ChapterSIX

M

*Hop Scotching Fronts:

September 10, 2002
Including Field Note Passages From
(Dec. 16, 2001 and Dec. 17, 2001)

From VA-day at Ground Zero To the Heart of God Bless America

~

December 16, 2001

Asia through Europe to North America

Death on the Highway

Travel Warning:

“Road travel in Pakistan is risky. The roads are very crowded, drivers are aggressive and poorly trained, and many vehicles -- particularly large trucks and buses -- are badly maintained. Roads, including most major highways, also suffer from poor maintenance and often have numerous potholes, sharp drop-offs and barriers that are not sign-posted... Driving without experienced local drivers or guides is not recommended.” [1]

                        The newspapers and TV were full of characterizations of what it must have been like, “Boots on the ground,” on the streets of the Tora Bora theater, “as might made right.” About how violent and chaotic it must have been. And I thought about that for a few minutes on the flight from Islamabad to Karachi . About how it had been chaotic, but no more so I thought (aside from the magnitude of the bombing and the fleeing) than most war zones I’d been to and probably not that much more chaotic than the typical turmoil perceived by Westerners when they plop themselves down for the first time out of their well-tended lives into typically chaotic Muslim street markets and view it through their tidy Western eyes.

            And although I must have seen more than two thousand guns since December 2, and although I watched all those roaring bombers and fighter jets pummeling the enemy from afar, the most violent thing I saw up close the whole time I was boots on the ground at World War III, was the aftermath of a catastrophic auto accident I saw on the way back to Islamabad from Peshawar. A grisly scene between Nowehera and ancient Taxila, of broken bodies and the burnt-out wrecks of what used to be a van and a car, still smoldering as the bodies were addressed on the shoulder and the traffic creped past on the median.

            While I was in southwest-central Asia I saw fear, distrust, anger, hate, and confusion. I saw ignorance, bureaucracy, discontent, regret, and a determined civilized resolve. I saw screaming bombers and fighter jets full of rage, and I studied poverty and experienced the outskirts of the terror war.

            All that war and hate and chaos and all those guns and all that hopelessness --- but the only carnage I actually saw was the aftermath of that car accident on the Grand Trunk Road between Peshawar and Islamabad ...

 

 

*High Over Europe

 

                        The most frightening and most hair-raising event of the entire terror war streetphoto shoot happened to me in German airspace on the flight from Karachi , Pakistan to Manchester , England . After I got up from my seat to use the toilet while we were flying over the Rhine River .

            While waiting there in a short toilet queue, I noticed that I could look right in through the open door of the flight deck to the cockpit. I could see the backs of the pilots’ heads sitting at the controls of the airplane.

             I worried aloud to a flight attendant, “Is that the flight deck?”

            “Why yes,” she replied, “Would you like to go on up and say hello to the pilots?”

            Well --- I was thinking, HELL NO I DON’T WANT to be able to just walk through the open doorway of the flight deck AFTER ISLAMIC ZEALOTS JUST KILLED 3500  INNOCENT PEOPLE by crashing four goddamn jetliners into several goddamn buildings. After all we'd been through since September 11, HELL NO I DON'T WANT ACCESS or want anyone else to have access to an ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF PAKISTAN AIRLINE FLIGHT DECK, or any other goddamn flight deck ON ANY OTHER GODDAMN AIRPLANE for that matter."

            Then the uncomfortably-timed and sharp-edged recollection of Osama bin Laden’s recent pre-September 11 reaction to an ABC-TV reporter’s question, wondering how bin Laden could possibly justify the many hundred of Muslim deaths and injuries resulting from the bombings at the embassies in Kenya and Nairobi that year, plunged through my brain:

 

“In jihad, it is the will of Allah who dies...”

 

            And then all the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I could actually hear the static electricity crackle in my ear as it did.

 

 

I was terrified!

I wanted to say what I was thinking to the smiling flight attendant,  curses and all, but my instinct as a photographer and storyteller (artist and raconteur) took over and I answered, “Yeah sure, can I just walk right in?” She told me, “Oh sure, go ahead ” --- and I could feel my body shuddering as I walked right into the cabin (the TV horror video clips pounded my brain like a sledgehammer). I sat down and chatted with the three pilots about German airspace and about how pretty the Rhine River looked from 30,000 feet today through holes in the clouds, and then I asked them if it would be OK if I went back to my seat to pick up my camera so I could take their picture. “Sure,” they said in unison. So I went back to my seat, picked my camera out of my camera bag in the luggage bin, and then went right back into the cabin (unescorted through the open doorway,) and I took a portrait of access there that I’m sure I never really wanted to know about.

            I thought about the nearby Eiffel Tower, and how if I were a crazed zealot how easy it would have been for me to have taken myself and a few hundred other Muslims to the promised land by taking out that infidel Western symbol of grandeur. The glory of God and everlasting virgins for everyone on the plane, my treat ...

The whole thing icked me out!

