f u g u e s t a t e p r e s s from Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) by James Chapman
p.o. box 80, cooper station
new york, ny 10276
212-673-7922
208-693-6152 fax
| Down under the sand there's a cement hallway. They got electric light, they got air piped down. Sixty soldiers live in this. They can't just stick their heads up and shoot guns at the Americans. To get up to the surface they single-file 25 meters to the only crawl-tube hooked to their wing, and up through the tube on a little steel ladder and out a beige-painted lid in the sand. Then they're in a trench. This is the same type bunker they built along the Iran border. They got fast at building them. The bunkers're pretty damn safe. The men write letters home, write in diaries, play cards, joke, argue, like normal--except they never complain. Not even two guys alone in a corner will complain. It's not a good idea. Planes dropped these fliers yesterday: CEASE RESISTANCE--BE SAFE Approach the Multi-National Forces' positions slowly the lead soldier holding this document above his head. If you do this you will not die. All got drafted here. They're age sixteen to fifty-two. "You will not die." If caught with one of the leaflets, a soldier is shot. Right now they're all asleep. Most people don't know sixty men, personally. I don't. I've kept myself apart. If you had to, you could name off sixty stars of movies and TV. If you had to you could imagine pretty near what Johnny Carson's handshake would feel like, and Phil Donahue's, Mia Farrow's, Elizabeth Taylor's. Whose names you know, whose handshakes you can imagine usually die in bed of old age. Sixty men, thirty seconds left. That's not even time for a sitcom version, like Number One is slick and a good con-man, Two talks croaky and limps, Three is loud and waves his hands around, Four never talks and always smokes cigars, Five-- No time. The bell's ringing, you don't care anyway, OK, they're awake, helmets on, lined up jammed crouched against the concrete wall. The light goes out and all sixty are dead. Quick as that, life goes on, they're dead and buried. You want a better look at it, what for? You don't care. They shouldn't have been down there. Drafted or not. Shouldn't be our enemies. This ain't nursery school. They'd have done the same to us, if ordered to, if they had the means. They had wives and families, hey so do I. So do I. And I gotta protect what's mine. I gotta protect my mood. Sixty guys is nothing. They're in a long line against the long wall, crouched facing into the wall. As the light's going out, as the bulbs are slow-motion fading, they all're slowly standing up, stiffly, they're all rising. The bomb was a burst of mist below the clouds, big spreading fog. Huge cloud on the land. Then cloud explodes. All the air of the desert is fire. They're underground in a long box with air shafts. So you figure it out. All the air--the air in the bunker, the air in the blankets of the beds, the air in their mouths, the air under their feet, between their legs, behind their eyes, within their blood, within their lungs--all the air's got to go up the airshafts. So the men are rising to their feet, like the spirit of fear wants to bust them open. Their arms all wave around slow. Slowly they come up off the floor, float a few inches in the air. They point their red faces up, their faces look painted red, red animals with animal-flat expressions, all breathing-out the letter "H," sick how they can't go on with the word. Already they're all the same. A minute ago one of them could've said I want to be home with my wife, and you'd've had a picture of it. Now you can't feature any of these people wishing a wish. The back-blast now slams them all against the concrete wall. Pieces of things are flying, it's hard to see, but the lights are out and you can't see it anyway, and it's underground and you can't see it, and it's not on TV, you can never see it. They're still up off the floor, slammed against the wall. And out of their mouths rip upward little red rag lungs, flipping all the sixty now-corpses over their own dead asses and dropping them limp on the floor. Then you can see. Bloody cloth and brown skin turn black. In the dark all things turn black same moment the heat increases. Heat brighter and brighter. Brighter and brighter black There is no electric lights, to begin. We have one generator runs with gasoline, and we have gasoline, for now. So we have power to our operating theatre, noplace else. At places in the hallways, candles, but these are going to be not possible when our stock is gone. Worse is the no running water. This mask I wear is a week old. Disposable mask, you know? I cannot keep my hands clean. Gloves cannot be washed, or gowns. We have burn victims here--do you understand what that means? I have very little left of drugs or medicines of several kinds. I require antibiotics, clotting factor, morphine, adrenaline, insulin, corticosteroid, codeine, copper sulfate, sodium nitrate. And dressings. Here, regard this man. He is three days alive. I would prefer him dressed, I do not approve the "open therapy," but we choose between filthy bedding and the no gauze. We are experimental with boiling sheets in very doubtful water, but I will not put that dressing on this man's burns. I'd prefer just shoot him in the head now. Oh, he was in charge to fill the oil in the trenches around his bunker--old oil seeps into the sand so that you must replace it. So he is out there pumping oil from a truck when the planes come. They drop napalm to ignite the trenches, and if it hits some soldiers too, so much the better. Here, this man over here, he was walking a road, he "found" a mine. This was riding her bike to work, she ran over an anti-tank round. She was a typist for a company that makes washtubs, mops, brooms, baskets. We