Camilla Lai kindly translated her posting about an encounter with a US soldier serving in Iraq:
You land in the heart of AmericaLand and suddenly you realize that we are at war. In fact, them, the Americans, are at war but we, Westerners just like them, appear indistinguishable, in cause and effect.
“This war risks to become longer then World War II”, I was reading in The New York Times while waiting to board my flight. Atlanta airport is loaded with marines destined to Iraq. On their arm they carry, in Arabic, the name of their duty station. Young recruits who in order to pay their school fees are ready to die for an ideal which they don’t even believe in.
“If anybody came into my house, in the middle of the night and turned it upside down like we do in their houses, I would react just the same way. And they would call me a terrorist too”. John is wearing civilian clothes, but its rhythmic and fast trod leaves no doubt: he is in the Army (“Marines are sissy”, he claims).
Between strangers who will never meet again sincerity blooms. So he tells me that he came back, to Tennessee, because his step-father had died, of cancer. “We knew it was coming”, he says, and his rhythmic step does not skip a beat. Because at 21 (22, maximum 23) years of age, John is used to horror. Because he himself created horror, every single one of the days he served in Iraq. And from the height of the studies he hasn’t yet done, he says the same exact things that so many intellectuals write: “Saddam kept all those diversities united. No one dared to rebel. Bush opened the gate to hell”.
I stumble, I suck my cigarette as if I were clinging to a sentence, a desperate sequitur. Nothing comes.
When we board (he is flying through Rome to Dubai and then Iraq), John mumbles, almost to himself: “Forget about Vietnam. They tell us to fight the enemy. But we do not know who it is, the enemy. They made us walk though that door and now we are there, in hell, everyday”.
