The Girl in Green Page 5

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Well … a person’s a person, no matter how small, right?’

  ‘Drink your Coke, Arwood. You need to get some rest.’

  Arwood sipped his Coke, but did not respond to Benton. Instead he muttered softly to himself, ‘I thought that was the whole point.’

  6

  Märta Ström was a project officer for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, based in Dohuk. She was Swedish, thirty-four years old, and had been working in humanitarian affairs since graduating with her master’s degree from Uppsala University when she was twenty-five. She was scheduled to meet a reporter from the Times, and was killing the time before it happened by leaning against a rock with a cigarette and marvelling at the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II.

  The British were calling it Operation Safe Haven, and the Americans were calling it Operation Provide Comfort. Märta refused to call it anything but a nightmare. The temperature at altitude was below freezing. The refugees couldn’t get farther into Turkey, couldn’t return home, had no military protection other than the lightly armed Pershmerga fighters, and the situation was volatile. The death count was untallied. Thousands. Thousands and thousands — a tremendous number of them children. They weren’t warm enough. They weren’t fed enough. Many had been separated from their families. She had watched a three-year-old boy die of starvation. She couldn’t save him. She decided she’d never have children.

  She could have a cigarette, though. Cigarettes were especially satisfying when the smoke mixed with the cool air. They were best with a stiff drink. There was none of that around, unfortunately.

  There was an airdrop coming in soon. She’d been tasked with speaking to the press about it. It was not her preferred job. The guy she was to meet — Thomas Something-or-other — was to photograph it and ask her about the general situation. Saddam had been fully victorious by around the fifth, and was now calling the airdrops the ‘ostentatious dropping of crumbs’ by the West. Whether he was the devil or not, it was hard not to agree with him on that point.

  Two white men, both clean, approached her from over a small ridge. One was in his forties and the other in his early twenties, or possibly a teenager. She took the older one for the journalist, but couldn’t make sense of the younger. He wore a T-shirt that said, If I were an Iraqi POW I’d be home by now. She decided she didn’t like him before he’d even stopped moving.

  The adult one readjusted his shoulder bag and then extended his hand. ‘I’m Thomas Benton. You’re Ms Ström?’

  Märta tossed the cigarette away and shook his hand. He was all business, and his handshake was firm. He didn’t smile at her, and she didn’t smile back.

  The younger man just stood there, and she decided not only to dislike him but to ignore him entirely.

  ‘This is Arwood Hobbes,’ said the Brit, slightly complicating her plan.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  Arwood Hobbes said nothing.

  Märta checked her watch. They had a few minutes, assuming the airdrop was on time.

  ‘We could set up over there,’ Benton said, pointing to a flat area not far from where an armoured personnel carrier was parked. It was American, and occupied by two men — one black, one white.

  ‘You want to photograph the truck?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I want to stand on a flat surface as we talk and I take pictures. It seems a reasonable place. Is that all right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course,’ Märta said.

  As they walked, Benton did not ask questions or make small talk, and Arwood also said nothing. She realised that Benton hadn’t explained who Arwood was or what he was doing there. She opted not to ask.

  ‘Just arrive in Iraq?’ she said, perhaps a little too loudly. There were many refugees seated and sprawled across the mountain. No one was moving. Everyone was talking. She’d adopted a louder register of speech from the moment she’d arrived three days ago.

  ‘No. I’ve been here over six weeks. I was in the south.’ He didn’t elaborate.

  He had a handsome enough face, but it wasn’t especially memorable. He reminded her of a man from a postwar photograph from the 1950s: not the dashing one in the middle with his arms around his buddies; one of the others … toward the back.

  ‘I know some of the other journalists who were out here,’ she said. ‘Robert Fisk. Martin Woolacott. Jonathan Randal. Nora Boustany. You know them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Benton said.

  He was taciturn, but not sullen. That, she found interesting. For a war correspondent, he didn’t present as someone pleased with himself, someone for whom the world’s suffering was the backdrop against which to display his own ego. Instead he seemed resigned, attentive, quiet. Though she walked behind him, he turned to check on her, and when he did, he carried an expression of someone trying to fit together two mismatched ends of a home appliance.

  Benton explained what he planned to do: supplies were coming in by air, and he wanted a shot of it happening and from as close as possible. Airdrops made for dramatic imagery, and that’s what was needed to attract media attention and hence gain public support. With that, or so the theory went, came political support.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she replied.

  ‘Which way are they coming?’ he asked her.

  ‘From the north-west,’ she said. ‘The US Air Force is going to do the drop.’

  Benton’s questions were factual and unpolitical. Märta recited the UNHCR’s party line of alleviating the suffering of people caught up in armed conflict and ensuring respect for international humanitarian law. It was nothing he couldn’t have learned by phone. Still, she hoped the conversation might produce some sense of urgency, because that was why she’d agreed to the interview in the first place. Looking around her, though, she knew this man would either be moved by what he was seeing or he wouldn’t be. Her words would do nothing to change that.

