Cold Hands

The tip of my index finger touches the tape machine’s jog wheel. My finger is rigid on my hand as I spin the wheel from my wrist, and I am fast. I have to be. I can’t get all heated up and emotional.  I have to be cold. As my finger spins, the red-lit numbers roll, and the pictures on the screen in front of me change. Burnt bodies and fire falling from the sky.

It has been an Iraq-heavy two weeks for me, which is odd since I have gone out of my way to have as little to do with Iraq as possible. You can’t get away from it though. Two things have pulled me into it. The second was the arrival in Rome of Talabani, the Iraqi president.

For the week of the president’s visit, I worked with Iraqi TV at the top of the Spanish Steps, in the worst part of Rome. It is an area gutted and destroyed by tourism, outrageously expensive chain stores, predatory taxis and Sri Lankans demanding that you buy roses from them. It makes me shudder just thinking of it. From there I sent materials back to Iraq, and broadcast live.

All day each crew would send back the same material, the same images, sometimes the same exact tapes, over and over again. Never did it dawn on them to divide their labor and pool their footage, which is the normal way of doing things. Instead, they would run in and out of the truck in a mad panic, screaming at each other, each demanding that they get to send their material first. And it was always the exact same images of the Iraqi president shaking hands with whichever second-string Italian politician.

Every night as we were preparing to go home, they would come running out and screaming at us to wait, because they had something else to send. Hours would pass, and finally someone would arrive to send the same thing that had been sent hundreds of times before. Then they would refer to me as “my friend.” Friends don’t make friends miss dinner, night after night.

Images after images of the Iraqi president wandering through government buildings with an entourage bigger than most rap stars, shaking hands with withered Italians. The reporters would arrive at the truck screaming that we send the material immediately, but they would never call their channels to see if they were receiving the material. After a great deal of wasted time and money they would call to see if the channels were receiving the material, but then forgot to ask if they were recording the material. After the first few days they remembered that they did not have to rent satellite space, that they had their own frequency on Arab satellite that was theirs to use. That they had this space was unusual; even profitable American networks don’t just have satellite space hanging around. That they continually forgot they had it was plain bizarre.

At sudden moments, reporters would run up and demand a live TV spot. We would place them on a platform with the amazing view of Rome behind them, and we would send pictures and sound into space. The channels were then supposed to call our truck and send the anchorman’s voice to the correspondent over the phone, via an amplified signal into the earpiece you see all TV people use. Anchorman asks on phone, correspondent answers on satellite: Not a difficult concept, right? You might as well have tried to explain the theory of relativity to a goat.

At one point, the correspondent from Kurdsat showed up and demanded a live at seven. We reminded him that the Iraqi president, the man he was here to cover, was having a press conference at six. He looked blankly at us, then suddenly had a moment of clarity, and then fear, as he realized he had completely forgotten about it.

The press conference began late, ended late, and nothing was said, so it went fine. Afterwards a crazed Kurdish journalist accosted me, in Italian, and demanded material. Not being a native Italian speaker I thought I misunderstood him, so I asked if he spoke English, not realizing that I didn’t understand him because he wasn’t making any sense. He angrily snapped back at me and asked if I spoke Kurdish. I responded that there were more Zoroastrians than Kurdish speakers and told him to talk to the cameraman.

The cameraman recognized the journalist.

Journalist: I need the material!

Cameraman: You mean the material of the president having a personal conversation after the press conference that you were screaming at me to record?

Journalist: Yes!

Cameraman: You mean the material that the president’s aide screamed at me to stop recording?

At this point the president’s aide arrived, and things descended into Kurdish and bad feelings.

After working closely with the Iraqi president’s inner circle and his press core, I can only hope that it is not exemplary of what happens in Iraq. Before my eyes I was watching money flushed down Iraq’s toilet. To be clear, these were the people from the north of Iraq, the part of Iraq that “works”; these people represent the Iraq success story.

The word the Italians used continually to describe the Arab journalists was “impressionante,” which loosely translates as “impressive,” but really has a pejorative connotation. Typically it would mean “impressively bad,” “impressively chaotic” or “impressively stupid.”

This was not culture shock. I have worked in the West Bank and found nothing but professionalism. Palestinians never waste money. The cameraman was doubly shocked, since he had worked in Iraq both before and during the first Gulf War. He kept talking about how the Iraqis had been the most together of anyone he had ever worked with in the Arab world. Then we found out who these people were, and it all became clear.

This one was hired because his family was important among the exiles; this one was related to an important Shia cleric; this one was from a good Christian family, that one was hired because his father was a martyr of Saddam. No one had been in TV before. We were watching de-Ba’athification in action.

As I said, there were two things that dragged Iraq to my door. The first was the breaking of the white phosphorus story.

The state broadcaster, RAI, in an unusual moment of competence, released a piece of investigative journalism revealing that White Phosphorus, a chemical incendiary, was used as a weapon during the siege of Fallujah. The story featured Jeff Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Fallujah offensive, saying: “Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately.” The accompanying images of burnt corpses, with their clothing intact, had the strange semblance of mummies.

At first the Pentagon denied the claim, saying that white phosphorus was used only for illumination but the military publication, Field Artillery Magazine, in an article called “The Battle for Fallujia,” spoke at length of its use:

“WP [i.e., white phosphorus rounds] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.”

White phosphorus was made illegal in 1980 by the United Nation’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, but the U.S. never signed it. We did sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, however, which forbids the use of any substance to kill or harm either soldiers or civilians if it is being used mostly for its toxicity.

Also, according the The Times UK:

“A US Army handbook published in 1999 states clearly that the use of white phosphorus burster bombs against enemy personnel is ‘against the law of land warfare’ and the US State Department clearly denied last year that any such weapons were being deployed in Iraq.”

What this all meant for me was that the international media went wild, putting out story after story about the RAI documentary, full of images of white-phosphorus fire falling on Fallujah. I sat cutting pictures of dead people into bite-sized pieces for TV-news stories in Holland, in Brussels and in Germany. My finger on the jog pad, moving past images of burnt flesh.

While I was doing this, I remembered Ann Coulter BBC 4 during the siege of Fallujah. When asked what she would say to the civilians that couldn’t get out, she said, “Tell them not to worry their pretty heads.” It finally came to me when I cut the burnt body of a baby into the news piece: The baby didn’t look like it was crying when it died. I wondered if the baby started crying first, as it was burning, or if it never had the chance.

The producer I was working with said that this is war, that these things happen. I don’t agree. It is one thing to kill innocent people in rage or fear. It is another to sit at a desk and sign the papers, then go get a cup of coffee.

“The world doesn’t give a fuck about you and you really don’t give a fuck about the world. So shut up and eat your pasta before I do,” says the cameraman as we sit outside in the late cold night.

The cameraman and a friend arrived before me, but still got there too late for a seat inside or at least at a table with a heater, so we all sit shivering in the shadows. We are bundled up tight with our hats and coats on. The pasta is hot and firm, with a minced fish and raisin pasta on top of it. I turn my fork through it and take a slow, beautiful bite of the perfect dish. I wash it down with cold white wine. Coming out soon are three tuna steaks, covered in capers and olives.

In the center of the table there is an old wine bottle filled with boiling water. It is there for us to warm our hands. As you lose the feeling in your fingers, stiff from the cold, you reach over and the feeling comes back into your cold hands. I reach my fingers out toward it between bites, and wonder if it is enough.