have to cut the leg off without anesthetic. Most of the amputee men, we keep them lying still during the operation by four interns holding them down--for this young lady I required six interns. That's not the real trouble for her, the real trouble is with infection. The boy--boys like the craters, the bomb pits, for playing in. And who is protecting them now? He simply broke a leg, however, and is a favorite here to cheer us up. This man is going to be twenty-four hours alive, soon, and I am impressed. He is the result of phosphorous. The phosphorous bombs burn very hot, and keep on to burn into the skin, even underwater they burn. Sometimes the patient will come in and after an hour you recognize he is starting to smolder. All the nerves are destroyed; he may not feel it even when he's conscious. It is more frequent here than napalm, and much worse, though this case is without the thermal damage to the lungs for some reason. I do my job. I will not speak of politics. But I wish for a way to separate politics from human beings. If these conflicts could be fought in outer space? machine against machine? Because what is the good? I have been awake now too long. Yes he's alive. Why do you think we use a bed for him? He'd be under sand now, if he was as dead as how he looks. At the time this happened to him, he was a regular soldier. In his country, that means he didn't want to be a soldier, but he had absolutely no say about it. This is not the wonderful United States where every citizen has rights over all other citizens of the world. Here a man has a gun pointed at him and he's told to shout a slogan and he does. What would you have advised him to do? You must not repeat to anyone what I've just said to you. Excuse me, you are mistaken, I have not criticized. I only say I wager you'd rather not be this man in this bed. Your own bed is nice, isn't it? And your own skin? Creamy nice. Your girl loves to touch you. She says you shine, your face shines with love. Phosphorus: four gauzes are stuck lightly to the center of his blackened chest. His balls are black as ash, all the hair burnt away. The black meat of his legs is cracked open, and black inside the cracks. His right forearm's a stump, piece of white cloth stuck on the end. His face is shiny-skinned, like there's a tight clear layer he's trapped under. The shiny layer is wrinkled, clear silver-gray stretched over black. The black is black with light splots here and there; splots must be original color of his skin. They seem very pale. Maybe he's pale in there, like not feeling well. Even his lips are burnt black. His eyes are shut. Before he was a soldier, he was a glass-worker, making bottles and jars for other people to fill. He ran machines that did the work. But from his father he also learned the old way how to blow glass. For his kids to play with, he blew red and deep green glass balls, glass to roll, to shine sun through. We were walking in lines. First a helicopter flew. Then came the airplanes. It circled us one time, three airplanes. I was scratching at the ground, trying to be underneath. I was watching the hands-full of sand I scraped away, this was sand from the time before I died, that's how I saw it go past. I was sure I was going to die now. But so many of the men had run in one direction that the planes only strafed at me. The bullet was like I was kicked in the back by a strong man wearing a boot. But the group of running men, they were hit with three rockets. Then they were strafed too. I lay in the sand, and I was very still. I said they can see everything from their airplanes, they see even my eyes blink, and I didn't blink, but I couldn't decide was I playing dead or dying, I thought dying might be this, playing dead with a bullet through you till you really die. Like pretending on your wife to be asleep, you think of fooling her and sneaking out later, but you instead fall asleep because you pretend so good. Kept my eyes staring dead, trying not to turn dead really, and that way saw the three rockets hit my friends, and along with that, my blood across the sand, coming from the hole in my chest where the bullet came out, you see I have no nipple on my right chest from today forward. I was lucky, hm. But I cannot say be thankful for my life. That would say, Allah thank you for killing all my brothers and friends so that I could live. I only say it is up to the God. Only He knows whether our lives are good to live. Death could be a mercy. "If you want to kill the fish you have to dry the sea." Sand is light gray. Gray sky. The black hulk on the sand is absolutely still. A man's trying to fling himself off the edge of the hulk. He is still. His face is just empty, a little serious maybe, like he hasn't got time to feel anything. He's got to fling himself off the mechanized vehicle. Even though his body's already leaning out into space, and his vehicle hasn't been hit yet, and he is now alive, he has no time left. He's got to fast right now fling himself off the fender of his BMP before it gets hit by an explosive shell. The shell is already on its way. He's got to leap, land on the sand and take off running. But at this moment he's still here, his body is leaning out into space and he's got the blank serious look. The sand over here is dark. The black shape looks like a horseshoe crab trying to bury itself. Long straight crab tail sticking out along the sand. The sky is black night. The crab's man-made. It has a round hole in the top. Then you realize it's an upside-down thing in the sand, you see it's the blown-off turret of a tank. The rest of the tank is not here. It will be nearby. Out behind the lost turret, black cloud's lighter black than the black sky, and tall, cloud tall like a hand rising. Looking into a metal circle. Abstract inside the circle, bits of shapes. Black