When All The Lines Disappear

By Walter Kirn

A televised satellite photo: Iraq from space. The image is maplike and abstract, with S curves for rivers, blurry grids for cities and no sign of people, although we know they're down there. In the next shot familiar forms emerge, accompanied by a sense of depth and volume. According to the retired American general hired by the network to interpret the war, those shoe-box-shaped structures are enemy barracks and that dark broken line is a convoy of armored vehicles closing in on Baghdad from the south. Now move even closer: an empty airport runway, a damaged tank and there, along the bottom, where the general is tapping his pointer--a human body? The orbiting camera has reached its limits, but the mind continues to zoom in until it's looking the dead man in the eye. The big picture no longer matters, just this small one--singular, piercing.

And then it too dissolves.

When the war first broke out, people saw it panoramically. They discussed it in terms of "issues" and "perspectives." Hard and fast distinctions ruled the day--between civilians and soldiers, hawks and doves, conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction, secularists and Islamists. Life was simpler then. Events fit into stable categories, and the major players wore uniforms that allowed them to be identified from a distance. The armies were in Iraq to fight, the embedded reporters to report and the women and children to stand aside. The battlefield was defined in terms of boundaries--the southern oil fields, the Kurdish zone, the front, the rear--that promised to stay put.

Three weeks later these orderly classifications have largely collapsed--even more completely than they usually do when the war games give way to the real war and the sweeping wide shots turn to jarring close-ups.

The reassuring dress codes broke down first. Masquerading as passersby and taxi drivers, Iraqi soldiers brought a grim new meaning to the old term "theater of war." Surrendering conscript or armed militia member? Distressed pregnant woman or canny suicide bomber? The difference between combatants and noncombatants was in the eye of the beholder, suddenly. For a coalition sentry manning a checkpoint, the penalty for guessing wrong was death--his own death if he failed to fire in time or that of an innocent if he fired too hastily.

The gap between observers and participants has also reached a vanishing point. In at least two cases, American journalists traveling with the troops chose to drop any pretense of detachment. Ron Martz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution held the IV drip bag of a wounded Iraqi civilian awaiting emergency medical assistance, while Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a contributor to TIME and CNN, operated on a critically injured 2-year-old who later died. The lines these men crossed may seem important in peacetime, but in wartime such lines grow fuzzy and indistinct compared with the bold line that separates life and death, and this was the line where they chose to make their stand, their professional codes of conduct be damned. When one is lost in a sandstorm, deafened by artillery and surrounded by primal cries of agony, an ethical lapse can be a moral leap.

On TV and in the press, this confusion of roles and erosion of protocol can be seen in the way high-ranking American officers--most, but not all, retired--offer themselves as pundits and commentators. They hint that they're still in close contact with the Pentagon, then proceed to lay out, with troubling specificity, where we'll go next, how quickly and for what purpose. Aren't old soldiers supposed to be tight-lipped and poker-faced? When Lieut. General William Wallace, who leads our ground forces, aired certain strategic and tactical misgivings that wound up on the front page of the New York Times, he became part commander, part commentator--a strange and unsettling new combination.

But then who would have thought that the war's great hero thus far would be a teenager assigned to the rear supply lines? Jessica Lynch, the person and the story, defies so many wartime stereotypes that she has forced us to create a new one: the scrappy, indomitable, steely soldier chick. Liberal feminists I know who reflexively opposed this war woke up changed women the morning that Lynch's exploits were described in the Washington Post. "I hope she blew them all away," one told me, her surging sense of pride and solidarity trumping her lifelong abhorrence of firearms. (So much for the M-16 as phallic symbol.) The other hero in Lynch's story, the conscience-stricken Iraqi lawyer who walked miles back and forth across a battle zone to help the army plot her rescue, confounds the biggest preconception of all: monolithic Islamic anti-Americanism. Not only don't they all hate us, they're not a "they," it seems, and perhaps we're becoming less of a "they" too. It's too early to know. The war is in our faces still. Once we were able to see it from on high, as gods and generals are said to, but no more. We're on the ground now, and everything looks different.