Auteur/autrice : Yves Robert

Prologue

Maybe we could open a window?
My lawyer wanted to speak for me… He thought I wouldn’t have the words… But I did.
He tried to dissuade me, he reminded me that I did not study… I would have thought I was stupid.
But it’s my life… Not his.
So I am depriving you of a plea, I am depriving you of a professional and you will have to listen to me, it is my life after all.
I’m sorry, I don’t want to displease you… I don’t want to turn you against me because I don’t know how to speak.
My lawyer, he has the words. It just comes to him… As if they were well-learned formulas and all he had to do was drop them on the floor, like that, and everyone listens and looks at those words on the floor as if to pick them up. As if to do him a favor and give them back. Me, I don’t know… But this is my life.
What I know how to do, the prosecutor told you, is to keep a man on a leash.
And to show off in a photo… With a naked man and a leash.
You’ve all seen this picture.
It’s real.
That’s me!
That’s me laughing in the picture.
And what you don’t know, because you weren’t told. Because the guy, he had a bag over his face, you can’t see it and they didn’t tell you, the guy, he was crying and his little sex, it was very small like when men are afraid, all retracted and that’s what I was laughing at… About his sex being all shrunken up.
My lawyer is going to be mad, I wasn’t supposed to tell you… But if I don’t tell you, then you won’t know.
It’s my life, you have to know. You’re going to judge me, that’s your job, so you have to know. I have to tell you everything and not only what happened on the days of the picture. But also long before.
So I’m going to tell you where I come from, this country that is ours, these people who are our neighbors, our parents, our friends and our pastors. Then you can say what you want about me, what you want about my penance.
Remember with me… Remember, a long time ago, I was not yet born, nor you either.
But remember, because what happened there is the beginning.

Oklahoma

It’s a small town on a plain, it’s in Oklahoma, it’s a small town surrounded by a river inlet. At first, there was nothing but grass lying in the wind and clouds rolling over the hills. Then one day there was another cloud, dust, the column of wagons. You were not born yet, neither was I. Then there was a city, in the cove of a river… I come from there.
Of course, I wasn’t there, nor were my forefathers or anyone close to me. We were still in Europe like most of us. We came later with the beginning of the new century when the small town had already made its place and the Indians were already parked further in the mountains.
My great-grandfather, he got off an emigrant ship on the East Coast and a guy told him that for the job, you had to go to Oklahoma. That’s how my family moved to Oklahoma because some guy said there was work there.
For my great-grandmother, that’s how it happened, she was from Greece. That’s all we know about her, she came from Greece and one day she came to town and it was like, everything that came before, it was erased.
She married my great-grandfather because he had a job. That’s all. They weren’t very particular. They got married because he had a job and he wanted a wife and she thought that with a guy who had a job, she wouldn’t be hungry.
You can think what you want, but they had other things to worry about.
I’m not sure they liked each other, but at least she thought she wouldn’t be hungry.
We think she’s from Greece because she always told grandma that when she died, she’d have to put a gold coin in her mouth to pay a ferryman.
An old man with a boat who takes you across a river to the land of the dead.
It’s a Greek story, so we think she came from Greece, but since everything has faded away, we’re not so sure.
There was work because a talented guy had invented a process for rubber and built a factory. There was work because Mr. Ford made cars for everybody and he needed tires, lots of tires… So that’s when my family had a future.
We have a photograph on the television where we see the great-grandfather in a suit, posing in front of the factory with some other guys. He’s not handsome and I understand that the old lady married him just to eat. He’s ugly, that would make you laugh.
Then she… Who else would she have married?
I must say that it was not fun for women, for single women, I mean. They were used by everybody and got diseases. They weren’t princesses, so when they found a guy, even an ugly one, they kept him like they would hide their savings under the comforter. You could keep a guy, especially if he had a job.
We have another photograph, but this one is not on the TV. It’s in a drawer, at the back, under the laundry… It’s a picture that we don’t show.
It’s a picture like I know there are dozens of them, and not only in Oklahoma. It’s a picture where you see the great-grandfather, he’s marked with a cross. It’s useless, he’s so ugly that you can recognize him right away, but they put a cross in pencil to show that he was there in the picture that day. It’s a picture where you see guys posing in front of a black guy. They are all laughing. Except for the black guy, who has his sex up. And the guys are laughing at this sex like we laugh at a beef at the fairground, when we go out with the girls to get crazy. They laugh at the black guy who is tied up, hung, lynched. He has a sign around his neck: « nigger »; and underneath, « white woman rapist ». The eyes are turned back, they are two white holes.
He won’t have a gold coin in his mouth… He might still be wandering around here with the ghosts.
You see, we’ve always had stories about the pictures in the family.

