Walking with Lynndie
Askold Melnyczuk’s story, “Walk With Us,” in the Massachusetts Review Casualty issue, is so skillfully turned you don’t know who the subject is until the end. At the risk of being a spoiler and softening the moment of recognition, I have to say it’s about Lynndie England, the poster girl for Abu Ghraib. But – and this is the part that makes the story so incisive – it is also about us and our capacity for denial. Melnyczuk is, of course, writing fiction; but a fiction compelled by indigestible facts, almost as if he is unable to push the story out of his mind and must get rid of it in writing. Told in her mother’s voice, the impact of the event has pushed the family to and beyond its limits, into areas of their mind previously unlit and terrifying.
Who can forget – except, perhaps, George Bush and the Have Mores – the photographs of the scenes, constructed with the fastidious cruelty of Sade’s Juliet: German Shepherds snapping at the genitals of naked and terrified prisoners, etc. At that time, in the thrall of the alpha sadist Sergeant Charles Graner, and pregnant by him, England appears to be a willing participant in the torture of prisoners, beaming and pointing as if she just caught a record trout. In Tara McKelvey’s prison interview of England, she claims she did not want to be in the photographs, and, given the surrounding material, I’m inclined to believe her. After 9/11, American rage was amplified and harnessed to the war in such a way that torture seemed justified. In the post Pearl Harbor-like nationalism following 9/11, the country seemed to give its military permission to push the envelope. To repeat something I’ve said constantly since my experience in Viet Nam, most Americans, and especially those who enthusiastically support any war, do not have a clue what happens in one. In Vietnam, we turned captured enemies over to the ARVN for the torturing, thus giving the impression we were somehow superior to the “cruel orientals.” But there was nearly always a CIA operative at these interrogations, gently asking questions as the ARVN increased the brutality of the torture. I have been witness to this.
In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US has found away to beat the rap once again. The contractors hired by the CIA and the military are not under military command and can thus be conveniently separated from the mechanisms of torture, so that Senator Gas Bag can say with conviction that our troops do not torture. Who can forget Bush’s blatant, “We do not torture,” which has the ring of Nixon’s “I am not a crook”? And, of course, as the marines say, “Shit rolls downhill.” Blame it on a few bad apples who do not accurately represent “our boys” in uniform. But I ask, what happened to the CIA contractors who were the architects of these methods? They disappeared into the ozone, leaving the enlisted soldiers to catch the flack. Leaving Lynndie England, with her baby, afraid to leave the house.
