Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War

MARTYRS' DAY BAGHDAD IS RICH IN MONUMENTS to the dead of war. They are, excepting the Leader's many palaces, by far the most impressive pieces of architecture in the city. The most peculiar one is The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a pavilion of polished dark-red granite over which hangs a giant upside-down metal clamshell hundreds of feet in diameter. A visitor walks up a long, broad ramp of gray stone that leads, as it were, into the belly of the clam. To one side is a smallish ziggurat, modeled on the ancient Tower of Amara, but in fact as trashily modern as a Burger King, with bright red, green, and black tiles crawling up and down its sides. A square hole in the granite under the center of the clam leads to a staircase, which descends two stories to debouch into a round, windowless room. The walls of the room, cambered inward to follow the line of the shell, are made of stainless steel and lined with poster-size photographs of the Leader at war: reviewing troops, tasting soup at a field kitchen, firing a rocket-propelled grenade, shaking hands with soldiers, regarding a howitzer. In between and in front of the photographs are glass display cases. Most of the cases contain weapons left over from one or another episode of large-scale killing. Killing has been a more or less continual preoccupation in Iraq since the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-1918. There have been twenty-three coups or attempted coups, five large politico-tribal revolts or massacres, and the country has been involved to one degree or another in eight wars. In a counterclockwise sequence, the displays make up a rough visual history of Iraq's unhappy progression, beginning with the shields, spears, and swords of early Ottoman days, moving on to the elaborate pistols and blunderbusses and hand-tooled Berber long guns of the nineteenth century, then to the sticks, shovels, hatchets, and clubs of the early-twentieth-century anti-British uprising, and so on into the modern era. Each display is labeled with a neat, hand-lettered placard: "Collection of mechanical rifles used by the Iraqi brave army in some earlier years. "Thompson machine gun, American-made, gained among the booty in the battle against the Zionist enemy in 1948." "Machine guns used by a group of Arab Baath Socialist Party Revolutionaries in the operation of blowing [sic] the tyrant Abd al-Karim Qasim on 7th October, 1959." (Twenty-two-year-old Saddam Hussein, the future Leader, was among the participants in the failed attack on air force officer Qasim, who had taken power in a coup against the British-supported Iraqi monarchy the year before. According to his official biography, Saddam received a bullet in the leg, which a friend cut out with a razor blade.) "Part of Israeli (Mirage) plane shot down by our great forces in 1967 in the H3 area." On one of the longer glass cases, there is a placard with the word "Martyrs" in a squirm of red Arabic script. Inside are the uniforms worn by various Iraqi soldiers or pilots at the time of their deaths. The uniforms lie flat and are slightly wrinkled. Without bodies to fill them they seem, like medieval suits of armor, too small and somehow false. They have holes in them, and the holes are ringed with rust-colored stains. A quarter-mile or so down the highway from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the Hands of Victory Pavilion, built in 1984 to celebrate an exceptionally bloody triumph in the most recent Iraqi war save one, the long and awful fight with Iran. The pavilion is a terrible thing. It is approached via a wide asphalt boulevard lined by unusually ugly lampposts, oversized globes set on spindly stalks. The boulevard runs a distance of several city blocks between two matching sets of giant forearms, which rise directly out of the asphalt, one on each side of the road, and loom high into the air, ending in hands clenched in fists. The Leader's own armsKelly, Michael is the author of 'Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War' with ISBN 9780679411222 and ISBN 0679411224.