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istanbul redux
(2007) First the businessman, then the taxi driver, then the cleric (the translator calls him a "preacher"), then the ex-soldier, then the dentist--could they be any more ordinary? We collect their testimonies, the week goes on and on. Now it's a thirty-year-old student, telling of being picked up in a sweep, part of the recent "surge." U.S. soldiers kicked their way into his apartment in the middle of the night, while he slept with his pregnant wife. The soldiers pulled the both of them from bed, shone a light in their faces, asked him a question about a neighbor, a neighbor he didn't know, a question he could not answer. They threatened to take his wife into the next room, alone --You know what that will mean, they told him, but still he had no answer. He was then beaten and shackled and hooded and dragged from the house, thrown into a humvee, driven to a landing strip, thrown into a helicopter, until he eventually arrived at a building he now believes is near the airport, either in Mosul or Baghdad. Once inside this building, he found himself in a large room, maybe the size of a gymnasium, filled with black boxes lined up in rows. Maybe a hundred boxes, maybe two hundred, hard for him to say--he was hooded nearly constantly and quickly lost track of night and day. The boxes are about two and a half feet wide, five and a half feet long. He was thrown into one of these boxes, for days, which turn into weeks, unable to straighten his body, barely able to breathe. Every twenty or thirty minutes a soldier kicked the box, or hit it hard with a club, and it made his shackled body jump. Around him he could hear the screams and pleadings of his fellow prisoners--those with stomach pains, those with infections, those slowly going mad. Three years since the release of the photographs, and you can be assured there will be no photographs of these boxes slipping out. What was once the vaguely directed actions of a bunch of amateurs on the night shift (if, in fact, that is what it was)has become professional, organized, sanctioned. Someone designed this room, someone fabricated these boxes, a memo went out telling the soldiers how often to bang on the side of the boxes, a memo we will likely never see. Among themselves the Iraqis call these boxes tawabeet sood, or nash sood --black coffins-- I can't help thinking of them as the shadows of the flag-draped coffins we were also not allowed--or couldn't--or refused--to see.
Nick Flynn
The Ticking Is The Bomb
(w/thanks to Justin Smith)
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