Aidan Delgado is a brave man. A man you want on your team. Not because he faces danger without trembling, but because he trembles as he looks into his own heart, and those of his companions, and asks, what can we know? In our descent into evil, what can we learn?
He begins his book, The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes From A Conscientious Objector in Iraq, with an invocation: Give me the strength to remember.
Not about killings, not about the mortars, though there are some. Not about the cold or the heat or the misery. Not about the early murders under color of authority that presage full blown Abu Ghraibism. All these things, yes, but more. What he really wants to remember is the Road, the Way, and how he struggled to find it, and the choices we all have to make - soldier or civilian– to live an honest life. Delgado wants his book to leave the question hanging before us: how do we do this?
Early in the book he tells of a missile incoming:
“LIGHTNING, LIGHTNING, LIGHTNING…Instantly the cafeteria erupts in chaos. With one enormous sound of ripping Velcro, soldiers tearing open their hip bags, reaching for their gas masks…I remember having read in some book that 80 percent of all last words are “Oh shit” and these are exactly the words that cross my mind.”
He describes the confusion, the fear, the panic, and then the all-clear. They can laugh then at their fear but Delgado insists:
“in truth, I feel acutely mortal and frightened.”
Days before September 11 2001 exploded into the American experience Delgado, bored with college, had drifted over to a climbing wall on the campus, put up by Army recruiters. “Maybe that’s the change of scene I’ve been needing…. join the Army Reserve … get away from school for a while, get some discipline…” He signed the contract minutes before the first plane hit the Twin Towers and is inducted a week later, proud of himself and ready to defend America.
A diplomatic brat he had lived in Thailand, in Senegal, in Egypt; he spoke a brand of street Arabic and loved the desert. His first stop with his unit is Kuwait, March 30, 2003. The advanced American forces are already streaming up the roads towards Baghdad. Delgado, a light-wheeled mechanic and sometime interpreter, begins to read and re-read the books assigned for the course on Buddhism he had flunked out of in college. In the heat and misery of Kuwait, and the early formations of friends and enmities, something from his youth in Thailand, the land of the saffron robed monks, begins to surface and meet with the ideas he is beginning to form.
The first book he reads is Sylvia Boorstein’s “It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness.” He begins idly, flicking through pages. Then, at midnight he sits up. He realizes he’s read the book straight through, cover to cover.
“I sit and ruminate for a moment. I’m a Buddhist. I didn’t become a Buddhist, I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time. I don’t experience a sense of conversion to Buddhism, only a sense of homecoming…”
“So here I stand: an American Buddhist in Iraq.”
He walks us, and himself, through the Four Noble Truths. And tells us: “The Way seems so impossibly distant, an unreachable dream. Reading the sutras makes me feel almost physically ill, so far am I from the ideal. I feel like there is nothing Buddhist about me,except that word, hovering over me like a badge of hypocrisy. Compassion…Loving Kindness…Although I call myself a Buddhist, I know that I am no follower of the Way, soldier and jailer that I am.”
For those of us who have never known Iraq, or the Army, perhaps know some saltings of Buddhist sayings or beliefs, Delgado’s memoir works like a slow seep of knowledge. He makes friends; he is attacked, and feeling sick at himself, fights back and wins. He loves the army; he hates the army. And most dangerous of all, he understands ‘the other.’
“There’s tension in the air that hasn’t been there before: a buzzing in the crowd and the stiff contorted movements of the soldiers… It’s hot as hell today and the sun is bearing down directly overhead. The mission is taking longer than expected. Tempers are bound to flare.
“Get the fuck away from me you fucking hajjs!”
I know the voice: a good guy. A friend of mine…
“I swear to God, one of these days I’m going to shoot one of you fuckers.”
Something seizes up inside me. I’ve heard things before, little flashes of aggression toward the Iraqis, but this is the first time it has boiled over. I’m hot and angry. Why does he have to act this way? … I walk up and get in his face. I raise my voice: “Chill out, man. They weren’t doing anything….”
He shoves me. “Why you always gotta be such a bitch, Delgado?”
Early in the occupation, his outfit in Tallil, south of Bagdhad, and before they are deployed to Abu Ghraib itself, he describes a scene, seeing the seeds of the ugly blossom that will appear two years later in photos and videos the world will see.