Spanish flu

Time, it slips through the fingers and they had children to fill a house on a small street. A house with its garden in front, and the swing bench on the terrace. When you get a job, you get a house, and we still live in the great-grandparents’ house. It’s like a migratory bird’s nest, we always manage to come back and nest there and that’s where I want to put my kids, I want to put them each in one of the bedrooms upstairs, keeping the little ones close to me, just in case… Just in case.
Illness and accidents!
It’s a bit ridiculous, but I already have motherly fears… Just in case, if by some misfortune, like them, I should see the white coffin go down into the earth, burying itself with the hymns and prayers of the pastor. To see the earth roll on the wood and bounce, before locking up in the night the bruised body of my too sick, too sick child… How they must have cried that day, over the stolen child, and cursed the impotence of the doctor. They must have cursed the whole world and the world returned the curse a hundredfold.
The child was the first Spanish flu death in this town and soon, very soon, friends drifted away, neighbors became suspicious, and at the factory, great-grandfather moved in a bubble of emptiness.
You know, not being touched by others anymore, it causes a stabbing pain, an oppression, a suffocation.
In prison, we knew that, we always started with that, isolation… It’s more effective than fear or beatings.
The back, he made a fist in his pocket and he got mean; sneaky mean. And every new check mark in the death column, a sheet posted at the Town House, secretly made him feel happy. He felt avenged, he saw the hecatomb fall on others, the epidemic hit the colleagues, and he told everything to his wife… It relieved him.
The faces marked with tears, ploughed with tears. He told everything without forgetting anything.
I saw these faces many times in the prison, twisted with terror, imploring and lamenting. They were taken off our knees and thrown into the dungeons.
My lawyer is going to kill me, but I have to tell you everything if you want to understand. Yeah, we’d throw them in the dungeons, just like a jellyfish that’s caught in a net is unhooked and thrown back in the water. They were jellyfish… they weren’t men anymore.

Twenty-nine

Afterwards, time passes and calm and work in the factory returns.
After time, the mourning of the dead child is done. Not completely, but done enough to make room for the other children. The ones who finally fill the house. And then there is the work and its new methods, a chain with electric motors, the heating baths and the smell of rubber. It’s a twelve-hour day!
And when he returns from the back, he has to find time to repair the house that is falling apart, to help the mother who has children everywhere, in her skirts and in the middle of the road, little bits that are lying around. Then you have to play with them, wipe their noses, remove the snot. And they still find time to do other things with the mother… I wonder where they found the time?
And the kids, mixed like that, they were less ugly than the back. The air of Greece, it was good for the faces. The great-grandmother had brought with her some of the beauty of that country… Even they forgot that the back was ugly.
Maybe when you start to love, things become more beautiful.
I didn’t like the mosques, with those minarets like old rockets. We called them: Prayer Scuds. Of course it couldn’t work for the prayers, it was like the Scuds, it couldn’t work. And we saw one, how can I put it, one, like the drawing of the Tower of Babel, with a spiral ramp that turns around an arrow and goes up to the sky… Like the drawing.
Have you seen the drawing?
The Tower of Babel… There, it was beautiful, sand-colored bricks, a stretched out sea snail that wants to talk to God. So there, it was beautiful. Afterwards, we didn’t call them Scuds anymore.
I don’t know if I found it beautiful because I liked it or if I liked it because it was really beautiful, this mosque. These are things, I don’t know how to explain them… It’s like that.
Then after, there was twenty-nine, the crisis. That’s why he became a security guard, to watch over the others. He didn’t have a choice, it was either the reds or this… It’s the crack of twenty-nine.
And then there were the kids, the house was always falling apart. All this is money and it doesn’t grow in the fields. So he became a security guard at the rubber factory, at the gate, sorting out those who could work and those who had to leave on an empty stomach. He became a security guard because of his scary face, for once it served him well. Sometimes, he had to knock, to make room, to let in those who had the right to work, to push away the others, the skinny ones who had chosen the wrong side.
For the children, he had carved wooden toys, for every Christmas, he had carved toys and we still have one or two in the house.
They found him dead, great-grandfather, on the terrace swing… Dead, but with a smile on his face.
The great-grandmother, she cried, she screamed like in Greece, she tore her clothes off. You wouldn’t see that now in America… I saw it in Iraq.
Great-grandmother, what she must have screamed in despair and when grandmother told us about it… It made us laugh, not in front of her of course, but afterwards, with my sisters, in the yard, it made us laugh.
In Iraq, the first time, the woman in black was rolling around on the ground, with little cries, like puppies yapping. I wanted to laugh, I thought about our family history, but that’s screaming… It twists your heart.

