Sean Penn Returns To Iraq
By Sean Penn
San
Francisco Chronicle
15 January , 2004
Doc
Birnbaum filled the last of three receptacles with my blood (he was
concerned about my looming cholesterol problem and had graciously made
a house call), then slid the needle out of my vein as my phone rang.
I answered as the doc pressed a cotton ball onto the puncture in the
crook of my arm. It was Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of Global Exchange,
a San Francisco human rights organization. I had put out the word that
I wanted to return to Iraq to write a piece for The Chronicle, having
been granted a press credential by its editor, Phil Bronstein. Medea
called to tell me that she would be taking a delegation of parents of
servicepeople, both killed in action and on active duty, for a weeklong
"mission of peace" to Iraq -- a trip unprecedented in the
history of U.S. military activity. They would be departing Saturday,
Nov. 29 (our phone conversation took place on Thanksgiving Day), embarking
from various U.S. airports with a rendezvous point at the "Meditation
Room" at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. Our conversation ended as
the doctor placed a Band-Aid over the cotton ball, wished me a happy
Thanksgiving and left with my blood.
Ever since the bombing
of the U.N. building in Baghdad in August, I had felt increasingly tugged
toward Iraq. As I had made my cautionary opinions known prior to our
military engagement, in a self-financed letter to the president in the
Washington Post (Oct. 18, 2002), and then reiterated those thoughts
after our invasion of Iraq in a self-financed ad in the New York Times
(May 30, 2003), I felt a responsibility to change or reaffirm my position
in the context of the new situation for our U.S. soldiers, and Iraqi
civilians as well. The call from Medea fixed my decision to go. Gaining
the support of my family would be tricky. My reputation within our home
is one of impulsiveness, hubris and an overall bloated sense of my own
survival instincts. Of course, this is entirely unfounded, but we'll
leave that for another day.
My wife and 12-year-old
daughter are different people in the sense that my wife will occasionally
kiss me on the lips, and my daughter, occasionally on the cheek. With
this one exception, they're exactly the same person. And when I told
them, "I'm thinking about going back to Iraq," they rolled
their eyes and said, "Uh-huh." I interpreted that to mean
"You're an idiot" or that they just didn't want to invest
in my explanation. So much for guidance.
But my 10-year-old
son said rather quickly, "Could you get killed?" I immediately
and idiotically responded with, "I could get killed crossing the
street -- or struck by lightning -- and SARS, what about SARS?"
He was embarrassed
for me. Then, somewhat more soberly, I tried to move the conversation
toward practical realities and balances. I won't go into great detail
here, except to say that I handled it rather imperfectly and without
much foresight. My son, on the other hand, was brave and ultimately
supportive. Our conversation culminated with my acceptance of his permission.
Only later would I realize the incredible burden I risked at his potential
expense. Two days later I left San Francisco International Airport.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Schiphol, the layovers from stateside flights connecting to Amman,
Jordan, are roughly eight hours. I grab a hot dog and head over to the
Meditation Room. As I approach, I see at least 30 sleeping bodies, travel-
weary bones at rest on reclining chairs. A woman opens her eyes and
stands.
"Sean?" she says.
"Yes, are you
Medea?"
She rubs her eyes
and nods. She is a diminutive blonde with delicate features, with a
reputation for having ridden out the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan,
interrupting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's news conferences,
consistently putting herself on the line -- in South America, the Middle
East and Washington. Within a short time I am introduced to the eight
or so waking members of her delegation. We burn the hours together waiting
to board our flight. An airport television is beaming in CNN coverage
of the stateside embarkation of one member of her delegation, Fernando
Suarez del Solar. The media is taking a particularly keen interest in
his involvement with the Global Exchange delegation: Seven months earlier,
del Solar had lost his son, Jesus, a lance corporal in the 1st Marine
division on duty in Diwaniya. The Pentagon had reported to del Solar
that Jesus had been shot in combat. Del Solar's own diligence revealed
that the truth was that in stepping off an armored personnel carrier,
Jesus was instantly killed by a U.S. land mine. Del Solar's response
to the death was to gather "messages of peace and love" from
American schoolchildren to deliver them to the children of Iraq. I will
later witness this warm, broadly mustachioed man cradling a leukemia-ridden
infant Iraqi boy, addressing him boisterously as "Cabron!"
In my mind I am taken back 20 years, imagining this man lifting his
own infant and addressing him as "Cabron!"