Walking right into the cockpit as if September 11th hadn’t happened. Or as if desperate Taliban and al-Qaida killers with nothing to loose weren’t still trying to flee Pakistan AT THIS VERY MOMENT... ... ...

            I was freaked out right through to my Chuck Taylor All Stars --- restlessly confounded and alone for the rest of the flight to England in my first class seat.

 

Headline News*[2]

 

The US was still bombing on Sunday morning despite the elation of Afghan ground forces:

   

*    “Afghan commanders claim victory, smiling Alliance forces chanting in English, “al-Qaida is finished! al-Qaida is finished!” as US planes circle overhead. “This is the last day of al-Qaida in Afghanistan,” one of the commanders said. But then after a five-hour lull in US air strikes during the afternoon --- attacks continued Sunday night.”

   

*    US Secretary of State  Colin Powell on Meet the Press:

           “We’ve destroyed al-Qaida in Afghanistan ... and we have ended the role of Afghanistan as a haven
 for terrorist activity.”

 

 

 

*Crossing the Water Home

 

 

                        On the flight from England to America I became acutely paranoid at one point due to the open cockpit incident over Germany. Although I never got up to check if the security was as lax on the Atlantic Ocean leg of the flight as it had been from the Indian Ocean to the North Sea (I was too frightened to confirm my worst fear), the thought of them letting anyone into the cockpit as we approached New York haunted me. And I even became convinced at one point that a terrorist cell was in business class, and that it was about to take over the flight. Five young men (including my row mate) got together near the back of the jet and whispered among themselves in a shifty manner for a few minutes and then split up. All were Pakistani and none of them smiled enough for my tastes --- and we were getting closer to New York all the time.

            I imagined what actions I’d take to go down fighting and to spare lives in the city if suddenly the bandannas and box cutters came out. I’d use my tripod as a weapon and would fight to the death if that were what it took.

            But it turned out that the five were all Pakistan International Airline employees shipping to New York for new jobs in the company. They were whispering because as employees they were under orders not to create a disturbance for the other passengers. I found that out later by talking with my seat-mate (my fantasy terrorist leader) who’s name was Zafar Awan and who generously invited me to call him if I needed help with my research or if I needed a place to stay next time I was in Rawalpindi. His generous hospitality coming on the heels of my grave suspicions (I was sure they were a terrorist cell for about 10 minutes!) made me feel embarrassed and made me think about how Zafar Awan and I (like nearly all his countrymen and me) had much more in common than we had reasons to fight ... 

 

            After that, things got real charming on the flight.

 

            The pilot announced the end of Ramadan in both Urdu (the Pakistan national dialect) and English, and invited the believers to celebrate in prayer for Eid. I’d watched a half dozen Islamic group prayer sessions on the trip, but that one on the airplane was the best one because I was among it instead of just watching from the sidelines. As in culture and street photography --- religion is always better among the masses.

            All in all however, I’d found the Islamic tradition of five prayer sessions per day oppressive, and thought it was spiritual overkill. I couldn’t pray five times a day to the Gods of college basketball --- much less a politicized God I’m not so sure I can trust. But it felt good just to be there among the prayerful and to watch their traditions up close. Through my own perspective instead of through that of a TV pundit or a stale talking head.

            Just like it probably felt good for the Pakistanis to immerse themselves in American tradition when after Eid prayers, a 747 jetliner full of about 350 Muslims and one Euro-American Jayhawk white boy from the Cradle of Liberty in Kansas, all watched multiple episodes of the Simpsons together.

            Laughing hysterically at ourselves all the way to New York City ...

 

 

*The Disconnect:

  And the Mujahid of Islam

 

 

 

 “Since September 11, the most popular new given name for baby boys in Pakistan has been ‘Osama’” [3]

 

 

 

                         I picked up all the major British, European and American national newspapers and news magazines in England, and there was a lot of talk in them about a Muslim disconnect referring to those (a vast majority of southwest-central Asians) who refuse to believe --- even after the release of the newest Osama bin Laden tape --- that the civilized world has proof that he was responsible, aware of, or helped finance the September 11 attack on America.

            And that made me recall what happened to me first hand on Saturday morning in Peshawar on what turned out to be my last streetphoto shoot there. I’d gone out into Saddar Bazaar to gather some breakfast and some supplies, and to make a portrait of the vendors selling Osama bin Laden tribute T-shirts. And as I made the rounds taking pictures among the vendors, I encountered a shop that had two bin Laden T-shirts hanging from hangers on a windowsill outside on the sidewalk. I framed up a still life picture of them hanging there, but as often happens, I decided not to take the picture because the light sucked, and I knew the shot wasn’t as strong as other bin Laden T-shirt shots I’d already made in the hour I was out.

            I was about to continue down the street when two men who were walking on the sidewalk behind me stopped, and one of them picked a T-shirt off the windowsill and in very good English asked me if I wanted him to hold the shirt up to his chest for a picture. Never wanting to make an enemy -- even accidentally and especially here and now -- I lied and said, “Sure,” and I took a couple of snapshots of him so he wouldn’t feel ignored.

