{"id":873,"date":"2005-05-03T08:29:11","date_gmt":"2005-05-03T12:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=873"},"modified":"2008-02-16T16:37:25","modified_gmt":"2008-02-16T22:37:25","slug":"gruesome-despicable-encore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=873","title":{"rendered":"gruesome, despicable… encore?"},"content":{"rendered":"

PART ONE<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\n\n
<\/a>Saleh, angry over children’s stares, went to his hospital room and told a nurse he wanted to draw. A marker was taped to his arm, and he then drew an airplane with bombs dropping out of it.<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

They were getting close to an abandoned restaurant, the halfway point on their 2-mile walk to their crumbling mud and concrete house.<\/p>\n

Saleh stopped. Something caught his eye in the trench alongside the road. It was a khaki-colored ball, small and smooth — a toy perfect for playing catch with Dia.<\/p>\n

Saleh’s parents had warned him not to touch strange objects on the ground. But he was still caught up in the giddiness of seeing his schoolmates again.<\/p>\n

Saleh picked up the object, and quickly realized his mistake when a classmate ran away.<\/p>\n

He looked down at his hands and began to cry. Dia raced toward him. Just three more steps.<\/p>\n

It blew.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Lying sprawled on his back, Saleh was motionless, his belly torn open. His right hand was gone, and only a thumb and an inch of his middle finger remained on his left. Blood poured from his eyes. A piece of shrapnel the size of a quarter had torn through his left eye and lodged in his brain behind his right eye.<\/p>\n

Raheem thought Saleh was dead.<\/p>\n

Dia was trying to get up. Much of his right thigh was missing. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in his neck.<\/p>\n

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Dia told his father.<\/p>\n

Raheem held Dia so tightly that his friends had to fight to get the teenager out of his arms and into a friend’s car. As Raheem climbed in the backseat, Dia said: “Dad, really, I’m all right.”<\/p>\n

Raheem embraced his first son and prayed. Shortly after they arrived at Saddam Hussein Hospital in Nasiriya, Dia bled to death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An Iraqi boy’s journey from the brink of death to a new life in California<\/em>
\nWritten by Meredith May<\/a>, Photographs by Deanne Fitzmaurice<\/a>
\nSunday, September 12, 2004<\/p>\n

PART TWO<\/a><\/p>\n

…a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.<\/p>\n

“He laughed,” Mr. Delgado said, “and everybody in the unit laughed with him.”<\/p>\n

The officer’s comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: “Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They’d keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people’s heads.”<\/p>\n

He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. “I said to them: ‘What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?’ And they responded just completely openly. They said: ‘Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.’ “<\/p>\n

“Haji” is the troops’ term of choice for an Iraqi. It’s used the way “gook” or “Charlie” was used in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From ‘Gook’ to ‘Raghead’<\/em>
\nBy BOB HERBERT<\/p>\n

PART THREE<\/a><\/p>\n

The private school, with its emphasis on social responsibility, waived the $12,000 annual tuition for its new student. Many kids already knew about Saleh because they had seen him on television and had written get-well cards to him when he was in the hospital.<\/p>\n

There were 14 students in Saleh’s class, an airy room where children learned in small groups at round desks surrounded by art supplies, computers and posters of the world. Children left their shoes at the door per Halaby’s rules — only socks and slippers were permitted.<\/p>\n

It was nothing like Saleh’s school in southern Iraq, with its dirt floor and run-down desks. Halaby’s class even had a rocking chair for student writers.<\/p>\n

“OK, Saleh, you’re in the author’s chair,” said Halaby, a Palestinian American. “What did you write?”<\/p>\n

“My name is Saleh Khalaf. I was born in Nasiriya in Iraq. I am 9 years old. I have three sisters, Sofa, Marwa and Zahara. The oldest is married and lives with her husband in a different house.<\/p>\n

“My only brother Dia died in an explosion seven months ago. I came to the United States six months ago to get treatment at Oakland Children’s Hospital.<\/p>\n

“Before I came here I went to elementary school. I had a lot of friends over there. My brother and I have homing pigeons. They would travel 40 kilometers and bring money and notes to friends. They would come back the next morning.<\/p>\n

“I’d like to send hijabs (head scarves) to my sisters and mother in Iraq. I can send them with newspaper reporters in Iraq. I miss my mom a lot.<\/p>\n

“There is a river running by my house. I used to catch fish in it, and my mom fried them for lunch. At night we saw some hyenas and wild pigs. I have a dog named Antar. He used to guard us at night from wild animals. I have four black cats and four white cats.”<\/p>\n

Saleh, who spoke after a boy who wrote about bugs and another who opined about expensive toys, wowed the room.<\/p>\n

“I want to catch my own fish and fry it,” whispered a boy.<\/p>\n

“I want to see wild animals,” said another.<\/p>\n

Halaby asked her students whether they had any questions. They came out in a torrent.<\/p>\n

“I thought that was a very good memoir,” said one girl. “I’d like to know what the weather was like.”<\/p>\n

Saleh answered that it ranged from very hot to cold, but sometimes there were sandstorms that made it hard to breathe or see, and he had to close the windows and cover up all the food in the house.<\/p>\n

One boy wondered what Saleh did for fun.<\/p>\n

“Swim in the river. We also used to carry a stone and hide it behind our backs and make my cousins guess which hand it was in. If they guessed wrong, they had to give me money.”<\/p>\n

After story time, the students went back to their seats to work in their notebooks. Saleh took a pencil and drew. Cradling the pencil between his thumb and partial finger of his left hand, he used his right stump to steady and direct it. He sketched a car with a person lying in the back seat, and little dashes leading away from the car.<\/p>\n

“That’s my older brother dead in the back of a car. Those are the wheels.”<\/p>\n

Then, pointing to the dashes, Saleh told his interpreter:<\/p>\n

“And those are the ants coming to eat his body.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FINALE<\/a><\/p>\n

In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.’s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.<\/p>\n

Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.<\/p>\n

Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. “I asked him,” said Mr. Delgado, “if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn’t get mad at all. He was, like, ‘Well, I saw them bloody my buddy’s nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.’ “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PART ONE Saleh, angry over children’s stares, went to his hospital room and told a nurse he wanted to draw. A marker was taped to his arm, and he then drew an airplane with bombs dropping out of it. They … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-e5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}