1941, December 7

The great-grandmother held out until December 7, 1941. They were all listening to Roosevelt on the radio in the living room, talking about infamy and the Japanese, and after a while they realized that the old woman was no longer listening, as everyone looked so upset. She wasn’t even listening anymore, she was already somewhere else. The great-grandmother, in the family, we say jokingly that she was the first victim of the Japanese, to have died on the territory.
The men, they all took their responsibilities. That’s why grandma inherited the house. All her brothers went to the Pacific or to Europe. It became a town without men, a town with small empty gardens, and beds with single women who let themselves be made by the guys passing by. So Grandma, she got a guy from the railroad, a guy who would stay because he had a job and that job was important to the army, because the trains, they had to run all over the country with tank parts, airplane engines, ammunition boxes, all that junk that was going to Europe or the Pacific.
Not one brother came back, so she really inherited the house. When it ended in 1945, not one brother came back and her husband, the railroad guy, joined the National Guard. To look good. The day before he joined the guard, he had been to the movies, he had seen a news item about the liberation of the camps in Germany. It struck him.
Did you see what they did to the Jews?
he always said.
Did you see those camps?
They were monsters!
So he joined the National Guard, Grandpa, he didn’t hesitate. And he said that he would do the next one right away, that he wouldn’t wait… But he didn’t do the one in Korea either.
It must be said that there were also problems that we did not expect. Problems with the National Guard and even more serious problems later, in the sixties. Blacks felt increasingly cramped as if they had been given an ill-fitting suit that was too tight around the shoulders and they had to flex their muscles to make room. Blacks began to take to the streets, to march and protest. Wanting the same schools as the whites and taking the jobs of the foremen.
All of this, all of these problems, became work for the National Guard.
It was a tough time for them and they had a lot of questions. It was during these years that they hid the photo in the drawer under the laundry.
Grandpa, he said he had learned to deal with it… He was not happy when Kennedy was elected, he knew that it would not be the same as before. That’s when he left the railroads and opened a gun shop on Main Street. A gun shop with camping equipment.

