Name Unknown: Something Everyone Must Read….

Many times these same thoughts have gone through my head. From John Pattison of the Burnside Writers Collective (read the original here):

Last month in the Burnside Writers Collective, editor Jordan Green wrote a moving tribute to three friends who were killed in Iraq. In conjunction with his essay, Jordan posted the names of the 3,299 American soldiers who have lost their lives since the war began four years ago. “The names of these soldiers are routinely used as political tokens,” he wrote. But the soldiers are more than just names. “They had family and friends and experiences, and, when we use them as tokens, we disregard their humanity.” Jordan concluded his piece with an invitation to BWC readers to honor the fallen by leaving memories on the comment board.

From the beginning, Jordan’s essay on the slain American soldiers was to be paired with another essay, which I would write, about the Iraqi civilian casualties. The essay I had in mind was angry and urgent, a little sarcastic, with a touch of righteous indignation. It would be short, nothing more than an introduction to the thousands of Arab names which would follow. Very likely, no one would post memories in the comments section, but that was just as well. I wasn’t interested in individual tributes. The essay I planned to write was less about grieving for dead Iraqis and more about giving full vent to my antiwar sentiments. The collection of names would tell a larger narrative - actually, page one of Chapter One of a story that would unfold for decades to come: a house on fire and how maybe we lit the match.

But an internet search for the names of Iraqi civilian casualties is an exercise in frustration. With the exception of one door-to-door survey conducted in 2003 by The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), no serious attempt has been made in the West to document the identities of dead civilians. The media cannot or will not do it. Advocacy groups like CIVIC are easily overwhelmed as the violence escalates. And the military isn’t interested. Referring to the war in Afghanistan, General Tommy Franks once famously said, “We don’t do body counts.”

This policy of “no body counts,” which was extended to Operation Iraqi Freedom, has led to casualty estimates that range from the absurdly low to the shockingly high. When President Bush was asked in December 2005 how many civilians had been killed in Iraq - by coalition forces as well as by terrorists and anti-occupation insurgents - he answered, “Thirty thousand, give or take.” Setting aside for a moment the casual “guesstimation” of his response, Bush was probably getting his numbers from the Iraq Body Count (IBC), a website which catalogs and tallies civilian casualties based on eyewitness accounts and the prevalence of media reports. IBC is frequently cited by news outlets and policymakers. In December 2005, the Iraq Body Count stood at 34,000. But the IBC urges the public to remember that many deaths go unreported. It is reasonable to assume, the website says, that for every reported casualty there are nine unconfirmable casualties. As of May 6, 2007, the IBC has confirmed 62,842 civilian deaths.

Two other estimates are worth noting. Late last year, Ali al-Shemari, the Iraqi health minister, reckoned that 150,000 civilians had been killed since the start of the war. This is based on the number of bodies brought to Iraqi morgues and hospitals, including the central morgue in Baghdad which was averaging 60 violent death victims per day in November 2006.

A study conducted by Johns Hopkins University and published in The Lancet last year relied not on body counts but on interviews with households. It put the civilian death toll at a staggering 655,000, about one-third of which were directly attributed to coalition forces. Most of the victims were men between the ages of 15 and 44. The Bush administration quickly dismissed the study, and The Wall Street Journal and right-wing bloggers attacked its methodology. But pollsters like John Zogby and statisticians from other universities defended the research. Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University told The Washington Post that the survey method was “tried and true.” The Johns Hopkins study was, he said, “the best estimate of mortality we have.”

Thirty thousand. Sixty-two thousand. Six hundred and fifty-five thousand. These aren’t people, just large numbers. They are abstractions, rounded up or down to the nearest zero, vulnerable to “give or take.” I had always been uncomfortable with the idea of copying and pasting tens of thousands of names - a good chunk of an entire generation of young Iraqi men. But now I was faced with another issue: how to demonstrate the civilian cost of war without them.

I test-drove a few possibilities. Having settled on the authoritative and more conservative (and somehow more “palatable”) Iraq Body Count, I opened Microsoft Word and wrote “Anonymous” 62,842 times. The document ran to more than 1,100 pages. But, scrolling down, I discovered I didn’t like “Anonymous” after all. I associated the word with sixteenth-century morality plays and authors who were theoretical even to classics professors. I used the Find and Replace feature to change “Anonymous” to “Name Unknown.” I still wasn’t satisfied. Now the list had an air of bureaucratic sterility. To save space, I tried to organize the list into three columns, but my computer crashed.

Later that week, I met my friend Dave at a Stumptown coffee shop in southeast Portland. Dave and I get together every morning at six, ostensibly to spend the first two hours of each day working on our personal writing projects before we head off to the jobs that actually put food on the table - writing grants for a local community college for Dave; freelance writing and editing for me. Usually, though, what happens is that Dave will work for a few minutes, then I will interrupt him with an urgent question, and we will spend the rest of our time together talking about it. This particular morning I was struggling with how to personalize so many civilian casualties. I tossed out half-a-dozen suggestions, each more gruesome that the last. Dave rightly rejected all of them: writing my own name 62,842 times; reprinting Jordan’s list nineteen times; or using the names of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. I thought about taking names from online phone books of U.S. cities with approximately 63,000 people (Portland, Maine, for example, or Iowa City). My last idea was to alternate the names of the two people I love most in the world - Dave, my best friend for thirteen years, and Kate, my wife - in one long, macabre, thousand-page monument to collateral damage:

12,973. Kate
12,974. Dave
12,975. Kate
12,976. Dave

It was at this point that I realized something important. I wasn’t trying to shock the Reader out of complacency, I was trying to shock myself.

I have long objected to the Iraq war on ideological grounds as being expansionist and counterproductive to our national security and possibly illegal. I have opposed it on moral grounds as an affront to a culture of life and destructive to the U.S. and Iraqi societies. And I have actively resisted it on religious grounds because it has become a hindrance to the gospel and because “Who Would Jesus Bomb” is actually a pretty provocative bumper sticker. These reasons are all good enough in and of themselves, but they are cerebral; I want the war to be personal.

Thousands of miles separate my desk in Portland, Oregon from the mother and child who will be killed tomorrow by a suicide bomber in a crowded Baghdad market, and the Iraqi police officer who will be kidnapped and shot execution-style beside a mass grave in the Anbar province. The family whose car will be riddled with machine-gun rounds by a brave but confused Midwestern kid watching over a traffic checkpoint in Fallujah - they are half a world away. And there is more that separates us than geography. We speak different languages and practice different faiths.

But what united us? Even if they had lived another fifty years, we probably would have never met. I doubt I would have ever learned their names. Still, I am compelled to believe that the Iraqi civilian casualties are my brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. I am convinced that their deaths impoverish my own life.

I’m angry that the military and the administration have made it official policy to obscure the true civilian cost of this war. But more than that, I’m embarrassed by my own inability to imagine the lives veiled by numbers too large to comprehend.

Thus, the indignant essay I had planned has proven impossible to write. I don’t have many answers, only the same questions I’ve been asking all week: How do I look beyond the statistics to discover the true cost of violence? How do I develop a heart of deep compassion that knows no boundaries? How can I be an instrument of peace? And one sad, final question which will be answered soon enough…

62,843. ?