            He returned the shirt to the sill and was about to walk off, but I stopped him. “Say,” I started, “I wonder if you might answer a couple of questions for me.” He said, “Sure,” and the three of us introduced ourselves. The man who’d held up the shirt (while he was greeting me) crossed his arm to lay his hand over his heart to let me know how glad he was to meet an American here at this time. I told him I thought he spoke English very well and he told me that when he was younger he’d studied for a time at university in both England and America.

 

 

 

            So I asked him, “So what do you think about what happened on September 11?” And he answered that he thought that, “What they did to you wasn’t right. You didn’t deserve that. Nobody does.” He seemed earnest, so I followed that up by asking him, “Yet you’re willing to volunteer to hold up an Osama bin Laden T-shirt and be captured for all time in a tribute to him?” And then the man blew me away by answering that he thought that Osama bin Laden was a “hero.” “He has stood up for our people as nobody else ever has, he’s the Mujahid of Islam,” he continued, and then repeated, “Osama bin Laden is our hero.” So of course then I asked him if he’d seen the videotape just released on Thursday showing bin Laden admitting his role in the attack on America. He leaned toward me as if to deliver some grand advise to me on the scale of enlightenment -- whispering patronisticly in my ear -- “Don’t believe everything you see on TV ...”

 

 

*Back on the Home Front  

 

 

Headline News*[4]

*    US Embassy Reopens in Kabul

*    Wall Street Journal:

          Afghans Claim Victory in Last al-Qaida Stronghold;

          ...overrunning caves, ridges, and valleys and capturing hundreds of fleeing al-Qaida fighters

*   USA Today --- Anti Taliban forces virtually wiped out the last major pocket of terrorist control in Afghanistan on Sunday. Colin Powell said, “Al Qaeda is --- if not totally destroyed --- well on the way to being destroyed in Afghanistan.

*   There has been no bombing in the White Mountains in more than 24 hours, since around 8 a.m. on Monday morning in Afghanistan.

         Three US marines were wounded by mines at Kandahar airport  and the cave believed to be Osama bin Laden’s fortified command cave was the last to be taken at Tora Bora ...

*    Donald Rumsfeld Goes to Afghanistan:

          Ramadan fast ends in Kabul, but a hunger grows for a new better life ...

 

 

*Victory Lap

 

 

 

 

                        I got out of the airport bus at the Port Authority after several hours at the Islamabad airport plus 28 straight hours in the harrowing airline system and after 15 days studying the interesting but troubling Islamic world, I was absolutely buoyant and vibrating with adrenaline. I didn’t kiss the tarmac or anything, but I was exploding with a powerful zest I didn’t understand, but decided to just go with anyway.

            I bounced up Eighth Avenue and found a hole in the wall room for only $75 a night at the New York Inn between 46th and 47th Streets. It was less than half the size of my $8 rooms in Peshawar and Islamabad and like them, also came with a CNN-equipped TV set but no remote control and it had the mandatory cheap hotel cigarette burns in the carpet. Although not half as nice as the dives in Pakistan, it did come with hot water --- a plus if I didn’t mind sharing the facilities with my neighbors on the fourth floor.

            A real pit, my new room. But it was only $75 a night, and after I used the pay phone in the lobby to rearrange my flight home tomorrow and called Janet to tell her I was back in the States, I bounced out the door, took an E-train to the Village, and found my way to my favorite seat at Ben’s Pizza near the park where I ordered a slice of New York pizza pie with a Hawaiian Punch chaser.

            On the way from the subway to Ben’s I encountered a cop on Sixth Avenue, and while we were waiting together for the light to change to cross the street, I felt compelled to tell him where I’d just been yesterday. “At the Al-Qaida Last Stand on the outskirts of Tora Bora in Afghanistan,” I told him, and he melted right out of his cop personality and shook my hand twice and said, “Man --- I wish I could have been there with you!”

            I don’t usually talk to cops unless they force me to. So I must have been stoked-silly to have crossed that line. But it had been such a success with the first NYPD cop I tried it with, and I was in such a rare circumstance of having been at the one place and event that was on most New Yorker’s minds (the rout at Tora Bora) just yesterday, that I couldn’t resist, and by the time I got back to my room after wandering around Greenwich Village for a couple of hours I’d stopped half-a-dozen NYPD and two FDNY to share my newsworthy story with.

            How often would I be in such a position as this, I thought. Back from an historic event that in it’s telling made another New York cop clench his fist and stab it into the air and then slap it (open-handed) on my back. How many times, even in my other two visits to the city since the attack, had I really had the chance to bring a little joy to the heroes of September 11. Those who ran in while everyone else was running out ...

            So after finishing my pizza at Ben’s I bounced over to Washington Square Park where I told two more cops about where I’d just been. Both of whom were so psyched about the moment that they both also broke out of their hard-ass cop personas, and the three of us spent several minutes together savoring the victory (the revenge) and what the rout at Tora Bora meant for the wounded spirit of New York.