  ‘I did meet a captain and his two lackeys from the air force,’ she said, looking up at the sky for the first plane. ‘One of them had the nerve to explain that the plan was to drop the food further and further into Iraq so the people would have to start chasing it like squirrels after nuts. I told them that would be illegal, and that forcing people back into a country they fled is called refoulement. I then tried to explain where it was best to position the supplies so that they wouldn’t be snatched up by mobs. I said there needed to be a gender-based optic on this so that women wouldn’t be muscled out of needed provisions by determined men. I said that order can feed more people than chaos.’

  ‘What did they say?’ Benton asked.

  ‘No much.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They were too busy staring at my tits.’

  Benton nodded.

  ‘Here they come,’ she said.

  As she had anticipated, the air force started pushing pallets out of the transport planes from much too close and much too low. The parachutes opened, but the pallets of frozen chickens did not land well. The air force should have used sling-load helicopters, but they didn’t because there was no doctrine to tell them to do so, and pushing pallets out of planes was faster, cheaper, and more dramatic.

  Some of the pallets were cushioned in their landing by the soft bodies of the Kurds, who were crushed under them and died.

  As the seals broke on others, the chickens bounced free and chased the uncrushed, who scattered like free-range bowling pins.

  ‘Now, this is special,’ Märta said aloud.

  ‘I think,’ Benton said, ‘that maybe we should find some shelter.’

  Exposed to the aerial bombing, they ran to the only shelter that made any sense — the US Army’s armoured personnel carrier — and banged on the window.

  ‘Open up and let us in,’ she said to the black military officer driving it. This was not UNHCR protocol.
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  ‘No,’ replied the man.

  ‘We are going to be crushed to death by frozen chickens.’

  ‘I am under orders not to allow any non-military personnel into the vehicle. Now step back, please.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Benton asked Märta rather calmly, considering the circumstances.

  ‘You should be crouching down under the truck,’ she said to Benton, who was not crouching down. Neither was Arwood Hobbes, who stood with his hands behind his back as though admiring a rainbow.

  ‘I’ve done enough of that lately,’ he said.

  ‘He won’t let us in. Orders,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you should go over his head,’ Benton suggested casually.

  ‘You know what? That’s an excellent idea,’ Märta said.

  She knocked on the window again. ‘You — name and rank?’

  The officer considered this for a moment, and then — though there was no requirement to do so — decided to answer. ‘Herb Reston. US Special Forces. Sergeant, first class.’

  ‘Where are you from, Sergeant?’

  ‘What?’

  There were explosions. The chickens were rolling into unexploded ordnance in a zoned-off area, and shrapnel was flying everywhere — that, and chicken parts, or what Märta hoped were chicken parts.

  ‘Where are you from? That cannot possibly be classified.’

  Herb was obviously thinking about his reply, and whether a reply was sanctioned or not sanctioned, and what the consequences might be of offering one.

  ‘Kankakee, Illinois,’ he finally said.

  ‘Is that a big town or a small town?’

  ‘Small town,’ said the large black man to the small blonde woman.

  ‘Reston. Army. Kankakee, Illinois. Here’s the thing, Herbert. If I survive this, I’ll be going to Silopi, Turkey, in three days. There are three telephones there being used day in and day out by the people at CNN to file stories. When I get there, I’m going to dial 001-800-555-1212 and ask for directory assistance for Kankakee, Illinois, and I’m going to use my calling card to call your mother. I’m going to tell your mother that you refused to allow a woman into the safety of your vehicle during a life-and-death moment and — sorry for the assumption, Herbert, but I’m going to guess from your black, boyish, and sincere face that your mother is a God-fearing woman, and I’m going to describe your actions as very unchristian. And then I’ll start to cry. And while I’ve never met your mother, I’m going to bet my life that my crying is going to make her very sympathetic to me and very angry at you, possibly for a very long time. So I’m going to count to three, and you have to make a choice about whether you want to please the army or please your mother and possibly God. One … two …’

  On the count of two — as when he was five and his mother laid down the law — Herb opened the door, as much to his own surprise as that of his French passenger, who’d been riding shotgun as part of a NATO observation team.

  When the back door of the APC opened, Märta, Benton, and Hobbes all climbed inside.

  With the door closed, it was rather quiet.

  Two of the chickens bounced harmlessly on the hood of the APC, and another rolled hard against the left front wheel, to no effect.

  Arwood Hobbes was the first to speak.

  ‘What do you think is the terminal velocity of a falling frozen chicken? It’s got to be, like, a hundred miles an hour, don’t you think?’

  The man in the passenger seat turned around. He was in the French military. His English was heavily accented, almost to the point of affectation.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be with your unit?’ the man said.

  ‘That’s where I was going, but then I chickened out.’

  The man did not reply.

  ‘Chickened out,’ Arwood repeated, assuming he hadn’t been heard.

  The French officer made a sound by puffing a bit of air through his dry lips.

  ‘Come on, Tigger, you know I hate that sound,’ Herb said.

