Story Corner #1

As we pull up we see a car completely destroyed and on fire, a body under a blanket--or what you could call a body, it was more of a torso with one arm, the entirity badly charred--a group of about 10 locals, and three Iraqi Army(IA) tanks and their crews. At least the latter explains the shooting we heard well after the explosion. The locals, friends/employees of the deceased, are all shouting and demanding and confused and bewildered at the same time; my interpreter tries to translate bits of ten separate monologues to me but the only thing I really comprehend is the emotion they use. My men secure the area, put out the fire in the car's trunk and engine compartment, and try to piece together the events that led to the car exploding shortly after we left that exact area less than a half hour before. I am told the bomb was on the roadside but after looking at the area the bomb supposedly detonated at and at the damage done to the car I conclude it was probably inside the man's vehicle. An assassination.

After a quick investigation and the threat of this guys family attacking the town for revenge subsides the IA leave and my platoon is left with the friends who are still demanding answers and solutions to problems that aren't even yet defined. But their speech slows; they smoke cigarettes and stare at the wreckage. We have nothing to do now but to wait for the bomb squad to come out and investigate, a proposition that could take hours. Long after the car stops smoking, the body smolders.

The bomb squad arrives finally and determines that one or two rockets rigged up under the driver's seat was the method of assassination, Soviet made 57mms. They jump back in their vehicles and depart, leaving the Iraqis to pick up the pieces of anatomy strung about the area. They do this by getting a pot from a nearby home and then walk around using our flashlights to locate pieces which include lengths of intestine, small chunks of organs, bloody bits of skin. They place the pot beside the blanket covered body and wait. After a few hours they go to a nearby home to warm up and sleep. The smell of the dead man fills the area.

For the next few hours we guard the remains. We aren't friends or family, we aren't even Iraqi or Muslim. We barely knew him--he was a man paid by us to employ locals to stand up checkpoints in town. Now his body was on the street under a blanket 150 meters south of one of his own checkpoints, left unmanned now that the employer was dead. And we were his company.

What struck me about death, this being the first dead man I have seen in Iraq or for that matter the first violently killed man in my life, was the finality of it. He was completely out of the picture and never coming back. Take a single peanut out of a large jar of peanuts and set it aside, look at the jar and you don't notice the difference; it is still a jar of peanuts to be eaten, thrown away, or left to stale. But look at the discarded peanut for some time and you realize the empty place left in the jar and wonder why this particular peanut was chosen from the lot.

It was past daybreak when higher allowed the Iraqis to take the body. They brought a hatchback car and lifted the blanket into the back. Then they took the pot, opened the blanket, and dumped the small bloody chunks of the man onto him. They discarded the pot and drove away into the countryside. A small boy walked up and I told him to go away, not wanting to be bothered for chocolate after hours of guard. He told my interpreter he was sent by his mother to retrieve her pot. It is still a jar of peanuts.