Dad

They were happy years, I think. So happy, that it was there, late, when it seemed more possible, that they had Daddy… It’s funny, I say Daddy, but it wasn’t Daddy, it was a pink thing. You don’t say daddy for a baby that has just come out and is clinging to your breasts, but nevertheless, it was already my daddy.
When we had to give up in Vietnam, Grandpa said it was the first domino that fell. That it made a thunderous noise. That no matter how much the kids filled their heads with long hair, it made a thunderous noise and that we had to be ready, that our freedoms were going to have a strange taste.
It’s true, in the end, the world had changed, the danger was closer, more immediate… Then on the other hand, his armory never made so much money. They even paid for vacations in Washington, D.C., and then in other cities. He wanted to show his family the important places in the country. The four presidents’ heads carved into the rock, the Capitol and the statue of Lincoln. In eighty-four, they visited the Black Wall of Vietnam Heroes, where you run your finger across the marble to read, as if in Braille, the list of the fallen. I too, later on, went through this wall… I brought back a cold hand.
Dad, he chose the army. He didn’t wait for the recruiting sergeants to come to the schoolyard. He didn’t wait. He wrote directly to sign up for the Rangers. So they took him in and he made a career out of the army.
It wasn’t brilliant at the time. Carter had let it all go.
Iran… Nicaragua… The Soviets were stronger than ever.
It’s true that he prayed a lot, but what’s the use of praying if God isn’t on your side? Carter, he prayed to God, but the God of the weak.
We had too many setbacks under Carter and Dad, it made him mad. The Rangers don’t like to drop their panties. So with his unit, they had a great wedding when it was Reagan. Ronald Wilson Reagan… the fortieth president of the United States. And things started to change. We didn’t let anybody make fun of us anymore. There was a slogan: America is back.
And Dad and the Rangers were back in Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and even Afghanistan, secretly, and they showed that it wasn’t just a slogan, America’s back. It was something to be proud of. We forgot it too quickly… But without Reagan, it wouldn’t have happened. And there would still be the USSR and its gulags.
Dad, he lived those years in the field… He married mom.
Grandfather died, so he came back with his wife to run the armory. He came back with his uniform, neatly folded, and put it in the drawer with the laundry and the old picture. That was the end of his military years, his own, now he would stay in the city and he would campaign with the Republicans… Then it was the year of the big relocation. It was cheaper to have tires made in Mexico. That was the end of rubber in our town. It was the end of a lot of things, but Dad stood his ground and told the people who were leaving the Republicans his way of thinking. Those who didn’t believe in liberalism. He told them that lessons are what make a man, and that the city would become a great city again, with beautiful parades and everything. He believed in it, really… He was right to believe in it, faith can’t be explained.
And the armory was doing well. All the empty houses, the deserted streets and the idle blacks with their old cars, all that sold weapons. You never know; you can’t fool with security.
They did it to me during the Reagan years, but now I don’t remember very well… It’s ridiculous what I’m saying here, when I say that I don’t remember very well. It’s not when they made me, but it’s the Reagan years that I don’t remember very well. It’s bits and pieces that come back from my childhood, maybe memories that are barely marked in my head.
The huge hide-and-seek games in the ruined houses, the deserted streets and the empty cars, that I remember. Later, I still remember the parades of the first Gulf War when the veterans came back. We were put in front, the Twirling girls, with little yellow skirts. We threw our sticks high, we had big smiles and behind us, the guys, who were walking at a pace, without any real discipline because they were happy to be back, because they were proud, because they had won.
Dad at the edge of the course, who had put on his parade uniform and was waving straight, hand in hand, and all those people throwing papers from the Town Hall, the firemen blowing the horns of the trucks. It was quite a party when the guys came back and we had beaten Saddam…
The first time we ever kicked his ass.
It was a hell of a fireworks display, from the colors to the stars. We watched it from the terrace of the house. Dad had made punch, he let me drink and we were all tipsy. We did like the Arabs, we fired shots in the air and nobody told us anything. Finally the war wasn’t so bad, that’s what we thought. We watched Schwarzkopf on TV, he was walking in front of all his guys, his people. They had done a good job with Powell and Bush… Sure they did a good job.
I don’t understand why they lost the election, I don’t understand why we got Clinton. It was under Clinton, in Mogadishu, Somalia, that the black falcon fell. A whole helicopter full of guys. It was under Clinton that we started losing again. It was under Clinton that the city continued to empty. He wanted to take care of Bosnia, his interns, and he didn’t take care of the country.
That’s it, we weren’t proud to be Americans anymore and that made Dad die.
I couldn’t see anything. I played in empty houses and prayed in church for Sunday services. I could see myself in the Rangers. We practiced shooting, Sunday shooting. I had boyfriends, but it was no big deal. I didn’t get the grades I needed in school. To tell you the truth, I was behind. I’m not stupid… I’m slow. I understand everything slowly. It would have taken me a while and then I could have gone to the Rangers.
But under Clinton, it was the bridge to the twenty-first century. The others, they had computers in their heads. I was one of those old crank machines that you turn and it comes out with a badly printed ticket. So we all voted for Bush. It’s not true that he cheated… We all voted Bush, so help me God.

.

Nine / Eleven

There is a day in the life of men. Of all men… Not just Americans.
There is a day when everyone remembers; where they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking.
I was swinging on the terrace. I wasn’t doing anything else but swinging on the terrace. I was with too tight jeans and holes in my knees, on the swing, back and forth, a little dizzy, with ideas in my head and heat in my stomach. I was fine and was counting on Daddy’s help to get a job. I thought about that pistachio ice cream that was in the fridge. I could taste it in my mouth already. My stomach almost hurt from swinging and I put my arms up, hanging, stretched on the chains of the swing to erect my breasts.
Dad; down the street; running… That’s when I knew something had happened.
He was crying, it wasn’t Niagara, no. He was crying and from a distance he yelled to turn on the TV.
Did you see how they fell; slowly… We didn’t see anyone fall.
We didn’t show how they jumped down so they wouldn’t burn alive… But, it’s like we saw them all.
So we got the rage, the kind that comes from the belly and we would make him pay for it. We immediately talked about Afghanistan, or Iraq; I don’t know.
Dad thought I joined to please him. No, I enlisted for myself. Out of rage. Out of curiosity… It’s still a job and a job was good to have.
That’s how I ended up in Iraq.