After boarding,
we are delayed an hour on the ground while the airport is searched for
a passenger who had checked a bag onto my flight but had not arrived
at the gate by departure time. With the announcement that the baggage
compartment is also being searched, I wonder why, if they are concerned
about a bomb on board, the plane is not being evacuated. I am too tired
to worry and fall asleep. An hour later I am awakened by the pull of
takeoff. I have missed the resolution of our delay and ride out the
4 1/2-hour trip to Amman wide awake.
It is 2 a.m. in
Jordan when my flight arrives. I part ways with Medea and her delegation,
pay the 10 dinars for a visa, and go through customs, where I am greeted
by Sattar. Before the Gulf War, Sattar had been a well-paid civil engineer.
Now he drives the perilous 12 hours into Amman and 12 hours back to
Baghdad, shuttling journalists and humanitarian aides, for a mere $300
per 24- hour round trip. Sattar is in a great hurry to get to the Iraqi
border, nearly 400 kilometers from Amman, before the 7 a.m. shift change.
It is important not to be delayed at the border crossing because from
there we'll begin an additional eight-hour drive to Baghdad through
the desert. Nobody likes to drive the last 200 kilometers through the
Sunni Triangle at night. The desert hubs of Ramadi and Fallujah are
not only political hot zones rampant with guerrilla insurgents but also
a center for road bandits (in Iraq, called "Ali Babas"). I
have no checked baggage, just my duffel, so we jump into Sattar's car
and head out onto the unlit two-lane stretch that leads to the Iraqi
border. There are several checkpoints along the way, where only our
headlights serve to illuminate Jordanian police, who loom from the darkness
along the road. They use their fading flashlights to indicate a stop.
They check passports and send us on our way. It's 5 a.m. in the Jordanian
village of Mahattat al Jufur, still no light in the sky, but we're taken
in by the fluorescent green hue of the storefronts and a cafe. We make
a brief stop for chicken tikka and bladder relief. Then, just as quickly,
it's back on the road to maintain our schedule.
Bleary-eyed, we
hit the sunrise at the Jordanian border. It's just about 6 a.m. Things
go pretty quickly here, but a kilometer farther down the road is the
Iraqi border, where the shift change seems to be starting early. Dipping
into my pocket, Sattar is able to influence the outgoing shift guard
to stamp our passports and send us on our way. It should be noted that
by Western standards, these borders appear extremely penetrable. Their
ramshackle and lightly staffed appearance aside, not one explosive-sniffing
canine is in sight. The vehicle's undersides are given a quick check
by mirror, maybe a trunk is opened here or there, but that's it. It's
daylight by this time, and I'm struck by the hundreds of tents in the
fenced area adjacent the border that house Palestinian refugees.
We're now on the
road to Baghdad, cutting through the endlessly flat Iraqi desert. For
hundreds of kilometers at a stretch, the occasional Bedouin sheepherder
is the only human form in sight. As far as the eye can see, these Bedouins
-- solitary robed figures traveling the desert followed by a hundred
head of sheep -- appear to have neither a point of origin nor a destination.
It seems their only mission is to exist as props for a National Geographic
photographer. Where are they taking these sheep? And where did they
come from?
As we enter the
Sunni Triangle, we pass several U.S. military convoys traveling the
seemingly endless road leading to Ramadi. Although sticking close to
a convoy near Ramadi may inhibit the Ali Babas, it also attaches you
to the U.S. military, the primary target for IEDs (improvised explosive
devices). These roadside bombs are often triggered by cellular phone,
enabling specific targeting. So we take our chances alone, rocketing
through Ramadi and Fallujah at 120 mph. As we race through Fallujah,
I take selfish comfort in the sight of black smoke billowing in the
aftermath of the recent shelling of a one-story building several hundred
yards off the highway, figuring that the closest guerrilla fighters
might currently be occupied or on the run from U.S. soldiers.
I arrive in Baghdad
at about 1:30 in the afternoon. It's about 60 degrees and sunny. The
military presence is heavy on the outskirts of town. Gun turrets and
high concrete walls surround all U.S. military facilities. A Black Hawk
helicopter flies overhead at a surprisingly low altitude, considering
the number of attacks that have come the helicopters' way lately. I've
quietly arranged (the less my whereabouts are known, the better) to
switch cars at the Hunting Club, a private social club that traditionally
hosted a who's-who of Iraqi society. Saddam Hussein's son Oday was known
to pick up girls there. There are many such clubs for the elite in the
Middle East. And the Hunting Club had reportedly been used until recently
as a meeting place for Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
There, I would be
greeted by Hiwa Osman, the editor of the weekly Iraq Crisis Report and
a trainer with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. It's a non-governmental
organization, based in a safe house in Baghdad, where young Iraqi journalists
are schooled by functioning war correspondents. My friend Norman Solomon
of the Institute for Public Accuracy, with whom I made my first trip
to Baghdad, had arranged a room for me at the institute through Mohamad
Bazzi, Newsday's Baghdad correspondent.