            “It’s VA-day at Ground Zero,” one of the cops said quietly at last, a bit of regret and the memory of the fallen in his voice as his sentence trailed off and as he ended the compelling thought with a high-five slap for his partner and me.

            I’d intended to take the train from the Village to Canal Street and then walk down to Ground Zero one more time --- to get one last smell of that awful place. But while I was in the park I met a Salvation Army Ground Zero volunteer named Jeremiah. As we chatted for 15 minutes at the chessboard benches at Fourth Street, I could smell Ground Zero on him, more pungent than if he’d have overdosed himself with cologne. I made a portrait of him and decided the fates had sent him to the park to save me the trip downtown after my tiring 28-hour commute from the red line border on the war map.

 

 

           

        

  

 

             I walked to the subway and took the E-train back up to the Port Authority to buy an airport bus pass for the trip out of Manhattan tomorrow. There I met the last NYPD cop I’d feel inspired enough to tell my Tora Bora story to. After he heard it he said, “Get out! You better not be lying to me buddy, because if that’s the truth than you just made my week!” Then he demanded to see my passport (which I carry on a chain around my neck for ultimate security and accessibility) and after I whipped it out and he’d read the Pakistan visa and the exit date stamped on it of December 16, 2001, he actually did a little dance for a moment or two. He kept shaking my hand and he too completely lost his NYPD cop demeanor. --- at one point telling me a charming story about what he’d been doing on Friday night while I was watching bin Laden’s bunch get blown to bits from the sidelines.

            It seems on that night a gentleman of the streets who the cop had often seen hanging out at the Port Authority and who once or twice he’d had to evict from sleeping there, came over to him and informed him that he’d just intentionally cut his own penis off in the bathroom with a knife --- and could he get some help now. The cop told me that he just wouldn’t believe that man’s story (either) until he went into the bathroom with the guy to see for himself.

            “And there it was, just laying there on the tile floor in a little puddle of blood, like someone had missed the stool or something...,” the cop whined, before telling me all about how the EMT responders had to wrap the penis up in ice in a towel in case surgeons might be able to reattach it to the man later at the hospital.

            The imagery was just a bit too real after all the global geo-political emasculation we’ve been drowning in for three months, so I thanked him for telling me his charming story, and the cop and I said our good-byes and I headed up Eighth Avenue toward my rented rat trap at the New York Inn. On the way up 42nd Street, I passed two FDNY firemen tending to a hose that was being worked down the street on a car fire, and when I told them my story they liked it so much that in the middle of the job they both took off their gloves to shake my hand, and then waved me off as I continued walking north across the street.

            While checking out of a bodega with all the day’s New York newspapers, a six-pack of Yoo Hoo, and some munchies --- I struck up a conversation with the owner (who, as it turned out, was an immigrant from Yemen). I asked him how September 11 had affected his business and he told me; “Some say things are getting back to normal in New York City, but I say that regular customers are still gone from this place and some who come in still look at me like I am guilty of flying airplanes into their buildings. But I am 200% not at fault --- just because I am from Yemen. No ---  I am 500% not at fault!”

            America’s not an equal place for everybody right now ...

 

 

 

*At the New York Inn

 

 

 

                        So here I am at the New York Inn in my tattered 8x12-foot box, lying on the bed reading the local newspapers and monitoring the CNN Tora Bora victory TV.

            The bloodlust is thick, whichever way I turn.

            The gloating has begun. And I’m right in the middle of it all. Back from the red-line war map theater in Asia to the American battlefront and now settled into my New York Inn burrow. After spending the afternoon regaling cops and firemen (from lower Manhattan to 42nd Street) with tales of my final three days at the war.

            Back at rest at the New York Inn. Back at the hub of the rich and hopeful Western world. Back from the extreme streets of Islam and from my streetphoto mission there.

            Not in Peshawar anymore ...

            Not under the laws of Ramadan anymore...

            Flown back and dropped off on the American street amongst nightclubs and bars and burlesque shows I had no access to in Aabpara market or Saddar Bazaar. Hell, even a couple of minutes at the Disney Store over in Times Square this afternoon (with that Mini Mouse floozy) was more blue fun than I saw anyone having in south-central Asia at the time of the World War III War on Terror. I was way too tired from the marathon commute to join in on any of the alcohol or sex or entertainment-related fun being had down the street from the New York Inn, even if I’d been so inclined. And in addition to a lack of desire and a lack of energy, I was also still very sick from the continuing flu I had and still coughing like a mad man. And besides all that, the elevator at the New York Inn was out of order, and it was four flights down and four flights back up if I decided to go out.

            So instead, I just spent the night writing my journal at the smarmy New York Inn. Just a laid back big-city evening of watching the world and my recent life on the TV set and reading about the whole mess in the local newspapers until I could finally get myself to crash off to sleep ...

