CPTnet
May 7, 2003
IRAQ: A tank called "Hostile"
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Like warriors of old, soldiers assigned to tanks like to give their weapons
names. There are probably as many reasons for each name as there are tanks
in the U. S. arsenal. For instance, the meaning of "Courtesy of the Red
White and Blue," or "Camel Tow" seemed clear enough to me. But another name,
which I saw on a tank standing guard just inside the entrance to the
Republican Palace suggested that I not make any assumptions about it, even
though it bore the potentially revelatory title of "Astonished."
So I asked the gunner, if there was any special reason as to why he settled
on that name.
"Not really," he answered amiably. "I got me a dictionary. Started at the
front and kept going until I found a word I liked."
"Does it fit with what you are doing now?"
"I hadn't really thought about that. I just liked the name."
However, the soldier, who named the first U. S. tank we encountered as we
reentered Baghdad on April 18,
had an attitude unambiguously expressed on the barrel of his gun: "Hostile."
"O. K., so that's an attitude," I thought, "but does that also express an
intention?"
Not long after that the intention issue popped up again when we encountered
another tank whose inscription asked the worrisome question, "Where's The
Bitches?"
Such a message cannot be reassuring to Baghdad women, very few of whom are
venturing from their homes these days, because of their fear of looting,
robbery, and worse by their own men. "If the soldiers won't protect them, a
brother of one college age woman worried, "who will? My sister will not
leave our house, unless I go with her."
More encouraging--kind of-- was a conversation I had with a member of the
crew of another tank named "California Dreaming." Here's what I mean by
"kind of."
"We had a job to do," the First Lieutenant said, "but I sure didn't like a
lot of it."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the wrong people die too often in these things. I'm stuck with the
memory of the morning, when we first reached Baghdad and we were manning a
checkpoint. An Iraqi family kept coming on to us. Maybe they did not
understand that we were trying to get them to stop. But our rules of
engagement were to shoot anyone who wouldn't. But they kept coming.
"Despite our frantic efforts to try to get them to understand that they
needed to stop, they just kept coming. So I gave the order to shoot, which
we did;
and an unarmed family--a woman and her kid--were killed. All of them were
killed. This happened earlier at Umm Qasr too: the exact same thing. I don't
like having to live with that."
"So now what?" I asked.
"Well, I know one thing. When I get home, I'm quitting the army. I'm not
going to volunteer to do this again."
"What will you do?"
"I'm going to be a man of peace from now on."
"Meaning?"
"I'm going to join the FBI."
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