in black. Looking into a burned-out tank. You can't tell what's far and what's near. You can't tell between man-made and could be organic. Black shapes curve and curl. They're really the shape of nothing. You're staring into nothing. You can actually see the high explosive round penetrate a BMP. The flash of the round goes through the vehicle and the sides are already caving in. Then every piece of ammunition inside goes off. The secondary explosion is so much bigger than the vehicle, bigger like fireworks explode way bigger than the little thing you light. The T-72 tanks come rolling along the night desert like they're looking for someone to surrender to. Gun turrets are pointed straight up in the sky. T-72 is a super crappy vehicle. The shells have to be brought up from storage under the floor. It takes twelve seconds each time to load the gun. Right on the right fender is where the fuel is stored. And there's no armor around the fuel! What armor there is is thin junk, hardly protects the crew. And plus none of the crews want to fight. The tank column is travelling across the desert at night. And the tank right in front of your eyes explodes. And right away the tank to the left and to the right, and in front and in back, they all explode. And every tank and truck you can see's exploding or veering off. In a few minutes, thirteen American tank crews destroy 119 Iraqi vehicles. Every single round our side fires hits. Every T-72 we hit has its turret blown right off. And the fuel explodes. Everyone inside burns. The Iraqis never even know where the Americans are. They only know their tanks are all blowing up. Some have time to jump. Seventy-two prisoners, burnt, missing arms, missing legs. Q: Why don't Iraqi parents let their kids play in the desert? A: Cause cats keep covering them up. Q: Why won't they teach sex-education and driver-training on the same day in Iraqi schools? A: It confuses the camels. Q: How do you break up an Iraqi bingo game? A: Call out "B-52." The marine, for eyes he has night vision scopes. That's the top half of his face. His mouth is for acknowledging orders. His lips could be cut off without impeding his effectiveness. He's on top of a jeep, rolling through the dark. He's got a TOW missile launcher on a tripod mount. It's a very flexible solution. Semper Gumby that's what they say, always flexible. Gumby sets his night eyes on the tank out there. Through the dust and sand and smoke he can see everything. He can see bright squares in a grid of dark. He can see reality in an enhanced way, so it's simple and clear. He's latched onto that square, and having acquired his target he launches, then he just has to hold crosshairs on that spot till the missile guides in. The missile is called a HEAT, squirts molten metal all over the people inside the tank. But Gumby's on the move all the time, he doesn't see "people inside" cube shapes, he swings to the next green box in the dark field. The enemy can't find Gumby at all, they're working without night vision, they can't see anything, we see everything. We can see every single abstract shape. It's just another exercise. The only difference between hitting these tanks and the cardboard targets he trained with is that these ones explode. Here's a guy used to drive a bulldozer in Michigan. So he's real skilled at the use of the armored combat earthmover. He's taking small-arms fire from all along this sand berm. Small-arms is not a consideration. In ten minutes he's pushed his whole section of sand berm back into the trenches the Iraqis dug it out from. He's filled in a length of trench occupied by 500 soldiers. Since he finished up so quick, he starts helping out on the next section, which isn't flattened out yet. Dots appear on the screens of the Apache helicopters. Dots are flying back from the buried trenches. They appear on the screens, and get strafed out. But not that many dots. The dots were soldiers, and most of them never showed on the screens, most got buried instead under fifteen feet of sand and rock. Fifteen feet of sand and rock over you, and you're curled in a ball, it's black and your neck is jammed down very painful, in a little pocket of sand between your face and thighs you've got one cubic foot of air to breathe, and you take a breath in, you are thinking what you are thinking, you can't move to dig, anyway digging'd just cave in your air pocket, but you feel the cloth of your trousers in your left hand, feel your own skin underneath that, you're alive, you have to breathe out and in again, you feel the stock of your rifle in your other hand, the rifle is stuck out at some strange angle. You are one of the unlucky ones even here, because to your left and right most of your friends are already dead, their mouths open full of sand because they just fell back screaming when it came over them, not you, you were smart and curled up with a little pocket of air, and your neck didn't break, you're sweating all over, and you have to keep thinking for four more minutes, you take another breath. groups of six Iraqi soldiers running groups of ten kneeling down sixty soldiers on the horizon walking single-file Under the clouds and smoke their raggy winter uniforms are dark, their faces dead watching the guns of the men they run toward. Get down they get down on the ground fast, trying to understand the instructions, do not fail to understand or these are the last words you'll ever hear, give your rifle, give your wrists to the plastic tie-wraps, so that's the American way of handcuffing, your rifle is in that great pile of rifles now, good. Lying on your belly with your wrists and ankles bound, lying one in a row of many, in a column of many, you are a dot. You see black chunks out ahead of you, former tanks of former men, who're now very much less than a dot, a dot can live. |