 

~

 

                        At about 9 p.m. my neighbors moved into their room across the hallway from me. It was a local man and woman and their cell phone, and they were using their room at the New York Inn as an independent retail business outlet that they kept leaving and returning to. When they were out on the street meeting clients, their room was quiet. But when they were back in the room cold-calling customers on the phone, there was muffled chatter, a cranked up TV, and here and there a lot of sharp bitching and yelling. If I were back at the house and was forced to put up with the likes of this disturbance, I’d be leaning hard on the Lawrence noise ordinance and the rule of civilized and well-mannered law. But after all the noise I was subjected to in Pakistan from all the traffic and horns and mosque loudspeakers and air raid sirens and those men always arguing politics late into the night on the roof --- the smarmy disturbances at the New York Inn hardly bothered me.

            The pair across the hallway operated their business from 9 p.m. until 4 a.m. and sometimes the woman came back to her room with a different sounding man --- a new voice less hyper and somewhat more polite. She and he would go into the room, the door would close, and then I’d hear muffled moaning and rhythmic thumping noises. After awhile they’d leave the room together and then the other more hyper guy would show back up with the girl, and they’d turn the TV on loud, bicker incessantly, and then get back to work on their cell phone.

            The shared bathroom facility on the fourth floor of the New York Inn was right next to their room and one time while out to take a leak, I overheard the hyper man telling the woman about how he’d, “sold six bags...,” while he was out on the street.

            “Ahhh,” I thought -- “multi-tasking,”-- and doing the best to make the most out of a work-night in the city...

            And so there I was. On the fourth floor of the New York Inn, winding down from the war, enjoying the rarefied air of forgivable instinctive bloodlust, and listening to the sounds of free enterprise next door. Pondering the differences between cultures and wondering how well the couple had done tonight at my expense, with their red-light crack and sex trade.

            Not in Peshawar anymore ...

            Ramadan’s over.

            I think I’ll celebrate tomorrow by having a cigarette out on 42nd street in front of the police and God and everybody ...

 

 

   

  *The Taliban:
           Not the Real Muslims;

     They’ll Like Us When We Win

 

 

“People of the book, do not go to excess in your religion, and do not say of God anything but truth”

                                                                                the Quran

 

 

Ezekiel 25(17)

(according to the Bible)

 

“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

 

 

                        I passed by a few churches while I was roaming around Greenwich Village this afternoon, each of which had the standard small directory sign out front advertising their denomination and the times of Sunday and Sabbath services and each giving its message of the day to the streets. One of them I saw today said, “Justice is in the hand’s of the Lord.”

             Meanwhile, I heard a report on TV that said that, “No tears were shed for the Taliban and al-Qaida at Friday prayers in Kabul.” Instead, the report showed a moderate Islamic cleric there delivering a fiery, sarcastic eulogy to the Taliban era as several thousand Afghani worshippers overflowed his mosque. The mullah blasting the Taliban as, “A fanatical strain of Islam,” and the TV showing him telling his congregation that the Taliban were, “Oppressive and narrow-minded,” and preaching to them that the Taliban had, “Humiliated the people and had dwelled on the ritual rather than the spirit.”

            “We are the real Muslims,” the mullah bellowed. “We pray and recite the Quran, but we also have a great humanitarian sense.”

            “The Taliban were not real Muslims.”

            While reading the newspapers and news magazines I ran across a compelling (because it regrettably rang true to me) Time Magazine essay by Charles Krauthammer (Dec. 24, 2001) headlined, “Only in Their Dreams; Why is the ‘Arab street’ silent? Because a radical Muslim fantasy has met reality”.  In the article Krauthammer wrote, “Look around. The Arab street is deathly quiet. The reason is simple. We won.” And he suggested how the secular West had been unable yet to grasp how powerful our victory is to the Arab psyche.

      “My God is great and omnipotent. I am a warrior for God, therefore victory is mine,” goes the extremist Islamic code, according to the article.

      “What then happens to the syllogism if he is defeated?” Krauthammer wonders. “This is not to say that Islamic fundamentalism is dead. But it has suffered a grievous blow...the Pakistani mullahs who after Sept. 11 had urged hapless young men to join the Taliban in fighting America and now have to answer to bereaved parents are facing ostracism and disgrace.”

      “We see the beginning of self-reflection in the Arab press... It is beginning now not because our propaganda is good. Not because al-Jazeera changed its anti-American tune. Not because a wave of remorse spontaneously erupted in places like Saudi Arabia. But because, with our B-52s, our special forces, our smart bombs, our daisy cutters --- our power and our will --- we scattered the enemy,”

      “What the secular West fails to understand,” Krauthammer concludes, “Is that in fighting religious fanaticism  the issue --- for the fanatic --- is not grievance but ascendancy. What must be decided is not who is right or wrong (one can never appease the grievances of the religious fanatic) but whose God is greater.

      After Afghanistan there can be no doubt.

      In the land of jihad, the fall of the Taliban and the flight of al-Qaida are testimony to the god that failed.”

~

 

                         This thing's making savages of us all.

                            We're starting to get that 2000-yard stare ...

            For a while on the flight from Karachi to Manchester I wondered if my own personal bloodthirst experience had gone overboard. I hadn’t expected to be calmed down by the whole Tora Bora moment I’d had and the heightened experience of it sent me to my notebook scribbling wildly about my bizarre travel trek from Peshawar to the New York Inn.   