Euphrates

I was nineteen years old. We boarded a troop transport, in the belly of a plane. I was nineteen years old and we had just finished training, three months in the Nevada desert. We landed in Europe, I think in Germany, and then in Arabia, we landed in Arabia, right.
It was there in Arabia that the instructors taught us how to guard the guys. They taught us how to put the electrical ties on with our hands behind our back. The plastic bag over the head, with just that regular little tap, a tap on the skull, it pulls the bag back and it lets the air in. You have to let the air out every once in a while, otherwise the guy might choke and we’re just trying to get him into a state of discomfort, into a state where he’ll talk. So we’ll just have to push him. A blow in the parts, the fasteners that we serve a little more to cut the circulation or the bag that we ventilate less and less. Then the guy starts to get really scared and that’s when he cracks.
I learned all this in Arabia. We needed guinea pigs. We didn’t have anyone in Arabia yet. So we all took turns playing the prisoner, and it felt strange, like a kind of forbidden pleasure, because we knew that it would stop.
One day, the noise of the planes became terrible, a continuous buzzing. They didn’t stop. As soon as they came back, they left again.
We were told to pack our bags, and that’s when we knew it was happening. We found ourselves in a column of tanks, Humvees, ammunition transports, tankers with water, caterpillars firing artillery, and on top of all that, a ballet of helicopters to guard and protect us. We used to joke that they were our pastors, our good shepherds.
I was a little afraid because that was it… If a soldier tells you that he is not afraid, it is not true. I was a little scared and I felt excited. We all were, excited.
Over the noise of the engines, you could hear the roll of the bombing and it made you feel better. We told ourselves that every time we hit the goal, there would always be a few less to block our way. Then everything skidded, as if in molasses; the column broke up, there was a gas alert and we found ourselves lying in the sand with our chemical equipment, dying of heat, and we had our first death: sunstroke.
On our right, there was firing, so we saw Abram tanks move into position and open fire.
Baow! Baow!
The ground vibrated with every shot. They stopped quickly, they had fired on our guys, up front, and there were casualties… They call it friendly fire, but there’s nothing friendly about it, it dislocates you, it dismembers you as if it were enemy fire.
The column started moving, and we passed through a village, or rather what was left of it. Blackened walls, and here and there, charred bodies. There were only charred bodies. Not a guy who’d been shot. Just these things huddled in weird positions, like bugs after a good fly-tox. There were British soldiers too. They looked like they were catching their breath, guns in hand, and they looked at us with contempt. They were the ones who had picked up the friendly fire; maybe? We never knew… We drove one more night, then one day, and we found ourselves in front of a river, a wide river. We saw black and swollen bodies pass before our eyes. They were so bloated that we never knew if they were cows or men. We had reached the Euphrates… It was the next day that our group became the vaporized section.

The Vaporized

It’s a funny name we were given, the vaporized section.
Actually, it was an easy job. We were right in between the head, which was going straight ahead, putting Saddam’s troops on the run, and those who were following us to occupy the country and take care of all the shit problems. We were in the middle and took care of the vaporized… The vaporized, it’s simple. It’s the guys who were in a tank or something more or less armored. The Iraqi tanks were not really solid against the Apache missiles. This is how it happens, an Iraqi armored vehicle hides in a palm grove or in a sandy hole and waits for us to arrive to drop a few shells. Then, twenty kilometers away, in the sky, like the finger of God, there is an Apache helicopter that drops its missile, something that flies faster than the speed of sound and that rushes on the palm grove or on the hole in the sand. The guys, they don’t hear anything coming, sure, they don’t hear anything at all. Then it makes a little hole, a little hole in the armor and it explodes right in…Baow!
It vaporizes everything in there.
Our job was to secure what had been vaporized.
I remember we had a history teacher, she showed us pictures. Do you remember the picture, Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
I don’t remember… The photo where you see the shadow of a guy on a wall. He was fixed, like a shadow, at the moment of the explosion, he was captured at that moment. He no longer exists, but his shadow remains. If he had been drinking tea, we would see him drinking tea. If he had been making love, we would see a shadow making love.
We would check that all the shadows were in their proper place in the armor. These missiles worked so well that often there was nothing to clean.
It’s funny, I’m talking about the shadows, but in fact it was quite rare. Most of the time, everything was so charred inside that there wasn’t even room for the shadows. Then sometimes, there was still cleaning to be done. A guy who had opened the turret, to get some air. Vaporized underneath and the other half of his body thrown further away. Dazed to have been cut in two without expecting it, with his hands and fingers planted in the ground, as if clinging to life, like a climber who feels his grip slipping away. Then we put him back in his tank and cleaned up with an incendiary grenade.
We followed the front line quietly, in a kind of No Man’s Land, a peaceful strip where nothing can happen. It was as if we were walking behind the line of flames in the forest fires, things are starting to get warm, but the animals haven’t returned yet. Everything is still and quiet… There was more and more armor spraying, so we fell behind and started to see people, mostly women, venturing out. They were coming out of their holes to look at what had happened. And when they understood, they would do like great-grandmother, they would scream and tear their black clothes.
It’s strange, I thought they would be happier to see us… We were there to free them.