When I arrive at
the institute, there is a class in progress. For about 10 minutes, I
observe as Betsy Hiel, a Weintel Prize-winning correspondent of the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, discusses reporting structure, using as a
model a multi-part piece she had done on mass graves. When this term
"mass graves" is used, one of the young Iraqi students chimes
in with laughter: "This whole country is a mass grave. We live
in a mass grave." And with that, the fatigue of the trip hits me
in the back of the head like a rocket-propelled grenade. As I excuse
myself, Hiwa offers me a shot of Glenfiddich. I accept a sip, enough
to wash down an Ambien, and then crawl under the covers in the bed they've
given me, sinking into a five-hour chemically induced coma.
It is about 8 p.m.
when a distant explosion wakes me. I rub my eyes and begin to process
that the pop, pop, pops I'd heard throughout my sleep are still present
-- clearly the sound of distant and not-so-distant gunfire. I come out
of my room and find the pool of journalists who occupy the house sharing
a six-pack or two, talking through the day's events. I ask about the
explosion. It turns out we aren't far from the airport, where the Army
detonates unexploded ordnance every hour or so, making it difficult
to differentiate controlled blasts from those of aggression. As for
the gunshots, that's Baghdad. Just as I sit to join the conversation,
everything goes black. It is very quiet. And then the gearing up of
a generator vibrates through the house, the backup lights semi-illuminating
the room. This, too, happens several times a day. So I grab a beer,
share the evening, and pick the brains and experiences of the group.
There is a great calm that is inherent in the nature of war correspondents.
I borrow it for the days that follow.
I rise about 7 the
next morning. Hiwa and I jump into the car with Qadir Nadir, the institute's
driver. He is a short, stocky Kurd, trusted for the eyes in back of
his head. As we head through the city, Hiwa briefs me on the contents
of the emergency medical kit in our van and gives me a flak jacket.
It's the general feeling that these flak jackets look good on television
and may be prudent to wear when in the presence of U.S. military who
are subject to attacks, but in my day-to-day movements they might draw
increased attention. Not something one wants to do in Baghdad. So the
vests stay on the seat of the van.
In the evening,
gunfire emanates with the relentlessness of frog "ribbits'' around
a summer pond, sometimes sporadic and at other times overwhelming. But
in the daytime, it's intermittent at most -- a few pops here and there.
Five times a day, the Islamic call to prayer is broadcast through loudspeakers
from each mosque in the city. The chant echoes and ricochets through
Baghdad's declining alleys and architecture. One experiences a palpably
hypnotic engagement with Middle Eastern spiritual life, like living
in a movie with this chant as its score.
Hiwa offers to take
me to the Free Prisoners Association northwest of Baghdad in the Kadhimiyah
area beside the Tigris River. The association was established after
the initial coalition occupation. Organizers took over the house of
one of Saddam's cousins to document the crimes of the regime. Sorting
through hundreds of thousands of looted documents, the staff logs the
names of all those in prison, executed, tortured or still missing.
En route to the
Free Prisoners Association, we stop in Utayfiya, where we spot U.S.
soldiers guarding a sewage pumping station under repair. We approach
on foot as a nearby school opens its doors for a lunch break and hundreds
of children come out to engage the soldiers.
The commander of
the unit is Lt. Col. Mark Coats. Coats' demeanor is confident and alert.
He is accommodating of my request to photograph his soldiers and their
interaction with the children. There is no question of politics here,
and the warmth of these soldiers toward the children is genuine. I get
the impression that such events occur daily here, and not only when
journalists are present. The children are excited to visit with the
soldiers, but when the street gets too crowded, I wish the soldiers
a safe duty and move on.
Farther down the
road, Hiwa and I come across a U.S. military foot patrol on Haifa Street.
While many of the engagement policies and raid tactics of coalition
forces are incendiary to the local population, the rank-and-file soldiers
I meet behave with dignity and grace in their daily interactions with
Iraqi people.
U.S. soldiers today
are not what you'd picture if you grew up on World War II movies. Think
younger.
Now add zits (some
of them).
And access to e-mail.