            I wondered how the homefront was taking al-Qaida’s Last Stand, what they were making of the American bloodlust occurring up on their TV sets. Whether they were still stuck on the word justice like that church this afternoon in the Village whose sign read, “Justice is in the hand’s of the Lord.”

            Were most regular Americans wiping the blood on their hands off onto the unknown or onto nature or onto God and feeling as remorseless for the rout of Tora Bora as I was?

            This thing's making savages of us all.

 

            Not long after beginning to read the news magazines and the European, American, and New York newspapers, I found out that I’d apparently participated in a remorseless group bloodletting shared by most of the civilized world (and particularly the Western and the damaged New York worlds).

            While some in the media (the tabloids) were blunt about what happened over the weekend on the CNN red-line war map up on their 24-hour CNN Breaking News Boxes, others were elegant but spooky. The front page of the New York Post tabloid showed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld celebrating with troops in Afghanistan with the extra bold multi-banner headline, “SEE YA’ LATER, AL-QAIDA,” with an inside page headline, “al-Qaida is Qaput in Afghanistan.”

            One of the more proper New York newspapers told how the events of September 11 here in New York, “Left us seething,” and told how we’d been left with no choice other than bloodlust when, “They broke covenant and left us compelling reasons to defend ourselves.”

            According to the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box and the media at large that details what comes out of the box, September 11 had, “Fried our mother-boards.” We wanted heads on sticks and found out “we were hardwired for bloodthirsty violence just like everyone else.”

            Just like how we’re hardwired to handle media junk food. Hollywood and TV and the like -- exaggerating and distorting the real -- and consumers like me there to take it all in as Hoyle.

            When I was under the bombers a couple of days ago, when I conjured up Ezekiel 25(17), I didn’t think about the passage I know from the Bible. A short passage heavy on the vengeance, but not flowery enough for this World War III season of TV hate. Rather, I conjured up in my mind the Hollywood rendition I can recite by heart from the Pulp Fiction movie.

 

Ezekiel 25(17)

(according to Pulp Fiction)

            “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will, who shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.

            And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers, and you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you ...”

~

 

                         After another round of muffled moaning and bed-thumping from across the hallway, I read through the Time Magazine cover article by Nancy Gibbs (with an excellent cover photograph of an anti-Taliban fighter silhouetted on a mountain top by Romeo Gacad) and found an interesting comment that eloquently reduced my experience to a paragraph. So well recognized (as I saw from the perspective of my last few weeks) as the issue of the day. So close to my own feeling as I stood there watching the bombing from the peanut gallery with an eerie pleasure of resolve and revenge:

     “It’s one thing to expect someone to die; it’s another to look forward to that day, not secretly, guiltily, but openly, eagerly, a morbid jubilee ... ... ... people who reject the death penalty, who teach their children not to use the word hate, who believe in balancing justice with mercy, who prize due process --- people, in other words, unaccustomed to bloodlust --- now watch the daisy cutter bombs shave the White Mountains bald and see smoke curl and await the news that the monster in the cave has claimed his last human sacrifice ... ... ... it was cold satisfaction to think of him entombed in a crushed mountain, just as his victims were 3 months ago.”

Pacifism and self-defense are two ends of a connected continuum. In the Central American wars of the 1980s, I hurt for everyone I encountered who’d been hurt by the war. This time I hurt too much for myself to be overly concerned with anyone else. When I was growing up I was taught by circumstance that winning a war meant keeping America from waging one. Now I was witness to an instance when winning a war meant to punish evil and to make it less likely the guilty will ever have the chance to be September 11-evil again.

 

~

 

                        I noticed that Newsweek Magazine had named the first Dave Letterman show after the attack as the number one best TV moment of the year. Particularly the moment when Dave wondered allowed to America (and the greater North American viewing audience):

“We’re told (the terrorists) were zealots fueled by religious fervor. If you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you?

            “Will that make any goddam sense?”

            I’d gone on the journeys to Ground Zero and Asia to do my best (giving 100% as a regular American patriot and global streetphoto artist) to try to answer that question. But after everything I’ve seen --- I just don’t have a clue. After all I’d seen on TV --- and on the streets of Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Lawrence --- I still can’t answer that question.

No more so than I could on the day after September 11.

Hell, I’m having trouble just understanding my own heartbreak and bloodlust, much less understanding fully the spit of the Taliban street.

            Sure, I understand the Taliban and al-Qaida and the anti-American Arab street movement many times more than I would have just staying at home in front of my TV. And sure I have the authority to try to describe the smell of a burning Ground Zero to someone who wasn’t there. I can show you a portfolio of street photographs showing slices of what it was like to have been adjacent to Tora Bora and what it was like to have been at an Afghan refugee camp on the CNN red-line border at the time of the war and what it was like to have been greeted there as a liberator. What it was like to watch first hand as a Taliban warrior fled in defeat over the border into Peshawar. But it’s still only an educated guess why those losers did what they did to us. All I knew (in the state of obsession I was in) was that in this case I’d rather have been part of the educated guess out on the streets of the messed up world instead of just absorbing educated guesses along with everyone else on the TV homefront of the messed up world.

