the Sunni/Shi’ite/Kurd fault lines, but its between factions and factions of factions. Both the Sunnis and the Shi’ites appear to be splitting into smaller, mutually hostile elements. There are signs that among the Sunnis, the secularists, who are mostly Ba’athists, and the Islamists are starting to go at it. Shi’ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s battles with American forces had less to do with resisting the occupation than with positioning himself within the Shi’ite community. In the north the PKK, PUK, and PRK all vie for control of the emergent nation-state of Kurdistan. The PKK has been committing terrorist/insurgent attacks in Turkey for years.  Blowing up pipelines and city busses.  Now they are using the US presence in Iraq to provide security so that Turkish forces can not persecute them south of their border. Iranians are everywhere, listening, threatening, bribing, distributing money, bombs, ideology, and training.

Once this fracturing begins in a post-state region, it continues.  While the Iraqi Government appears to be physically strong it is morally weak.  It is this moral weakness that will cause the government to fall apart in the long run.  The civil war may still have Sunni vs. Shi’ite aspects, it is almost certain to include that fault line, but there will be many other fault lines as well.  Some of these lines within the Shi’ite and Sunni communities, some cutting across them. At the physical level, this works to the “government’s” advantage, in that its relative power increases. But at the moral level, virtually all the other factions have greater legitimacy.

The killing of Iraqis by Iraqis has created a climate of fear, fuelled by the fact that no one is being held responsible. In some cases the murder being conducted by the Iraqi Police itself.  Every operational element over here knows that an Iraqi Police checkpoint is never to be trusted.  Not surprising since the army negotiated agreements with the Mahdi army and other active militias to legitimize their organizations, thereby allowing them to openly wear uniforms, obtain recruits unhindered, and infiltrate the police force en-masse.  It is tantamount to deputizing the Mexican mafia, the Bloods, and the Crips then telling them to protect Los Angeles.  What is worse, no one appears to be capable, or more importantly, willing to stop the murders from escalating into an all out civil war.  The greatest uncertainty is in the large metropolitan areas that lie on the physical border between the conflicting factions. The new struggle will be fought these cities streets.  While the US forces halfheartedly battle through areas where insurgent resistance is greatest, the real focus is somewhere else entirely.  But what location can you trust?  Even in the cities themselves this is unknown.  Different city blocks are ruled by different groups, growing in numbers and eagerness.  But the neighborhoods change so rapidly that you never really know what you may be walking into around the next corner. One day a neighborhood is safe, the next day dangerous.  One day Kurdish, Sunni the next.  This is not wholly a moral battleground though because some of the major reasons for the repopulation and geographic struggles are the local resources whether it be industry, culture, or oil.

Whatever the local motivations may be the attacks are getting more frequent and more bold.  What has the military response been?  Nothing.  So we sit here and read our books and drink coffee and go to the gym.  There’s nothing that an individual can do in this situation, it is an insane scenario, existentially impossible.  Its not just that a few things are beyond your control, but seemingly everything is outside the scope of your individual influence.

There was a mortar that crashed through our berthing area not so long ago.  It was a dud so we all lucked out and nobody got hurt.  They fired it from too far away to hear the outgoing report so it flew undetected until shooting through the aluminum roof, then through the wooden second floor hallway, then through the wooden bottom floor where it stuck into the dirt.  Aside from a lot of talk and a few jokes not much was done as a result of the attack.  The floorboard on the second story that a mortar round went through was replaced, as was the small area on the first floor.  The aluminum roof was left damaged, too small a concern to waste time and equipment on I suppose.  I used to sit outside and watch the evening sun shoot a laser beam in the dust saturated air through that hole in the rooftop, now only rain pours through it. The berthing was constructed some years ago now and the floorboards are all dark brown, dirty, weathered, and worn.  The new board that replaced the damaged one is brand new, very light in color, and has remained untouched since its installation.  It has achieved some kind of strange cultural significance to us.  Nobody in our little area will step on, stand on, or walk over that board.  People believe that if you stand on that board that something bad will happen to you, like maybe when you are sleeping a mortar will land on you or something.  I am generally non-superstitious in any way except when I get over here.  Something happens to your mind in situations like this.  The randomness and the stress and the fear all mix together so that you are constantly knocking on wood or avoiding black cats or about a dozen other ridiculous things.  You know you are being a jackass, but you just don’t want to take any chances because that bloody mess that got yanked out of the burnt vehicle yesterday could be you tomorrow.  So we all have our own unique idiosyncrasies and superstitions here but there is one that we all share.  The white plank.

Not only will nobody step on it or walk on it but it has invaded our lingo as well.  “Stepped on the plank” has become a slogan to express that you did something to get cursed when bad stuff happens to you.

Johnny “Did you see what happen to Mike the other day?  He got shot through the hip and shit out all his guts through his asshole!?”

Billy “Ha ha ha, he must have stepped on the plank!”

“Go walk the plank” is like a warped way of saying ‘fuck you’ even though it is only used jokingly.  The strange thing is that other things have been hit but have not had the same effect.  Blown out tires on a car, shattered windows in a room, but none of these things have spawned any culture.  Its just that fucking plank.

I walked out of the gym tonight to take a piss.  I always piss in the dirt.  Base logistics put a port-o-shitter out there for people to use but nobody does.  I mean, they used to, dudes used to even wait in line just to piss in that thing.  Guys would be out there waiting in line to piss in the boxy blue plastic port-o-shitter and watch the local hire hajis piss is the dirt behind this little work shed and call them “savages” to each other and feed off each others hate.  See, hajis won’t touch their dicks when they take a piss.  Culturally they just squat over a hole and piss and shit their guts out, their cocks spraying like a wild garden hose.  They just give a quick wipe with their hand then carry on about their day.  Most of them have never seen and none of the fuckers knows what to do with a toilet.  I guess some ranking dude overheard the complaints one day and decided to have two steel plates installed in the port-o-shitter where the seat used to be so that hajis could stand on them and do their business.  Fix the problem right?  Wrong. Well it worked, only problem is that now the shitter is totally nasty.  Smelly (much worse than before), shit on, covered with haji graffiti.  So now nobody but the hajis uses the shitter while everyone else chooses to piss in the dirt.  I was out there pissing in the dirt tonight and another guy comes up next to me, whips out and starts to piss, he looks over at the haji going into the shitter then turns to me with a sneer and says “fucking savage”.

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