“The sight of ragged, starved Iraqi dogs running desperately from packs of gun-toting men in four wheelers.. we watch a pair of Air Force security corner some bag-of-bones canine…and fire repeatedly at it…the dog is cut down by a limb shot but manages to hobble back to its feet and limp away. The four-wheelers buzz off in pursuit of their prey.”
Yet Delgado is able to reflect, to see his own life within these acts he hates.
“There is something primal in witnessing an act of violence. Something about it stirs the soul in vague and subtly erotic ways. We all experience the rush, the first time we fire a rocket or unload a belt of SAW ammunition. It is something deeply rooted in the male identity and consciousness, an instinct for violence.”
Eventually, the knowledge has grown too big in him. He knows he must declare himself a Conscientious Objector. He turns in his weapon. He defends himself and explains his beliefs to whoever will listen. Many are not interested — in talking to cowards… One of those who listens best, and understands the most is a bible reading, Glory! Glory! praising black Sergeant, Delgado’s immediate superior.
“You’re in for a hard time, Delgado, but I’ll do what I can for you.”
And so the story is woven for us — of a kind of courage that very few of us have, to go against our own, to work out, alone, what beliefs we hold so deeply that we cannot let go, come what may.
On November 18, 2003, Delgado’s birthday, the unit arrives at Abu Ghraib. By November 24th, a prison protest against the food, the cold, the treatment is met with lethal force. Twelve prisoners are shot. Three die of those wounds.
“They took pictures of the bodies after the shooting….nothing special. The other soldiers are pressing McCullough for details; clearly they are proud of him and envious of his accomplishment: killing an Iraqi.”
In the days that come rumors sweep the compound of other pictures. Officers muster up the troops and tell them to quit talking about the photos; this is a family and we take care of our own business. Don’t tell your wives and sweethearts. Stop the crap.”
The reality of the photos and the actions in the prison wasn’t known to Delgado and his unit until it was to most of us. But the suspicion was high, and in Delgado, some hope:
“Perhaps the people back home will finally see a small part of the truth. Something here has got to give, for no sin this large and this great can be concealed forever. The law of karma, of action and reaction, is inescapable. Whatever the Army has sown here through its own policies and its own culture, it will reap in equal measure.”
And it is this that Delgado takes for his main theme and title. Its worth quoting at length.
“[There was] a daily reality inside Abu Ghraib: a reality so bleak and joyless it could drive men to the edge of madness, and did. Picture a cold, windswept wasteland of rubble and ruined buildings. Picture living there with a thousand other people guarding four or five thousand prisoners, some of whom want to kill you. Picture no heat and no light for a month. Picture no phones, no Internet, no contact with home for several months. Picture getting shelled every day by an invisible enemy and never being able to do anything about it. Imagine what that would do to your mind. Picture people around you getting killed or maimed by random explosions. Picture having to fix vehicles in three inches of freezing mud for a captain you despise. Picture have to work with and handle prisoners who are filthy, diseased, and angry. Picture not understanding a word they say. …That’s an environment that breaks people and some people have lower breaking points than others.
That’s part of it. That’s the universal part, something we could all understand: how stress and fear could turn ordinary people into monsters. Yet I’m not satisfied with that as the whole truth. There’s something deeper to it, something that hasn’t been talked about yet openly. The fact is there were thousands of soldiers rotated through Abu Ghraib and not all of them turned abusive, not all of them hurt and degraded the Iraqis, some of them even said no, some of them even did something about it. What separates us? What divides those who turned hateful and those who stayed human? The answer is complex and nontrivial. It can’t be summed up in a sound bite. Over these last few years I have meditated long and often on this topic, trying to see into the sometime abyss of the human heart. I believe that through reliving these times, I have found pieces of my own truth. I believe that Abu Ghraib holds many teachings, many sutras, about the way that men live. I’m still trying to unravel them.”
And so, this is a book you’ll want to read and perhaps, with Aidan Delgado, read others, trying along the way, the best you can, to read your own heart and to follow it, as hard as it may be, trying to read the hearts of others and come to know, in some small way The Sutras of Abu Ghraib.