            It was somehow way more comfortable for me, I think ...

 

~

 

                        After giving up on finding an answer to such a hopeless yet important question, all that’s really left is faith in the form of hope. Hope was really the only reason I had to travel to New York and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

            Paying attention to all the details, all those horribly sad and gruesome details. Keeping track of the death toll and suffering all the uncertainty of war just like everyone else --- the government that I’d told myself years ago I’d never be able to trust again waging it in my name.

 

            Hope is what got me out of bed in the morning at Camping Zeeburg on the morning after September 11 and hope is what got me out of bed at Khani’s Hotel on the last morning of my three-month-long September 11. It’s what made me catch a tram into Amsterdam that first day to buy an International Herald-Tribune newspaper, and its what made Janet and me climb the Eiffel Tower in Paris under an intense terrorist alert as a European Islamic terrorist cell moved in to blow up the American Embassy there.

            Hope is what took me to Ground Zero, to the Afghan refugee camps, to the Taliban birthplace at Peshawar, Pakistan, and to the outskirts of the Al-Qaida Last Stand at Tora Bora.

 

            And after everything I’d been through -- after drowning in the suffocating minutia of the horror and aftermath of this thing -- hope was all I had lef t...

5

September 10, 2002

The Shoe Bomber & the Civilian War:
A Civilian Affair

~

December 17, 2001

New York City to Lawrence, Kansas

God Bless America:

White With Foam

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.

I wrote for eight hours last night and except for going out for fresh newspapers, more Yoo Hoos, and some breakfast this morning, I spent today (right up until the civilized 2 p.m. checkout time I arranged at the New York Inn) locked up and writing in my room.

             There was hyper security at LaGuardia Airport on my way out. Two national Guardsmen carrying  M-16s at every door. A training session at the gate for new security agents held up my entry to the concourse for 15 minutes. I got hand-checked at the departure terminal entrance (picked out of a crowd of 25 people), and I asked the man why me, and he said it was because I was carrying camera equipment. But then I got waved through at the boarding gate by Vanguard Airlines security doing hand checks on everyone else. I was watching the staff and I was certain that me and the other twenty people left to be hand-checked behind me at that checkpoint were waved through because of takeoff-time pressures, overhearing one of the Vanguard people rushing another one along to “get the flight loaded.” And I really couldn’t argue with their hustle because I wanted to get home to see Janet. But on the other hand, the priority of time over security at that last checkpoint didn’t make me feel any safer, flying during an acute holiday alert and all.

 

*Overcome With Patriotism

  

 

 

                        My homeward-bound jetliner banked just north over Kansas City and came in for a landing. I watched the city and the farms around the airport, and I remembered the way I’d been the last time I’d landed at KCI three weeks ago. How enraged I was after reading the details about what happened aboard flight 93. How my temperature and bloodlust rose to a boil. In the twenty minutes it took me to read that article I’d seen my faith in Americans rekindle and explode along with my anger, and how I saw my bloodlust and revenge quotients rise to critical mass.

            Alone with my thoughts in that landing jetliner as I watched the ground rise toward me out the window, I couldn’t help but sense that this landing was going to be somehow more triumphant (in light of the victory in Afghanistan), especially compared to that last one. The flight attendants buckled up, the landing gear was lowered, and the wheels touched down safely despite the heightened holiday threat of terror and our rush to board the airplane.

            The flight was full, and I presumed it was full of people who’d been to New York on business or were there to pay their respects to Ground Zero or were there on a Christmas shopping spree. Or people just getting back home to Kansas City early for the holidays.

            However, as I dramatically found out just moments after touching down, the flight also contained a choir of about 25 singers from Kansas City who’d been to New York to honor the victims and families of September 11. And in those moments just after I landed, back on the homefront after all I’d just been through in New York and Asia --- the choir (dispersed about the plane) revealed its presence by striking up into the most beautiful and most moving surprise rendition of God Bless America that I’d ever heard or ever will hear. And never (even since the attack) had an American moment touched me like that song touched me while landing back at home from the war today.

God Bless America,
Land that I love

the choir started off, and since everyone on the airplane (including the two veiled woman sitting across the aisle from me) knew the words and could each (in their own funks and obsessions about the past three months) feel the pain and comfort of it --- everyone joined in, and by the second stanza everyone on the flight (united and in fine voice) were singing as if there were nobody else around ...

Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home
God bless America
My home sweet home

~

                        I’m just another regular American photographer from Kansas (that’s all), and during those months of war I manufactured and lucked into (right place/right time) the chance to express my feelings about the human condition and of the suffering and discontent and hopelessness of the refugees. Of the anger and flight of the vanquished, of the Tora Bora anvil movement, of the everyday buzz of the Islamic street market at an historic hour in time, and of Victory in Afghanistan Day in New York City.

