Combat Viewed from the Rooftops and Beyond
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Some Notes on War
Watching
Of all the things I don’t remember anymore, here’s one I do. As
a boy, I dreamt about being a foreign correspondent, a war reporter in
particular -- and I think that Bob Shaplen must have been the reason why. He
was a friend of my family’s, perhaps because, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was
the New Yorker’s Far East correspondent and my mother drew for
that magazine, or perhaps because of a history I’ve long forgotten or never
knew. What I still remember, though, is how kind he was to the young boy who
was then Tom Engelhardt. It wasn’t often in those days that a grownup, no less
a grownup war reporter, would spend time with someone else’s son barely into
his teens. I remember, for some reason, those hands of his, large and wrinkled,
that carried pen and paper into battle. I doubt, though, that I grasped much of
what he had experienced when it came to war, but here’s how the New
York Timesdescribed his reportorial life in his 1988 obituary. In
World War II, as Newsweek’s Asia correspondent, he had
“plunged
ashore with the Marines on Leyte in the Philippines in 1944 amid withering
machine-gun and mortar fire. He flew over Nagasaki hours after it was
devastated by the atomic bomb in August 1945 and wrote of ‘looking over a
volcano in the process of eruption.’ He was with Mao Zedong in the mountains of
Yanan in 1946; reported on the rise and fall of Indonesia's President Sukarno
in the 1960s; wrote strategic and battlefield pieces from Korea and Vietnam and
[in 1975] provided a gripping firsthand account of the fall of Saigon as panic
swept over the city of abandoned refugees.”
Who could blame
me, under the circumstances, for dreaming that I might someday be like him? As
it happened, I never came close, never made it to Vietnam, notepad in hand, or
experienced war directly in any way. Still, he left me with a fascination about
covering war and perhaps in some sense led me, a half-century later, to
focus TomDispatch on America’s disastrous wars of
the twenty-first century, the ones Donald Trump, whatever his
impulses, hasn’t generally been able to bring himself not to fight (though he
did at least ground a first wave of planes set to strike Iranian
missile sites last week).
Otherwise,
perhaps the closest I ever came to sensing the persona of a true war
correspondent was sometime in the 1990s in what might have been the most peaceable
city on the planet, Stockholm. There, I found myself at a conference with
another of the great war reporters of our age, Gloria Emerson. She had covered
the Vietnam War up close and personal for the New York Times and
her award-winning book on that grim disaster, Winners and Losers, was a classic of the era, of perhaps
any era. Little as I knew Stockholm, whenever we had free time, I found that
the woman who took on Vietnam on her own was incapable of getting her bearings
in a peacetime city and I had to lead her wherever we went. You could -- or so,
at least, I suspected then -- sense in her confusion that a totally peaceable
land felt disorienting to her.
In his
bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves,TomDispatch’s own Nick Turse wrote memorably of the
war Gloria Emerson covered. He then experienced (civil) war himself
in South Sudan, which he captured in his book, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and again
witnessed it firsthand in the Congo. He has now returned from Libya where another civil
war, part of the spreading planetary chaos created by America’s never-ending war on terror, is
fiercely underway. In his account today of war as a civilian hell -- from the
U.S. Civil War to the present disaster in Libya -- you can feel both the
strange attraction of such warscapes and just why, under the circumstances,
peace might prove disorienting indeed. Tom
TRIPOLI,
Libya -- Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes
like the whisper of the wind. This early morning -- in al-Yarmouk on the
southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli -- it was a mix of both.
All
around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands
of the militiamen who make up the army of the Government of National Accord
(GNA), the U.N.-backed, internationally recognized government of Libyan Prime
Minister Fayez al-Serraj. The war had slept in this morning and all was quiet
until the rattle of a machine gun suddenly broke the calm.
A day earlier, I had spent hours on the roof of my hotel,
listening to the basso profundo echo of artillery as dark
torrents of smoke rose from explosions in this and several other outlying
neighborhoods. The GNA was doing battle with the self-styled Libyan
National Army of warlord Khalifa Haftar, a U.S. citizen, former CIA asset, and longtime resident of Virginia, who
was laudedby President Donald Trump in an April phone call.
Watching the war from this perch brought me back to another time in my life
when I wrote about war from a far greater distance -- of both time and space -- a war I covereddecades
after the fact, the one that Americans still call “Vietnam” but the Vietnamese know as “the American War.”
During the
early years of U.S. involvement there, watching the war from the hotels of
Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was a rite of passage for American
journalists and the signature line of unfortunate articles that often said far
more about the state of war reporting than the state of the war. “On clear days
patrons lunching in the ninth-floor restaurant in the Caravelle Hotel can watch
Government planes dropping napalm on guerrillas across the Saigon River,”
Hedrick Smith wrote in a December 1963 New York Timesarticle.
As that
war ground on, the pastime of hotel war-watching never seemed to end, despite a
recognition of the practice for what it was. Musing about the spring of 1968 in
his fever dream memoir, Dispatches, Esquire’s correspondent in Vietnam, Michael Herr, wrote:
“In the
early evenings we’d do exactly what the correspondents did in those terrible
stories that would circulate in 1964 and 1965, we’d stand on the roof of the
Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so
close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes.
There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from
the heights, at least as detached about it as that even though many of us had
been caught under those things from time to time.”
“It
Has Been Said That There Was a Woman Killed There by Our Guns”
Today, few
know much about Borodino -- unless they remember it as the white-hot
heart of the war sections of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace --
a Napoleonic victory that proved so pyrrhic it would have been regarded as the
French Emperor’s Waterloo, if the actual battle of that name hadn’t finally
felled him. Still, even for those who don’t know Borodino from Bora Bora,
Herr’s passage points to a grand tradition of detached war-watching. (Or, in
the case of Ernest Hemingway’s famed Spanish Civil War coverage, war-listening: “The window of the
hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line
seventeen blocks away.”)