The mosque

We had crossed the world to come and free them from Saddam. We had risked our lives and they were screaming and tearing their clothes as if we had been the Huns… I remember Mulan: The cartoon. Mulan, she fights the Huns!
Sometimes I wonder why we came all this way. When they had finished tearing all their clothes, suddenly like the wind falls, everything would calm down and they would start long litanies. Softly whispered songs and we could see men, civilians approaching too, and children, and dogs… We let it go, it was as if we understood that we were not at risk.
One evening, we stopped at the edge of a village, we stopped in the shadow of a mosque. The sea snail who wanted to talk to God, I already told you about it. We stopped and we were very happy with the job we had done. We knew that Saddam had lost. That it was only a matter of time and that all the bastards, the executioners in his government, Chemical Ali and all the other scum in the card game, were going to be caught and that they would have to do justice. We were thinking of the images of the gassed people of Halabja; you have seen these images, with the little swollen bodies, the children clustered around their mothers, the little bodies hanging out in the streets as if looking for air. They should report on this… We were happy with the job.
In the evening light, I looked at the mosque and saw a man slowly climbing the spiral to the top. It was a black dot, moving, slowly advancing on the golden color between the orange spots, crossing the shadows of sand, and suddenly making his silhouette appear on the blue cut of the sky. Regularly, he disappeared to reappear again. When he reached the top, he intoned the evening prayer.
I already spoke about the beauty. It’s a trick, we don’t understand. It’s not like the little jewels in the supermarkets, that’s pretty right away… But there it was more.
It was a tea, like honey on these days, on the smells and the sand that we swallow. Don’t get me wrong… I was not going to believe in Allah… Why would I believe in a God that was not mine?
What I saw, what I heard, was the pure and beautiful voice of a man in the middle of chaos. I didn’t care if I lived or died, there was room for music and its tenderness.
A mother, to put her children to sleep, sings the lullaby. She often takes the deepest voice, the deepest. A cigarette voice and the child slowly falls asleep.
I felt warmer and warmer, I mean, an inner feeling like when you roll up in a comforter and you are careful not to let the air in through the holes, to keep the heat in and the body warms up, and there is a feeling of well-being. I fell asleep during the evening prayer.

The singing dogs

The others told me that it was a strange night, that the sky was clear and dotted with stars. The dogs started to sing. They told me that they were the singing dogs like in the Cherokee legends. The legends that tell of how the spirits of the dead come out of the earth and marry the trees, rustle the leaves and join the circle of the living. The singing dogs that accompany the spirit’s journey, barking and hopping, guide it to its tree and show it its new home.
But, with all this desert, with all these vaporized, with so few trees in this country, what homes can the singing dogs propose to the dead?
Maybe the spirits had been vaporized too…
The others told me, but when I woke up, there was no dog, no star, just a morning mist and the order to get back on the road, erasing, as if with a sponge on the blackboard, the silhouette of the mosque.
We joined a convoy and we progressed on the edge of the sands. There was a hindrance, the vehicles stopped, that’s when the first shot slammed into the knee of a lieutenant. He collapsed in the ditch. We all ran for cover in that ditch behind the Humvees. We couldn’t tell exactly where the shots were coming from, but every time someone came out, they were hit.
A sergeant who had experience said it was four guys, four he was sure, who were hidden in the sand, buried in a dune, not two hundred yards away.
I was scared and almost wet myself. It must be said that fear doesn’t come right away, first you have reflexes. You run and throw yourself in the shelter, but the shelter is so small that you have the impression that everything sticks out and will make a nice target.
I was thinking about the singing dogs and I didn’t want them to come and sing for me, so I would close my sex so I wouldn’t pee on myself. I would close it tight and that gave me some peace.
There was nothing we could do about these invisible shooters. We had to wait for an Abram tank. It arrived about noon and we expected it to get into position to fire two or three shells. Spray the sand and what was in it… But he didn’t do it. Instead, he moved forward carefully. The pilot of the tank, he must have been very angry because of our guys being hit, and we, when we understood how he wanted to do it, started to howl with a violent joy, a relief that came from the stomach… We became a pack of singing dogs.
The tank searched the sand and flushed them out one by one. There was a moment where each time, the man tried to stand up, to straighten up or on his knees to beg for mercy. But the tank swallowed him, crushed him and the screams of the crushed man drowned in our satiated yapping, in our immense joyful clamor. A clamor of satisfied revenge. Suddenly, calm came all of a sudden… We could hear the regular beat of the diesel.
The tank had stopped for a moment in the middle of the sand, as if to check that there were no other prey. Then it left. Many of us threw up. It was like a relief.
Vomiting is strange. You feel better afterwards… Where the men had been crushed, it was a bit like where we had thrown up.