  The man called Tigger then shook his head and mumbled something more audible and in French. Only Märta understood him and smiled.

  ‘You speak French?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’m based in Geneva.’

  ‘Maybe we can speak later. There are too many Americans here.’

  ‘Why are you called Tigger?’ Märta asked.

  ‘That’s my fault,’ Herb interjected.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Märta said.

  ‘I was being ironic and said he was “fun, fun, fun,” because, you know, he’s not, and somehow Winnie the Pooh came up, and Tigger, and I started calling him Tigger because Tigger’s fun, fun, fun, and he said he knows that song, and the best thing about Tigger is that he’s the only one, and I agreed it’s a good thing there’s only one of him and … I don’t know. We’ve been stuck inside this truck for a long time. And now, you know, chickens.’

  Herb looked up in the sky to see if any more pallets were on their way down. It looked like the C-130 aeroplanes were moving off now, their job done. ‘I just don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Who would do something like this?’

  ‘Clearly,’ said the French officer, ‘it is the air force. This is what I have come to expect from the air force. I expect it because dropping things on people is what the air force does. Drop aid to the refugees. Drop aid on the refugees. One little preposition to separate them, and no doctrine in place to draw the distinction. One little word, and voilà. Crèpe à la Kurd.’

  ‘Maybe Perdue done it,’ Arwood said.

  No one responded.

  ‘Maybe Perdue done it,’ Arwood repeated.

  Herb shook his head.

  ‘That’s the motto,’ explained Arwood, ‘of the Perdue chicken company. They make prepared chicken dishes so you don’t have to. Because … Perdue done it.’

  ‘It wasn’t Perdue,’ Herb said.

  Arwood was prepared for this possibility. ‘How about Colonel Sanders?’

  Herb Reston was not laughing, though he was likely the only one in the APC who knew who Colonel Sanders was. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Herb asked. ‘You got PTSD or something?’

  ‘Well, there’s a phrase. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I wouldn’t call it post-traumatic, no,’ he said, as three men about twenty metres away grabbed a chicken from a woman who was standing with two small children, and then pushed her to the ground as she tried to resist. ‘I admit I’ve been wondering for the last few days about why I can’t sleep, and when I do, I dream of strangling dinosaurs with piano wire. I don’t think it’s because of something I did. I think it’s something I didn’t do. I think I have pre-traumatic stress disorder. I think I’m stressed out from not being able to do the right thing. And then, to top it off, the army has decided that my inaction wasn’t inactive enough, and by not doing even less I was doing too much. And so I’m getting bad paper when I’m done. I’m not convinced my brain is working on the same frequency as the world around me. I mean, look out the window. How can I be the only one who finds this hilarious?’ he asked. He did not laugh, though.

  Arwood’s voice no longer sounded sarcastic. It sounded farther off, as though he were speaking from the far end of an accident. Then he snorted. ‘Refoulement,’ he said.

  Märta looked to Benton as Arwood’s keeper. As Arwood spoke, though, Thomas Benton turned away and said nothing.

  The day wasn’t over.

  7

  It was a child. That much was certain. Maybe eight or nine years old, judging by the size of the empty shoes.

  Everyone had thought it was over. Arwood, Benton, Märta, Herb, and the Frenchman whom Herb called Tigger had all stepped out of the armoured personnel carrier once the aerial bombardment of frozen chickens was over, and the mobs and riots had subsided. After an hour, the explosions had stopped, the panic had relented, and the chorus of nor
mal human misery had resumed its dull lament.

  From the APC they’d walked to a small ridge that overlooked a wide and flat area. Only a few people were wandering around there. Most of the fighting had stopped. The women had all lost in their melees with the men to collect food, and the medics were already attending to the wounded, beaten, and stabbed.

  The child had been below them in the wide-open gully. There was a ridge above it where people had started to gather. It was hard to know why that child might have been there. That didn’t matter much now, because whatever he’d stepped on had blown him into a thousand mismatching pieces. What did matter was the other child — the one still in the minefield, metres away from the empty shoes, and paralysed with fear.

  All eyes were on the boy. The American soldiers, who’d arrived the day before, were all shouting to the boy not to move, as they too were not moving.

  The American soldiers yelled in English.

  It was unlikely that the nine-year-old boy understood English.

  And even if the boy didn’t move, what then?

  Nothing about this was productive, and it was Märta who sized up the situation and exerted some leadership.

  ‘You,’ said Märta to a man near her, who looked slightly better dressed than some. ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes, OK, OK,’ said the man in penny loafers and grey trousers.

  ‘You speak what he speaks?’ she asked, pointing to the boy.

  The man shouted something in Kurdish, which Märta didn’t speak. The boy turned around at the sound of the man’s voice, which Märta took as an affirmation in response to her question, and immediately told the man to tell the boy not to move. From here on he became Märta’s voice, and, like every other Westerner trying to change the world through a translator, Märta had no idea what he was actually saying.

  While Märta tried to calm the child down by proxy, Tigger calmly explained to Herb that all this was the fault of the Americans.