In fact,
the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in
the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or,
for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of
Manassas). “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback,
and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,”
wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the Times of London. “The spectators were all excited, and a
lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an
unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood -- ‘That is splendid,
Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”
That woman
would be sorely disappointed. U.S. forces not only failed to defeat their
Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but
fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a rout of the first order. Still, not one of the many
spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the
8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.
But that
isn’t to say that there were no civilian casualties at Bull Run.
Judith
Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle.
Born in 1776, the widow of a U.S. Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed,
living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when
Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the
second floor.
"We
ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with
sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my
horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James
Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First U.S. Artillery, wrote in
his official report. “I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it.
It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.” Indeed, a
10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot.
She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.
No one
knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to
count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease,
starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict -- close
to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.
“What
You Saw Was Them Shelling My Home.”
A
century later, U.S. troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted.
More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates
of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number,
just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from
the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, just as I’ll never know how many
-- if any -- lives were snuffed out as I scanned the southern edge of Tripoli
and watched smoke from artillery shells and rockets billow into the sky.
That same
afternoon in Libya’s capital, while taking a break from war watching, I met
Salah Isaid and his two children. They were, like me, guests at the Victoria
Hotel, although we were lodged there for very different reasons. When I
mentioned having spent the previous hour on the roof as a suburb was being
shelled hard, a glimmer of recognition flashed across Isaid’s face. “That’s
Khalat Furjan,” he replied with a sad smile. “What you saw was them shelling my
home.”
Isaid, his
wife, and his two boys had found it difficult to escape the war zone, but
finally made it to the safer north side of Tripoli, to this very hotel, in
fact, a few weeks earlier. Worried that his house had been looted or destroyed,
he tried several times to investigate only to be turned away at militia
checkpoints. Now, he was homeless, jobless, and -- even with the hotel’s
special displaced-persons’ rate -- rapidly burning through his savings.
“I sold real estate, but who wants to buy a house in a war zone?” Isaid
asked me with a wry smile that faded into a grimace.
My own
experience as a reporter, in country after country, has more than confirmed his assessment. The “real
estate” I saw in Tripoli’s war-ravaged suburbs was spectral, the civilian population
having fled. Other than a car that had been hit by an air strike, the only
vehicles were tanks or “technicals” -- pickup trucks with machine guns or
anti-aircraft weapons mounted in their beds. Many buildings had been peppered
with machine-gun fire or battered by heavier ordnance. The sole residents
now were GNA militiamen who had appropriated homes and shops as barracks and
command posts.
Real
estate, as Isaid well knows, is a losing proposition on a battlefront. After
Judith Carter Henry’s hilltop home in Manassas Junction, Virginia, was blasted
by artillery, its remains were either demolished by
Confederate soldiers or burned down during the Second Battle of Bull Run, another
staggering U.S. defeat with even heavier casualties in August 1862.
A photograph of Henry’s home, possibly taken in March 1862,
months before that battle, already shows the house to be a crumpled ruin. (It wouldn’t be rebuilt until 1870.) Judith Henry was buried in a small plot next to
her devastated home. “The Grave of Our Dear Mother Judith Henry” reads the tombstone there, which notes that she was 85
years old when “the explosion of shells in her dwelling” killed her.
One
hundred and fifty years after Henry became the first civilian casualty of the
Civil War, Libyans began dying in their own civil strife as revolutionaries,
backed by U.S. and NATO airpower, ended the 42-year rule of dictator Muammar
Gaddafi in 2011. Before the year was out, that war had already cost an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 lives. And the killing never ended as the
country slid into permanent near-failed-state status. The current conflict,
raging on Tripoli’s doorstep since April, has left more than 4,700 people dead
or wounded, including at least 176 confirmed civilian casualties (which experts
believe to be lower than the actual figure). All told, according to the United
Nations, around 1.5 million people -- roughly 24% of the country’s
population -- have been affected by the almost three-month-old conflict.
“Heavy
shelling and airstrikes have become all too common since early April,”
said Danielle Hannon-Burt, head of the International Committee of
the Red Cross’s office in Tripoli. “Fierce fighting in parts of Tripoli
includes direct or indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their property.
It also includes attacks against key electricity, water, and medical
infrastructure essential for the survival of the civilian population,
potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.”
In this
century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own
individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to
Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and
elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo
to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those
reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can
sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being
chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse
the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak
to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims. Some of us, like
Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it -- often from a safe distance and with the
knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such
wars, we can always find an even safer place.
War has an
all-consuming quality to it, which is at least part of what can make it so
addictive for those blessed with the ability to escape it and so devastating to
those trapped in it. A month of war had clearly worn Isaid down. He was slowly
being crushed by it.
In the
middle of our conversation, he pulled me aside and whispered so his boys
couldn’t hear him, “When I go to bed at night, all I can think is ‘What is
going on? What does war have to do with me?’” He shook his head disbelievingly.
Some days, he told me, he gets into his car and weaves his way through the
traffic on the side of the capital untouched by shelling but increasingly
affected by the war. “I drive by myself. I don’t know where I’m going and don’t
have any place to go. My life has stopped. This is the only way to keep moving,
but I’m not going anywhere.”
I kept
moving and left, of course. Isaid and his family remain in Tripoli -- homeless,
their lives upended, their futures uncertain -- pinned under the heavy weight
of war.
Nick
Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch. He reported from Libya for Yahoo News in partnership with Type
Investigations. He is the author of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and
the award-winning Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
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Copyright
2019 Nick Turse