Baghdad

We arrived in Baghdad.
We had to hurry because our troops had definitely pushed the Iraqi guards. They were running out in total confusion and we had to run to Baghdad because there were riots. We were quite happy because we thought that the riots were like what we had seen in Romania or in Berlin when the wall had fallen, like what we had seen on TV.
So we got all dressed up, we looked tough and we stuffed our pockets with chewing gum to hand out… We were the liberators after all.
We told each other how we would shake the hands of passers-by, the hands of the crowd and the children we would hold. How we would hold ourselves to pose well for photographs and the people we would take prisoner to protect them from lynching. We would know how to be gentlemanly, magnanimous, but firm. We brought democracy and justice. It’s true that we were all fired up. True missionaries with white hands bringing knowledge and happiness to all those copper hands. It’s true that we were pumped up.
There was one guy who didn’t say anything, a guy in the back of the Humvee, who didn’t look good, who didn’t stuff his pockets with gum and seemed to be waiting for the rain to fall from the sky. For days, he hadn’t said anything, and then, as we arrived at the gates of Baghdad, he told us that Mesopotamia used to be there, that writing and other things had been invented there, that it was the cradle of humanity. He fell silent, as if relieved to have dared to tell us all this, as if he had emptied his bag… In the silence that followed, a voice said that we didn’t give a damn about all that.
I was not very sure, I remembered the snail mosque and the singing in the night.
We entered Baghdad. We saw the first riots and we understood that it wouldn’t be like in Berlin or Prague, it wouldn’t be velvet, these were riots that we didn’t understand. The faces were closed and the civilians carried Kalashnikovs. We had our finger constantly on the trigger and there were blunders, it’s normal, there were blunders because it was so messy.
We approached a huge building, it was a museum. It had become a souk where everyone helped themselves and broke what they didn’t like or what they couldn’t take away. They would pair up to carry a stone statue, push a cart with gold vases, others had scrolls in their arms and we thought it was this museum we had to protect. So we spread out quickly, we established a cordon.
The guy who wasn’t saying anything looked a little happy for a moment, as if he’d suddenly served a purpose.
Then, before the crowd dispersed, an officer arrived and ordered us to go to the oil ministry. People elsewhere were grabbing furniture and computers. It was a real looting, the equipment of the Ministry of Oil was flying all over the place and we had to stop it.
We had not yet had time to leave, to climb into the Humvees, that the crowd was already coming back, as if swollen by a rainstorm. We saw passing under our eyes, the collections of the museum… It was incredible.
Fortunately, later, we were able to save the Ministry of Oil.
The guy who didn’t say anything has said even less since that day. I think he went back to the country after a medical check-up… He had some kind of autism, you know the disease of children who live in a different world from us and don’t want to talk to us anymore.
Afterwards, we set up a base at the Baghdad airport, with everything we needed and enough barbed wire to be separated from these half-mad people. You have to have seen it, but when you have seen the Baghdadis up close, when you have seen how they look at you, then you know that they are half-mad.
It has become: Baghdad Routine… Even madness has a routine.

