Anthony Lloyd - Another Bloody Love letter

Another Bloody Love Letter

Anthony Loyd

Copyright 2013, Anthony Loyd

For my mother, The Brother, and Delilah.
None ever met.
They do so here .

GLOSSARY

APC: armoured personnel carrier.

DB: Dravna Bezbednost, Serbias state security service.

haram: forbidden to Muslims.

KLA: Kosovo Liberation Army, the insurgent force of Albanians opposed to Serb rule of Kosovo.

Kosovar: an Albanian living in Kosovo.

Kosovo: the southern province of Serbia whose two million population are predominantly Albanian.

madrassa: Islamic religious school.

mujahedin: plural of mujahed, translates literally as strugglers, or in context as holy warriors. Used by Islamic fighters throughout the world, in Afghanistan the term generally applied to fighters serving the Northern Alliance.

Northern Alliance: the union of various mujahedin groups, representing several Afghan ethnicities, who joined together in northern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

panga: square-tipped machete.

peshmerga: Kurdish guerrilla. The word translates as those who face death.

PKK: Kurdistan Workers Party, the militant separatist organisation of Kurds aspiring to independence. Also known as KADEK.

RPG: rocket propelled grenade.

RUF: Revolutionary United Front.

schwerpunkt: the deciding moment of thrust in a battle.

shalwar-kameez: the knee-length unbloused shirt and loose baggy trousers worn by most Afghan males.

shura: a meeting, usually conducted among Afghan elders or commanders, to discuss important matters.

SLA: Sierra Leonean Army.

Talib: translates as seeker. Singular of Taliban, the predominantly Pashtun fundamentalist force in Afghanistan.

Yugoslavia: now defunct, during the Kosovo war the term referred to the federation of Serbia and Montenegro.

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on-on-and out of sight.

Everyones voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears: and horror

Drifted away O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Contents

Iraq, Winter 2004

The day was nearly done, the fire fight over and the mission all but complete when the question arrived, slipping from a soldiers mouth in an unbroken slice of sound, so quick that it seemed almost like a single word. A senior NCO with an Airborne flash on one shoulder, older than most of the others, he was a compact, muscular man, his cheek bulging with a wad of chewing tobacco. Behind him, across the river, a dead young American was soaring up into the sky on the floor of a helicopter fuselage, bloody and dirty inside a bag: first wrap for the start of the long journey home, where he would arrive so clean, so cold, but so neatly presented, casked beneath the Stars and Stripes. Beside us, Carlisle was still hyped and trembling, jaw muscles bunching and twitching on the adrenalin rush, his rifle barrel uncooled. All along the banks of the river fire teams were checking their ammunition, regaining their breath and shaking out to move forward once again, more in ritual than hope by that stage, for they knew their quarry was long gone.

The NCO might have looked angry for soldiers often display bitterness towards a journalist the moment they lose one of their number but there was no trace of malice in his voice or eyes. Instead he seemed just curious, as if merely wanting to know whether the death of the young American was worthy of a story, somehow justifying my presence there. The question was punch enough though, unwittingly as intrusive and complex as anything I had ever asked as a reporter. One way or another, it had haunted me across the years, an unanswerable stalker at the close of every day in every war, hungrier by the hour.

Hey, he said, you get what you were looking for?

I paused for a second, still unsure of precisely what to say, even though I knew that I had some sort of reply by then. It had come to me a few months earlier, on my first day in Baghdad, the loneliest in my life, as I stared from a hotel balcony across the city, already capital to a thousand and one tombstone tales of dead dreams and broken hope. But it would have taken too long to use that answer on that afternoon in Al Anbar. So I said something about people not having to die for me to be there, sounding defensive without intending to, abandoning my belief in the brush-offs credibility even as I tried to shore it up in my own mind, and left it at that. The soldier shrugged and walked away. He was probably asking himself the same question. It hovers over most men in war, second stepping their every move like an unborn twin.

It had been an altogether haunted day. Right from the moment when Bravo Company had dismounted from their vehicles on the northern bank of the Euphrates, formed up and crossed the mission start line beneath the bright blue of the winter dawn they had been pursued, the eyes of the unseen insurgents watching their every move. Chasing them too was the ghost of Charlie Cong. Charlie, with his ethereal Chinese Kalashnikov and spectral satchel charge; Charlie, chattering through the rotorblade throb of two overhead Hueys; whispering among the tall rush beds that divided the paddy fields and irrigation ditches; lurking in his black pyjamas under the palm trees; eating his bag of rice in the shadows thrown by a fat, cold sun. Watching. Waiting.

Adjusting their equipment and glancing around them, the soldiers knew Charlie was near. For soldiers know that there is no place more haunted than a war zone; that ghosts chase you across years, generations and continents; that Vietnam was too close; that haunting can be personal and malicious and goddamn youd better believe it. But none of them mentioned it, at least not directly. It would have been bad karma. And no one wanted to mention the V-word lest it actually incite matters.

Except for Carlisle. He came right out with it. If I was near the end of my trip, the point at which I could no longer listen to a war song without knowing that I had heard it many times before, but sat there anyway waiting for something new, too long term an investor in the venture to sell my shares, Carlisle was at the beginning of his. We had barely exchanged a word on the route to the drop-off point. Together with Bravo Companys commander, a quietly spoken, authoritative young captain, we had travelled by Humvee in the reflective silence that characterises a sleep-broken ride to the start of a ground operation, staring ahead as the grey, undulating desert around us gave way to the vegetated alluvial plane that borders the Euphrates, wondering if everyone was still going to be around to remount their vehicles at the missions end.

Stepping from the Humvee and surveying the scene, the reeds and flat fields, the lean-to farmers shacks walled with bamboo and roofed with palm leaves, the peasant women grinding flour in stone pots around small fires watched by children with inscrutable dark eyes, and the slick, brown, slow-moving expanse of the river, Carlisle tilted back the brim of his helmet and spat on the ground. He was a tall, rangy man with an aquiline nose, pale Celtic eyes and a straight mouth that hinted of something mean.