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“Ever Been A Pallbearer Before?”

“No, what do I need to do?”

“Just carry him.”  

AP’s Todd Pitman, who has done good work as a grunt-level newsman, on the death of a friend last year in Diyala.  

Pitman remarks that he had been in and out of the war repeatedly over a period of several years, but it hadn’t affected him until this happened.  It would be easy to get moralistic about all the American and Iraqi death that did not affect him, but the level at which you connect with people and the point at which it gets under your skin is an individual matter, and in the end, this essay notes the terrible truth that the death of a stranger is very different from the death of a friend.

A different kind of post-traumatic press reaction was reported by Michael Herr in “Dispatches,” who had been in heavy combat at Hue and Khe Sanh, among other places.  He also lost close friends who were media in Vietnam, but the waking nightmare he wrote about was sitting up in bed in the middle of the night in his apartment in New York, smoking cigarettes, knowing that his living room was full of dead Marines.

The dead that haunted my thoughts include the dead newsmen I knew, David Bloom and Michael Kelly. Also, several Iraqi soldiers I saw killed at close range, including three on whom I directed a .50 caliber gunner’s fire, and an American pilot who was a stranger, but whose death I witnessed as a strange shooting star in the sky.  Other Iraqi dead, IRG and a lot of fedayeen, nothing. The company I was attached to experienced no KIAs, while the brigade lost 8 in the invasion, I didn’t know any of them and did not witness their deaths or those of any friends, for which I am grateful. Other deaths I was indirectly associated with, two European newsmen killed by an Iraqi missile on the morning of April 7, after our armored column had left to assault Baghdad, and two others killed by the unit I was with when they were mistaken for Iraqi forward observers, also were strangers, not directly witnessed, and don’t have the same kind of emotional impact. Some people I know who experienced those deaths more directly or knew them have very different reactions.

No nightmares.  But the war experience as a whole opened something up, and I have found myself easily overwhelmed by examples of self-sacrifice for family and friends, such as the Americans who have shielded their friends with their bodies, or have gone in or stayed to fight for friends, and Iraqis who have tried to limit the impact of suicide bombers with their own bodies. Also, by American military death and grievous sacrifice short of death in this and other wars, a fair amount of which has become personally familiar, and has now become a trigger than doesn’t require much pressure. 

And that’s how it goes.

Topics: Iraq, media, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:02 am on Sunday, March 16, 2008

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