Spot The Happy Ending

Prologue

Fine days these, as summer comes to its end. Still heat in the sun, high clouds and blue in the sky. Sit in the park to fall asleep listening to the cricket. In the evening the widow open, hearing night come in over the city on the breeze. Life at war.

Mortared sleep
In recent days the conversation has reached a conclusion: that what we are waiting for is more bloodshed. Hope worn so thin that death is a solution. If enough people die, maybe that will stop the killing. If the drip-drip-drip of far away murder becomes a torrent, and comes closer to home, maybe the logic of the situation will change. Will be forcibly shifted of its axis and onto something different. An end to the downward spiral if more used bodybags are being shipped back to the US, to the UK.

The logic is foul and ugly, and almost certainly wrong.

At Christmas, things looked grim enough. Sleeping one night, fitfully, cold in a tent, on a US military base north of Samara, in liberated Iraq. Two mortar rounds came over the wire and exploded close enough to rouse us and the 4th Infantry soldiers. Nothing more happened. The Americans smoked cigarettes and we all talked a while in the freezing blackness and went back to bed. Most places you turned in that country someone was shooting or shelling or rocketing. People had stories they shouldn't have to tell. Dead and mutilated Iraqis, dead and mutilated Americans. RPGs, bombing and such. Fuckit, its war, why not? Handful of eyes for a handful of eyes.

We talked then of the shitpile everyone was stuck in for the unforeseeable future, for years and years. Everyone wanted to wake up and find it was a dream gone bad. Cling to the thin, unrealistic hope maybe the people who run The War could get their act together, maybe it wasn't too late.

But it was already turning into a long fucking dream and it's getting no shorter. Hard to escape the feeling now that this shadow has spread in ways that are becoming less and less controllable. The problem is, the problem was maybe too big in the best of lights and was anyway allowed to fester in the darkness.

Everyone wants to leaf through their Sun Tzu and see what's said about the art of war. And to paraphrase, it says don't fuck up. It says prepare carefully. It says know your enemy. It says, the most successful wars are the ones anticipated and avoided. Not deliberately sought by politicians and fought by their lights.

Months have passed, the damned seasons have changed, and today in the newspaper there was:

12 dead Nepalese cooks and cleaners. Eleven shot in the back with an automatic rifle, one beheaded with slow painful cuts of a hand-knife.

Two French journalists captured and threatened with death by the Islamic Army of Iraq - which has already killed an Italian journalist and some Pakistani hostages.

Whatever the hell is happening in Najaf, the on-going foul comedy of truce and war which has most recently left all the Shia fighters in the city, still armed, still an army, still run by another cursed religious leader. Still there to be crushed by the new Iraqi interim government and its CIA leader who is independent of the US and only works for Iraq's interests.

Whatever the hell is happening in Fallujah, Ramardi and Samara. Places which aint reported on because no fucker dares go there now they are to dangerous for the US and official Iraqi forces, and journalists who value their lives.

No one wants to say civil war, but Iraqis are fighting Iraqis again and still, in Najaf and elsewhere. Sun Tzu doesn't say if it looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit it's shit. But he knew it as true.

And today there was:

Suicide bombings in Isreal, the grimmest kind of hostage crisis in a Russian school, close to Chechnya. On-going investigations into the bombing of to Russian planes. Murders thought to be carried out by Black Widows. (Women who kill, not through religious motivation, but to avenge the murders of their husbands, fathers or brothers by the Russians as part of the Chechen war - a mess so bloody, underhand, ruthless and shot through with ruined lives Iraq pales alongside. Vladimir Putin says the war is won and simultaneously calls it a war on terror. Like its American cousin, it's a shitpool largely of Russia's own making and only partly about terrorism.)

EPILOGUE

All so hard to understand, with the schools still on holiday and the football season back and girls or boys to chase and money to be made and days to get through or friends to see or pasts to forget.. The normal beat of life. Most people in this world don't live a life like mine or yours, that's all. It's easiest to see if you wake at 5am and see the morning there cold and hard and grey, the day ahead impossible and too much for too many.

We only talk about how fucked up everything is because anything else sounds like a lie and makes us laugh as you can when the gun is pointing at someone else's head. The mortars are still falling but not on me.