This is not the
war of yesteryear, with relatives waving our boys off on ships and losing
all contact beyond a weekly mail drop. These are young people who, via
the Internet, are reminded daily of the comfort and safety of home and
are quick to express their desire to return to their families. I want
to ask many of them their feelings about our occupation in Iraq, and
some express thoughts on this issue without being asked. And their thoughts
represent all sides of the debate. But one has to be mindful that these
are young people who have lost friends to battle, and girlfriends, boyfriends,
wives and husbands to distance. One wouldn't expect them to yield easily
to the notion that perhaps the United States should not have sent them
in the first place.
Adjacent to the
slums, this area of Haifa Street also boasts contemporary high-rise
apartment buildings, built by the former regime for the Palestinians
welcomed to Iraq during Hussein's Pan-Arab campaign. When Baghdad fell,
the people in the slums pushed the Palestinians out and moved in. (Hence
the hundreds of tents at the border.) Sniper attacks are not uncommon
in this area, so after I chat and take pictures with the soldiers, it
seems my presence might be creating a distraction for them that wouldn't
be best for their health or my own, so Hiwa and I proceed to Kadhimiyah.
We arrive at the
Free Prisoners Association, are searched and then escorted to the office
of its administrator. The foyer serves as a locus of commiseration for
the families of the dead and missing. They wait in line every day in
hopes that the information on their missing or dead family members has
been processed in the association's computer. But many come simply to
share their loss with the family members of others lost as well. The
administrator takes Hiwa and me on a tour of the building, where thousands
of documents are stacked floor to ceiling in each office. If the Hussein
regime could be credited with anything, it would be with keeping obsessively
complete records of the atrocities the regime itself committed. (Pol
Pot and Hitler shared this habit.) Many of the death warrants are signed
by Hussein. Our tour ends in a room of moldy documents piled head-high
and wall to wall, representing some of the lives claimed under this
horrific regime. Our guide makes the point simply: "We will put
all these names in a museum as a way to say thank you to all those who
sacrificed their lives on the long road to reach freedom." It's
a reminder that it wasn't only the Americans and coalition forces that
"liberated" the country. There were tens of thousands of Iraqis
who lost their lives opposing the regime as well.
The mangled steel
and concrete rubble of Baghdad's central communication tower now stands
only to communicate the awesome power of U.S. military force. I stop
to photograph this monument to our Shock and Awe campaign as we proceed
to the Palestine Hotel, where I have asked Qadir to drop Hiwa and me.
(I think I might look up a journalist friend staying there, who might
have a satellite phone. I am anxious to touch base with my family.)
The communications
tower, or what is left of it, is under the guard of soldiers from the
new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. This is the recently trained army that,
since my return, suffered an exodus of 400 out of the 700 trained soldiers,
who complained that the $60 per month paid them by the occupying authority
wasn't going to cut it. In essence, they were being asked to risk their
lives in the service of an occupying army for a monthly salary that
would, in Baghdad, buy the equivalent of one night at a Holiday Inn.
With not much else to do, these Civil Defense guards deny me access
to photograph the stricken building. It is an impotent order. If I backed
10 feet around the edge of a corner building, I'd have ample opportunity
to photograph. But I don't. It is, after all, their only real authority
I'd have been violating.
Qadir has to drop
us off several blocks away from the Palestine Hotel. The military has
erected huge concrete barriers to protect the hotel from car and truck
bombing attempts because only a couple of weeks earlier, the hotel suffered
a rocket attack from the back of a donkey cart parked on the main boulevard.
Hiwa and I walk the pedestrian route through the barriers to the hotel,
where we are once again searched before entering. My friend isn't there,
so we have a quick tea and head out to find some lunch. As we walk back
to our car, I take a long look at the rocket damage on the side of the
building. There is a lot of power in that donkey cart -- talk about
"dual-use" technology!
On the busy boulevard
in front of the Palestine Hotel are several makeshift money-changing
tables. They survive on the fluctuating exchange rate of the dinar and
charge a commission for changing money, mostly U.S. dollars for Iraqi
dinars. It's not really a black market, because there is no official
market; it's all black, without regulation, taxes or import duty. As
with the many storefronts and restaurants, it's still somewhat surprising
to see business go on under circumstances of war. Nowhere more than
Baghdad, however, is it clear that war itself is a business.
