How I won the war

In old Quiapo during my days as a war correspondent – or rather when I was only so high and already an aficionado of various war movies – among the titles I remember watching in those dark fleabag theaters along Avenida, Escolta, Quezon Blvd. and Recto rang with all the drama of the moment, Battle of the Bulge, or that one based on a novel, Catch-22, and even something with the late John Lennon in it, How I Won the War.

War was something seen if not on the giant big screen, then on the miniature blurred picture tube of the Magnavox black and white TV courtesy of Combat, starring Rick Jason and Vic Morrow leading foot soldiers named Cage and Little John. Early on it was drummed into our little heads that those strange-speaking Germans were evil and the ever undermanned and scraggy Americans had hearts of gold and so always won the battles and village skirmishes and maybe even the great world war.

It was always larger than life painted on the billboards in vivid colors, the charge of the light brigade, almost like a representation of that Botong Francisco painting of Bonifacio at City Hall leading his katipuneros, you could feel the adrenaline rush and thrumming in your forehead as the omnipresent staccato rat-tat-tat rattled the orchestra sections of the mind. And if we were denied our weekly fix of simulated violence, we could threaten to jump from Jones Bridge, down to the not-yet-so-polluted Pasig River.

Was it both figment and pigment of the imagination then that the billboard of Battle of the Bulge displayed outside the lone theater along Espana invaded our boyhood dreams scattering plastic toy soldiers brought home from Clark in its wake?

There were a couple of unforgettable scenes in Catch-22 that hinted of the bloody gross aspect of war: Someone’s guts suddenly spilling out close-up, a flashback that recurs whenever coming across a cat run over and in its death throes on the street, or footage of a barebacked soldier waving to a light plane diving low, the aircraft slicing the poor fellow from the waist up.

And who can forget that image of Lennon in some minefield, having lost use of his legs and slowly wasting away, but we wondered if any moment he was going to break out into song, "Help me if you can I’m feeling down."

Those were the days of our war correspondence – rather war movie aficionado – when the events and circumstances of a time past could scarcely be grasped by a boy, however impressionable.

In the present century we now get partial drift of it on the news, on CNN and BBC and the execrable and funny saber-rattling Fox News; you don’t know if their anchors are going to have a seizure, an orgasm, or both at the same time – call in Nurse Ratchett to have their blood pressure taken.

Or we get glimpse of the war and peace dynamic in such essays as "An Egyptian in Baghdad" by Amitav Ghosh that appeared in Granta 34, where even fellow Arabs go to work in Iraq because money’s never a problem but, according to Ghosh’s friend, life was hard enough to make you grow old before your time: "The Iraqis – They’re wild; all those years of war have made them a little like animals. They come back from the army a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on the streets there at night; if some drunken Iraqis come across you they would kill you, just like that, and nobody would even know, for they’d throw away your papers. It’s happened, happens all the time. They blame us you see, they say: "You’ve taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while we’re fighting and dying."

Of Saddam Hussein, Ghosh’s friend named Ismail has this to say: "Saddam Hussein! You have to be careful when you breathe that name out there – there are spies everywhere, at every corner, listening. One word about Saddam and you’re gone, dead. In those ways it’s terrible out there though of course there’s the money. But still, you can’t live long out there, it’s impossible."

And Ismail had a cautionary tale for overseas workers in "pre-liberated" Iraq, especially if your team has just qualified for the World Cup: "Earlier in the year Egypt had played a football match with Algeria, to decide which team would play in the World Cup. Egypt had won and Egyptians everywhere had gone wild with joy. In Iraq the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who lived packed together, all of them young, all of them male, with no families, children, wives, nothing to do but stare at their newly bought television sets – they had exploded out of their homes in a delirium of joy. Their football team had restored to them that self-respect that their cassette recorders and televisions sets had somehow failed to bring. To the Iraqis, who have never had anything like a normal political life, probably never seen crowds except at pilgrimages, the massed ranks of Egyptians must have seemed like the coming of Armageddon. They responded by attacking them on the streets, often with firearms – well-trained in war, they fell upon the jubilant, unarmed crowds of Egyptian workers."

But as always the question lingers, does the end justify the means? Soon the new administrator of Baghdad will have his pictures published daily in the national newspapers, and the minarets at vespers will be calling out the gospel of Pax Americana.