Abu Ghraib

One day they needed volunteers for Abu Ghraib prison, to prepare the prisoners for interrogation. They needed people who had been trained in Arabia and knew the preparation techniques. I stepped forward and was put into the new unit for the prison.
I got to know Richard, Sergeant Richard Fulton. A lot has been said about him and me. It’s true that I’m pregnant.
It is true that I am carrying his child. It’s true that I slept with him, even though I knew he was married and had two little girls, four and six, Kelly and Jessie. It’s true that I knew all that, but if I’m pregnant with him it’s because we love each other… We didn’t just have sex.
It’s true that we had fun and we did it in every way. It’s true that everyone knew, but what’s more true and what everyone needs to know is that I love him and I’m carrying our child.
We started the job with Republican Guard officers, tough guys who were not intimidated by our preparations. Then an intelligence officer came up to us and told us what a shitty job we were doing, and that our guys getting their throats slit in the streets of Baghdad should be ashamed to be dying for wimps like us. He was screaming, this guy. Some guy, I never knew his name. He was screaming and it’s true that he never told us what to do. That he stayed white as snow.
That he could not be blamed… He kept his hands white.
So we invented things that we hadn’t learned in Arabia.
Things as old as the world. I say we invented, but others, before, must have had the same ideas… The metal bed frame and electricity.
And above all, humiliate, humiliate by finding weakness. The weakness of a man, it is in his nakedness that one finds it.
Now when I think about it, I must say that I had doubts. It’s true, you have to believe me. I still asked myself questions. At the beginning, it’s normal, you ask yourself questions. A guy, even if he is one of those bastards, a guy who screams, who implores, who looks at you as if you were his mother, as if you had the tea to bring down the fever, as if you had the medicine to lift the child, the sleeping pill to face the night, a guy like that, it brings tears to your eyes and you know that it’s not a game, those tears. That he’s really hurting… So you break down or you turn the situation in your favor.
You become the master again.
When they looked at me like that, I used to hit them in the balls with my baton. Then they didn’t dare to look at me with that pleading look… They didn’t dare to look at me anymore.
And it was as if I was in a train that lost its brakes. A train going down a mountain and it lost its brakes… I was getting good results.
After the sessions, I felt bad. You know, sometimes you punish a child, you scare them, and they break down into big tears. You know you were right to scold him, but, those big tears, it breaks your heart and even though you don’t show it, inside, it makes your heart that big, yeah, that big.
You hold back everything you can, but then it has to come out, it has to be emptied and the instructors told us that it was normal.
That we had to get rid of it, even though what we did was just… We had to dump it out.
I would throw up in the bowl, I would lock myself in and throw up in the bowl. I don’t know, maybe half an hour, maybe more, and then I’d have to wash all that emptiness out, and then I’d have to fill it up again. Fulton would meet me in the shower and I would fill that void with sex and alcohol. Stunned like a rabbit before ripping the skin off. Stunting each other so hard that Fulton and I thought we were happy, between the violence and the tenderness.
You may think I didn’t ask myself any questions.
That’s not true!
I asked myself a lot of questions, but I didn’t have any answers, I didn’t have time to find answers between the showers, Fulton and the sessions.
The snail mosque with its spiral path, remember?
It was like rolling down from the top. I was rolling without being able to hold myself back… Didn’t you ever have any pleasure in doing harm?
And yet, you, you stayed in the country, without risk and without guys torn apart in front of your eyes. But deep inside you I know that there is revenge and that if you could nuke them all, all without exception, you would do it, you would do it, I’m sure…
So I, lost, I did what you whispered to me in your dreams. I heard your dreams, the dreams of a whole country. Dreams kill as surely as rat poison. I’m a girl of the American dream… The bad dream… The bad dream.
What a piece of shit, my lawyer’s gonna kill me, it sucks to accuse you.
I thought of the picture of my great-grandfather, the nigger with a hard-on, the white woman rapist. The picture that was sleeping in the drawer, under the laundry. And I told Fulton about it. That’s when we got the idea to do our pictures too, to bring them back home, to bring them back as trophies…. If we hadn’t done those pictures, I would never have been here.
I would never have been called the woman who held a man on a leash. None of this would have happened. I would be like the Apache pilot, a good girl, who did her duty.
He, the pilot, the sprayer, he won’t get a trial. He just sprays, that’s all!
The general is in charge. The president orders… I’m holding a naked man on a leash.
What a piece of shit.
I suspect now what I must know about war: shame… A shame to bury yourself alive.

She leaves, then stops for a second at the edge of the stage. She looks at the audience.

I don’t know the real life of Lynndie England… It’s fiction.

She walks out.