For Iraqis, there
was no pro-war or anti-war movement last spring when the United States
invaded their country. That, in their view, was a predominantly Western
debate. They're used to war; they're used to gunshots. What's new is
this tiny seed and taste of freedom. It is a compelling experience to
have been in Baghdad just one year ago, where not a single Iraqi expressed
to me opinions outside Baathist party lines, and just one year later,
when so many express their opinions and so many opinions compete for
attention. Where the debate is similar to that in the United States
is over the way in which the business of war will administer the opportunity
for peace and freedom, and the reasonable expectation of Iraqi self-rule.
This is an occupied
country. A country at war. Many Iraqis I speak to tell me there is no
freedom in occupation, nor trust in unilateral intervention. People
from all sides of the debate acknowledge that the insurgency movement
builds every day in manpower and organizational strength. The insurgents
are made up of Saddam loyalists, displaced Sunni elite, resentful victims
of U.S. raids, the Fedayeen, foreign terrorist cells and of course many
of Hussein's soldiers, who, as participants in the Baathist regime,
were sent home with their weapons and told, "You'll never work
in this town again." The Iraqis I speak to say that the U.S. policy
of de-Baathification is devoid of consideration of long-term goals,
human nature and Arab culture and thus could ignite a powder keg.
Will Iraqi freedom
flourish or find a new stockade? Certainly, in any transition period
such as the one in which Iraq finds itself, security support from other
nations is necessary. However, on the streets of Iraq, from everything
I observe, suspicion is high. While disgruntled neighbors can gain quick
access to the military brass by accusing one another of insurgency involvement,
the head of a household whose windows have been shattered in the collateral
damage or mistakenly targeted by American firepower gets little attention
when asking for those windows to be replaced. It's winter, after all,
and the electricity necessary for heating is intermittent at best. These
kinds of concerns are extensive. And with all this, one must consider
the daily toll of civilian deaths in similar situations of mis-targeting.
"Your government has come to liberate the people from Saddam,"
one man asks me, "or to liberate oil from the people?"
The alienation bred
by war on a people doesn't stop with armies, but instead continues with
corporations and privatization dominating and shaping the very culture
and economic participation that freedom might otherwise express. One
man tells me that "if the United States fails in its promise of
freedom to the Iraqi people, we may very well create an entire nation
of suicide bombers."
Al-Ghouta is a Syrian-owned
restaurant a five-minute drive from the Palestine Hotel. When we walk
in, it is packed, primarily with women in full Islamic dress. These,
it turns out, are Iranian religious tourists, visiting Shiite holy sites
in a Baghdad under siege. Hiwa, Qadir and I are seated, and we order
a tasting plate. I need to pay a visit to the men's room and excuse
myself. When I return, I see Hiwa chewing on a luscious chop of lamb.
There are three of us and only two samples of each dish. My mouth waters
as I home in on the second and final chop of lamb on the plate. But
before my hand can move, our wonderful and trusted driver Qadir reaches
in for the kill. It will be only hummus and olives for the boy from
California. War, it seems, has sharpened their reflexes.
The presence of
Syrian businessmen and Iranian tourists highlights the irony of the
Iraqi situation. Syria and Iran each want their piece of the Iraqi pie.
Fundamentalist Syrians send suicide bombers to distract the United States
from a regime-change policy in Syria, while fundamentalist Iranians
want to impose a theocracy in Iraq through puppet Iraqi political leaders.
To look across this restaurant at all the floor-length black Islamic
dress (they are referred to as BMOs, "black moving objects")
is to view Iraq as Iran would like to see it.
With an anamorphic
image of a tender, juicy lamb chop still swimming in my head, we return
to institute headquarters, and out come a couple of six- packs as day
moves into night. There's a ski-lodge feel to a house full of war correspondents,
their press passes clipped to them like lift tickets, as one by one
they return from the slippery slopes of Baghdad's streets and the outlying
moguls of Kirkuk and Samarra. What should be understood is that when
I arrive in Iraq this go-round, for what would be a four-day trip, there
are roughly 1,500 journalists in and around Baghdad, and in these four
days, only one, to my knowledge, is shot and wounded. So the survival
odds for such a brief trip are very much in my favor.
But for the people
and children of Baghdad and the coalition forces, the insurgents and
the utter lawlessness of the streets are a constant and real threat.
Shortly before the U.S. attack, Hussein opened the gates of his largest
prisons and released his worst criminals and killers into the population.
Until recently, several illegal taverns posted Arabic signs reading
"Killer for Hire." Kidnappings, robberies, rape and murder
are commonplace.
Sean Penn
is an actor and director who lives with his wife and children in the
Bay Area. His most recent films are "Mystic River" and "21
Grams."