            What I saw and experienced in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua during the Cold War damaged my humanity to the point that all the hopelessness, turmoil, and chaos I lived among at the World War III terror War in Pakistan and Afghanistan didn’t effect me more than to note it as sad and to use the sadness and hopelessness as an inspiration in capturing a portrait of the condition my streetphoto cameras found the place in at that time. And the acceptance of grief combined with a strong ability to rise above it (a usually sturdy armor against letting the evil and absurdity and chaos of this messed up world crash my expression to the ground with the full weight of its suffering) allowed me to deliver the streetphoto goods I was after.

            I’m just another regular American photographer from Kansas trying to go about my normal life of global street photography on both good and bad streets. Going to extremes for information, knowledge, and art --- a commendable humane way to spend a lifetime, I think. Emotionally consuming, yet intellectually satisfying all the same. I took the chance to befriend the other (this time an enemy) and to try to come to a boots on the ground understanding of our problem from their perspective. And for my obsession, I got to see what it’s like on the Muslim street at Ramadan and at Christmastime too. I got to know what a noisy and polluted and fascinating place it is and how hard working, hospitable, kind, and energetic most of these hopeless people are. And about how most of them (the 8 out of 10 Taliban sympathizers) react to defeat.

            Along the way (even though I’ve tried my best all my life to avoid such responsibility) I was thrust into the roll of human rights expert in the refugee camps (just because I was an American) and then gave a speech about it to 275 students and faculty at an Afghan refugee camp school during the rout of Tora Bora and the liberation of Afghanistan.

            God Bless America...

            That song has been called America’s National Prayer and since the Vietnam Experience and all I’d seen since, I never put too much faith either in God or flag to be able to keep the peace for very long. But for a short time at the end of the year 2001 --- a very important time --- I became one with the flag and more American than I’d ever been before in my regular patriotic non-flag-waving life.

            More American than I expect I’ll ever feel like again.

            I’ve developed such low expectations of government that it’s competence in this whole mess (so far) has thrown me for a loop, and just like almost everyone else in America, has eventually painted me red white and blue.

            Whether I like it or not..

            I’ve been driven to the point that I truly believe in my government. I want them to do well in my name and they have. I’ve been rooting for them... and by God, they’ve won! America Right or Wrong?, no --- I’ll never subscribe to that dubious mindset. I’m just not built that way. But this time America was right, and for once during wartime --- I was behind her (and occasionally a little bit ahead of her) all the way.

            And so there I was, back on the homefront. Sobbing uncontrollably  because a choir sang God Bless America on the airplane and because under the circumstances I just could no longer deny my extreme love for an America gone good.

            I hadn’t cried for weeks, since the last time I went to Ground Zero, but now I couldn’t hold back and I sobbed until I was halfway home to Lawrence on the shuttle bus. While blubbering and wiping away the tears with a bandanna and while avoiding the concern of the shuttle driver (who I’d never have been able to explain myself properly to at that moment if I’d tried) I attempted to crystallize my September 11 experience into words, but was forced into accepting that I’d never really understood what went on the past three months, and probably never would.

   Not if I lived a thousand years.

            Not if I lived a thousand goddamn years ...

            As a conciliator and believer of peace at all cost (well, at nearly all cost --- save now for justifiable self-defense) I believe staying out of a fight demonstrates strength. Yet that Austrian Thumbs-up Punk in Amsterdam at the Down Under Coffeeshop drew me as a muscle-bound angel. Because I was an American, not because I had an aggressive demeanor.

            But because he just didn’t know ...

            As a lifetime pacifist and as one who has mistrusted my own government for so long, I’ve grown to have hated the Vietnam Experience and all that it spoiled in me. Yet that Belgian lout on movie night at Camping Zeeburg in Amsterdam was just about willing to push me into beating him silly by insisting that as an American I should be forced into being battered about my implied culpability in this messed up world. Because I was an American, not because he knew my feelings about war and violence and the Vietnam Experience.

            He just didn’t know ...

            I’m just an artist who spends a great deal of his time avoiding commerce in a dollar-crazy world. I loathe big business that goes beyond caring about the individual, and I always show college photography classes I teach (in the guise of “new documentary studies”) Michael Moore’s Roger and Me movie (about the insensitivity and bloodthirst of big business for money over people) because I think young people should think about the consequences of worshipping the almighty buck. I only make $15,000-$20,000 a year as a teacher and global streetphoto artist. Yet that Middle-Eastern panhandler with the Nike wind-breaker in Paris who called me a fascist and cursed me to die as a fascist didn’t do that because he discounted my feelings about the down sides of capitalism, but just because he knew I was an American.

            He just never knew who I really was ...

 

            Well, I’m just another regular American patriot who’d like to help form a more perfect union by leading America toward a more globally inclusive era of wisdom and honor. And if the last three months are any indication, I just might have to think about buying an American flag to put up in my yard at home...

 

            “How about that,” I thought. “I do have a country --- I’m an American after all ...”

 

            “Yes sir eeee, and by all means: God Bless America ...”

 

Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
   White with foam ...