The Photographs

There are those who never wanted me to see the photographs

the receiving clerk’s brother smuggled home.

The first was of a burnt out truck cab with the body of a fried soldier
gripping the edge of the driver-side window.

The corpse looked like nothing human but rather like a latex special-
effect I was used to seeing in any grisly B horror film. I said to
myself this isn’t real. This isn’t anything. The skull was
recognizable beneath the frizzled skin and the tilt of the head was
quizzical, almost jaunty.

I shuffled to the next photograph and saw nothing more than a badly
focused, off-kilter shot of more burned vehicles. There were
heaps of clothing barely visible here and there amidst the
wreckage but they too resembled nothing human.

At this point the receiving clerk pointed out that his brother had been
with a unit that had swept north from Kuwait City a day after our
Air Force had decimated a column of fleeing Iraqi soldiers, some
of whom were no doubt the very ones who committed the much
publicized atrocities against innocent Kuwaiti civilians.

I had heard on CNN about this attack and I had listened to one
American pilot describe the experience as shooting fish in a
barrel. The report had been accompanied with images not too
dissimilar from the photographs I held in my hand.

The next shot was a close-up of one heap of cloth. Amidst the
disarrayed battle gear I could make out a hand and a boot.

The next shot was very clearly focused. I could see the stubble on the
face of a young Iraqi soldier. He was mustachioed and had very
black, bushy eyebrows. He wore his thick, black hair brushed
straight back from his forehead. He looked like any of the
exchange students from the Middle East I had known in college.
He could have been sleeping except that as my eye ran down from his
face along the length of his body there was nothing below his
chest. There was no blood. Both shoulders, both arms, both
hands were there, flung back casually behind his head but where
the rest of him should have been there was nothing except some
tatters of cloth and a hollow protected by his ribs where his heart
must once have rested.

The next shot was worse. Someone had been killed and had fallen in
the middle of the highway. Very shortly afterwards a column of
tanks had advanced along the same highway. Out of ignorance or
insensitivity the first driver in the column of tanks had not chosen
to swerve around the body and since he didn’t swerve no other
driver in the column could swerve or chose to swerve once they
saw what the first of them had done either by accident or intent.

What the body had become could not have been done by one tank. The
receiving clerk’s brother had come upon this scene and had
chosen to lift his Instamatic to take the photograph I held in my
hand.

The last shot was the hardest for me to witness, though I don’t know
why. The receiving clerk told me before he showed it to me that
it was of an American. When he placed the photograph in my
hands I could immediately identify the desert battle dress that had
been issued to our troops.

The soldier had stepped on a mine and the force of the explosion had
very nearly split him in two. He lay face down in the sand and he
still wore his helmet. His right leg, thrust out and up at an
unnatural angle, was almost completely severed. Again, there was
no blood but there was a strong slash of white where the shattered
femur showed through torn muscles.
As he was putting the photographs back into their envelope, the clerk
explained, with some pride, that though the authorities had made a
very thorough search of all returning combatants, his brother had
managed to come back home with these photographs in spite of
all their efforts.

Without thanking him, I turned, walked from his office across the
receiving dock back to my desk where I sat at my computer to
write these notes.