Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 3, 1993 | by Robert L. Spaeth

Vivid Account of Gulf War Can Shock

In mid-January 1991, when the United States and its allies started bombing Baghdad, Michael Kelly, a young American journalist, was there. It was the beginning of the latest of many wars Iraq has fought, and within a few months it was to become, in Kelly's words, "Iraq's most disastrous war," giving Iraqis yet another reason to annually commemorate Martyrs' Day.

Despite all the evidence, people Kelly met in Baghdad just a week before the bombing denied it would happen. But when American Stealth bombers appeared over the city, "the days of delusion had ended abruptly."

That night also marked the start of a year of close observation of the Persian Gulf war and its aftermath by the observant Kelly, whose reports appeared in the New Republic, the Boston Globe and GQ. The book Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War (Random House), a vivid narrative of his experiences, brings the horrors of that short war back to one's consciousness with shocking effectiveness; some of the details are more atrocious than past media reports have revealed.

Driven from Baghdad by the bombing, Kelly commenced many months of constant movement, looking, listening, questioning and conversing, recording facts, impressions, quotations, sights, sounds and smells along the way.

First he went to Jordan, where he listened to enough Jordanians to conclude that they "wanted too much. They wanted to encourage the Iraqis to kill the Israelis, but they didn't want the Israelis to take offense at this. They wanted to help Iraq but to be treated still as neutrals by America."

Then to Israel, to Tel Aviv, where the hotel clerk gave him a gas mask with his room key. While in the hotel he witnessed, from a safe distance, two Iraqi Scud attacks, and he later discovered that "America and Americans were the passion of the city." Israelis were saying that "for the first time in two thousand years, someone was willing to stand up and fight for the Jews."

By way of Egypt Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Kelly arrived in Iraq in February, just hours after the ground war began. Ignoring allied controls on the press, he and a friend drove to the front in time to watch the pathetic surrender of thousands of Iraqi troops. One of these soldiers told him he had not agreed with the war but that "if we tried to desert they would hang our families." "They" meant Saddam Hussein.

When Kelly got to Kuwait City, he saw up close what abominations Saddam had unleashed. Person after person told him of arbitrary murders, torture, rapes, senseless destruction and everything that maddened and undisciplined soldiers can possibly do to harm what they regard as an enemy.

A victim of torture described it to a television crew: "They hang us upside down. Naked, no clothes; we are not allowed to sleep or eat. . . . They put electricity on you with batteries. . . . Your whole body is electricity."

The survivor philosophized: "Torture not only hurts at the time. It will hurt all your life." All over liberated Kuwait City, Kelly says, "people talked of murder and torture and disfigurement and rape."

On the road north, the Iraqis made a desperate attempt to escape, but American pilots bombed the huge, makeshift convoy. Kelly compares the attack to "bombing the road to Daytona Beach at spring break." He saw -- and dispassionately describes -- as many burned and disfigured bodies as anyone should.

The war over, Kelly did not quit, but went to Iraqi Kurdistan and into Iran and found more massive evidence of the murderous policies of Saddam. By December 1991 he was back in Baghdad, finding that in one year the city had changed from a mood of denial that war would happen to a city plagued by crime and degradation. An Iraqi woman told him, "What we are seeing here is the moral disintegration of a society."

Michael Kelly is heir to the best tradition of American war reporting. He tells what he saw around him, what people directly involved were doing and thinking, what the war actually did to people. He ignores press briefings, does not speculate about military strategy or tactics and eschews the pontificating that so often tempts journalists of our day.

His prose brims with clever similes, mostly helpful, but occasionally forced. In Amman, Jordan, he found that Palestinians live in boxy stone houses "stacked on top of each other . . . like an overdone Escher print." In Cairo the population is "as dense as a black hole." The highway from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia was "as smooth and as well-lighted as a pool table in a good hall."

Kelly's writing style is attractive, but readers picking up Martyrs' Day need to be prepared for blunt descriptions of unspeakable horrors. It may have been a short war, but it was a very dirty one as well.

Robert L. Spaeth is a professor of liberal studies at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn.