Memoirs written in prose of Sergeant Robertson, Damon M. USMC while in Iraq | ...with frequent appearances of King Hammurabi.
If you are new to this journal, make sure to start reading in chronological order by scrolling down to the bottom of the oldest post in October 2004. Damon's letters from August 20th, 2004 - October 23rd, 2004 were all added to this blog on Oct. 23rd, 2004. All subsequent letters are posted in real time.
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Dear Family and Friends: Hammurabi v.2.0 [if you can handle my utter botching of verb tense, read on... sorry, rough thoughts] ... We're both in the back of a humvee, sharing the space with two other Marines, but they're not the imaginitive sort, and they don't see him. Hammurabi I mean. And I also don't mean literally. He's here, sort of, if you count "presence" as satisfied by the marks we leave in passing. I don't even look at him as we pass through the village at 20mph. I'm too locked on to what I'm seeing. Brick houses, maybe two dozen, surrounded by detritus and garbage, each home looking like its seen the business end of a soviet tank shell at some point in the not-quite-erased past. My helmet, even padded, is starting to drive my scalp crazy. I briefly imagine that ancient warriors had the same problem. "Helmets..." they'd think. "Good idea. Now if we could just make them comfortable." And you know they said the same thing about boots, er, sandals back then. Well, we still haven't figured either of those conundrums out. My head still aches and my feet still get blisters. A jawa once told me that "all things change: only the sands remain." Well, it's true for headaches and blisters. Our Marines don't much look like babylonian footmen, but we have some of the same problems. "Do you regret it sometimes?" I ask him. We're passing a rivulet of green sludge that, unsurprisingly, smells like untreated sewage and rotten garbage. A jackal, and no I'm not kidding, a jackal, solitary and scruffy looking, wanders around in the junk about 50 yds from me. It lays down in the midday heat, staring out into the wasteland to the north. People do still live here, in case you're wondering. "What's that?" he asks, having waited a few seconds before responding. Like me, he's seeing what's really here. The substance of the issue. "The eye for an eye bit," I explain. "The seminal idea you gave to people, essentially the belief that two wrongs make a right." And what I mean to say is something I hinted at earlier, that if one man accidentally or even intentionally takes out the eye or tooth of another, what good is served in visiting the same fate back on him in the guise of judicial punishment? Now you have two half-blind men. Or two toothless farmers. Or two dead men. Hammurabi doesn't respond. He extends an open hand to me by way of petitioning for a swig of my Gatorade. I hand it to him without pause. He gulps down a few swallows and the shaky humvee ride ensures that a couple tiny rivoulets of Frost flavored drink run down his emaculately kept beard. "I don't understand what you're getting at," he says. But he says it in the way people do when they understand what you're getting at perfectly. He dabs at his beard with an MRE alcohol towlette. "This legacy of violence," I spout instantly, very much aware of how much I sound like San Francisco. I cringe at my own inner hippie-ness. He looks me in the eye for the first time in miles. The village, small, perhaps home to a couple hundred people at most, is already shrinking behind us in a trail of dust. The convoy is almost through to Al Qaim. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the place, but I was too concerned-- and rightly so-- about security issues to take my hands off my rifle the whole time we were passing through. Rubble makes excellent cover for ambushes. Everyone knows it. Hammurabi even. "You know how writing works, D," he begins. "Something we didn't understand when we first started scribbling on clay way back when was the fact that folks, even educated ones, believe what they read. The faux permanence of tangible media is confusing to the human mind." I look crosswise at him. This guy just sounded educated. My brow furrows. And here I thought he was out of touch, being deceased for a few thousand years. I guess they knew more back then than I've ever given them credit for. "It took us a few years to recognize that," he continued. "Writing was still new then, but by the time ... near the end, I'd figured it out. Not only do people believe everything they read, but ... well, there's something more embarassing about it. To be honest. And I think this is the answer to your question." "What's that?" I ask. The humvee hits a rut in the road. The rear tires, pumped up to 60psi, send the force of the road straight through our skinny butts and into our lower backs. My 40lb flack jacket is my morbid butt-pain. "I don't regret anything at all," Hammurabi continued. "You have to understand that since my time, historians have called the laws of babylon my "code." Like i pulled the ideas straight out of thin air or something. I get credit for inventing this severe code of laws, get this rep as a horrible and harsh ruler, and yet, think about this: what if I didn't make that crap up at all? Look out of my palace windows for a moment. Look at the horde, the unwashed throng, and tell me what you see: people who don't respond to reason because they've never been taught to recognize it. Men who work tirelessly every day of their lives just to survive. They don't understand the finer points. They do, however, understand losing teeth, paying heavy fines, all that. When you need the attention of a man who's broken other people, break him. His jaw, his arm, whatever. You'll have his undivided attention." "So you just observed human tendency? That's the answer." "Look, man," he says, handing me the empty bottle. He doesn't mean to insult me. He's just finished it off and is too wrapped up in the conversation to notice he's just kanked me. "It's not an issue of justice at all. More like equality, but even then an equality based on the lowest common demoninator. One guy misses a tooth, and anyone involved is gonna miss one also. It's the way people work. No one wants to see someone else with more. No one wants to think they're the only one in pain. They're happier, the whole filthy lot of them, when they're all just as unhappy as the next guy. So give them harsh laws. Satisfy at once their desire for equality and their desire for a legalistic set of standards to adhere to. At the outskirts of town we pass a shepherd family. A boy, maybe five, is running alongside the road. He carries an MRE cracker packet someone must have thrown down to him from the lead vehicle. He's giving us the "thumbs up" sign, and I can't tell if he means it like we do, like us GI's could have taught him, or if he's speaking in the silent gesture talk of his culture and he's telling us "up yours." I'm not sure he answered my question. ... :D
# posted by chevas @ 7:43 PM 