After the invasion of Iraq came the long occupation by troops from America and other countries
in the alliance. Some of the soldiers started to wonder why they were there. What was the purpose
of their mission exactly? Most of the time they were busy protecting themselves from the rebels.
Put bluntly, their objective was to kill the rebels. What made the situation seem just a little
absurd was the fact that there only was a rebellion because the foreign troops were occupying the
country. Q: "Why are we here?" A: "To put down the rebellion." Q: "Why is there a rebellion?" A: "Because we are
here." Something didn't quite add up.
James Meek, a foreign correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, spent a week with a group of
American marines and brought back the following story:
One morning I was in the back of one of the marines' armoured personnel carriers
out on patrol. At one point we had to wait near the centre of town, and shortly after we arrived a
white minivan pulled up on the opposite side of the road about 100m away.
"This would be a perfect spot for them to ambush us, man," said one of the marines,
Chris Turner from Idaho. A man stood next to the van with children around him.
"If he slips an RPG out of the door, you'd better light him up," said Turner.
("Light up" is marine slang for "shoot".)
"I'm on it," said his buddy Webb, taking the safety catch off his machine gun.
But nothing happened. Later I asked Turner about the landmine he had found in the path of the
previous day's patrol. I asked him how he had felt when he saw it. "Nothing much really,
at first, and then, it's like: O, God, please don't let it blow up," he said. Turner
is married. He told me then that he hadn't wanted to come to Iraq again. It was his second
tour of duty.
Turner, who was 21, had joined the marines back in 2001. He had signed up to be an electrician,
which would have kept him back a bit from the firing line, but they discovered he was colour blind
and immediately transferred him to combat duty.
Towards the end of the patrol, in the evening, it was getting cooler - for the first time the
temperature dropped below 40. A mist was forming over the fields and there was a smell of fresh hay
from where Iraqi farmers had been gathering grass. We stopped one last time, to set up a
checkpoint, before returning to the barracks. The sun had just gone down and the light shone
horizontally across the land. Turner was walking towards us from the checkpoint and it struck me,
seeing him there in the evening light without his goggles, what a good-looking man he was.
Later, when I came to write this article, I was reading through the most recent Pentagon
casualty press releases and saw that, four days after I had spoken to him, Turner was killed in a
non-combat road accident, along with three others. I think I shook hands with him before I left,
but I'm not sure.