See the Lady

—Fort Knox, Kentucky, June 2002

Army Basic Training: we march and sing cadence everywhere we go. The chow hall. The motor pool of tanks. The obstacle course. Whether the march lasts two minutes or two hours, we sing, and depending on the drill sergeant, the cadence can involve anything from love of army to homesickness, from war to women. For Drill Sergeant C., who’s tall with a deep bellowing voice, it’s mostly women. He takes wide, open-toed steps since full strides with his long legs might rush the song. Each verse’s line begins with all our left boots hitting the ground.

See the lady dressed in red, C. yells.

See the lady dressed in red, we call back, raising our inflections on the last syllable. We know what comes next. We know hundreds of these songs. Makes her living in the bed—Makes her living in the bed—

In 2013, years after leaving the military, I come across a poem by Robert Hass, “Winged and Acid Dark.” It involves two officers and an unnamed woman somewhere in 1945 Berlin. Hass isn’t explicit about what’s going on, but the poem gradually reveals itself. After one of the officers brings the woman “wine and sacks of flour,” Hass portrays what happens next in a fragmented narrative: “When the first one was through he pried her mouth open.” Then, Hass offers what initially seems like an aside, paraphrasing a statement from Bashō: “Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.” In the poem’s penultimate stanza, we read the “sensational material”: that soldier “pried her mouth open and spit in it.” After reading the poem, I went online and learned that this scene came from an anonymous German woman’s diaries during the Russian Army occupation of Berlin in 1945: A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. The next day I went to the library and checked out the book.

—Jalawla, Iraq, 2004

Walking past me, Specialist S. says, “Some hot girls in there.” For this raid, I’m outer security; I’m not supposed to go in. There’s no moon tonight. Beside a wire holding pen, I hear sheep breathing, their light hooves on the dirt. Flipping down my NODs, I see them come into focus: a dozen or so huddle in the pen’s far corner and stare, their eyes, through my lenses, bright emerald flicks. I hear shouts and screams from inside the mudbrick home. We’re somewhere south of Jalawla, ten miles off a paved road. This family’s farm stands alone in these dry hills where there’s no one else for miles. I wander toward the door and peek: a man’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, his hands zip-tied behind his back, a Kalashnikov and two magazines in front of him. Flashlights brighten and blur various spots in the room so I can’t see anything. Leaning in, I turn my neck and see two girls sitting, backs against the wall. Yes: I look. Surprisingly, their faces, chin to forehead, aren’t covered. Specialist C. stands in front of them smoking. The captain’s speaking to the terp and the terp’s speaking to the man on the ground. Other soldiers, searching, wander through halls and rooms. For a second, both girls glance at me: another Kevlar-covered head, black goggles with a wide blue lens, loaded pistol on my vest, pockets brimming with magazines, khaki-brown uniform, loaded M16 in my hands. Through my NODs, their faces are static green and I see the bright flash of teeth as their lips shake. They’re crying, very quietly. The tears leave a faint green trail on their cheeks. They’re maybe in their early twenties, late teens. I’m a few months past my twentieth birthday. I turn out of the doorway and walk back to the sheep pen.

Raids involved bursting into someone’s home, someone’s life, usually as they slept. I’d feel a rush of adrenaline as I made arrests, searched for weapons and IED materials—all these things, I hoped, would diminish the ways we might get killed. Because we spent so much time driving Humvees on roads as open targets for IEDs and RPGs, it often felt better, even safer, to be on the offensive. But whether any of us admitted it or not (it was usually just an afterthought) we also looked forward to seeing women. At home, most of my friends were starting college and dating. On our base, FOB Cobra, there were hundreds of men and three female soldiers. Maybe because I was constantly—in the Humvee, in the latrine, in our housing units—surrounded by men, seeing women reminded me of a previous civilian life. During the endless tedium of patrols and details and missions it was rare when I encountered a woman without a veil or any covering on her head; even more rare was the sight of a woman in less moderate clothing, a long colorful blouse or dress in a sea of black abayas. But in this context our gaze—a male gaze, yes, but also the gaze of occupiers, of empire—carried a meaning more sinister. At the time, I didn’t understand how my stare—the face of a twenty-year-old freshly graduated from high school and basic training—carried other implications. I had so much of my own tangible suffering to deal with: I missed my friends, my family, especially my mother; I was always exhausted, sometimes collapsing on my cot after missions, falling asleep in my boots and flak vest; I spent most waking hours worrying about IEDs and indirect fire attacks. Many times as I rushed into homes, even with my locked and loaded rifle, I’d be terrified. I worried about being shot, or worse, worried a door or room would be rigged with explosives, but this never happened to me. I didn’t think about my stare as the inchoate outset of male violence in war. I didn’t think about how my stare carried a history.

“I scream and scream . . .” the German woman writes. It’s the first time she’s grabbed by two soldiers in her Berlin apartment hallway. “The other is pulling as well, his hand on my throat, so I can no lon- ger scream.” As I read her account—eight weeks during the 1945 Red Army occupation—often I had to stop and close the book. She shows the struggle to get food, water. She shows the destruction from the Al- lied air raids—“A little before 10:00 a.m. a trunk-sized bomb landed on the roof of our building.” She drinks liquor with her neighbors to help her sleep during the constant bombings. But for her, and for her female companions, the biggest threat is men. She details what civilian women do for protection: an air-raid shelter is reconfigured to resemble a typhus patient quarantine ward; large warning signs are displayed in Russian and German; however, the “patients” are young German girls and “the quarantine is a ruse the doctor came up with to preserve their virginity.” She sits with other women and they discuss “how often it had happened to them.” One woman repeats with dark humor the saying, “Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead.”

While working on poems about my deployment, I noticed a participle- noun image: screaming women. I searched the Word document: the phrase appeared, in different variations, six times. Within my poems, women and young girls cried and screamed. In Iraq, this was routine: to see and hear older women wailing in houses being raided, at funer- als, at bases or checkpoints begging for a son or father we’d arrested, mourning those who’d been killed. After searching the document, I began to understand how the vast majority of women I encountered over those eleven months did only one of two things: wail or remain silent. In towns, villages, homes, that’s what we’d see: the women wrapped in black burkas, abayas; they’d watch us search a room, arrest a relative, kick a door. We saw them, usually, without complexity, in only two extremes: rage or silence; there was very little in between. So simple, then, to compartmentalize their presence with an easy label like screaming women.

—May 2004

We’re somewhere near Qarah Tapah in the hills of eastern Iraq. It’s mid- day and there’re no clouds anywhere. I overhear the story from Ser- geant Kenson, my platoon sergeant: a father hoarded artillery shells, wires, cheap plastic cell phones in the courtyard of his home: he made IEDs. One day, when the man was gone, his son—maybe ten, maybe eleven—got into his father’s work. He touched something he shouldn’t have. There is nothing left of him after the explosion. The home is nearly gone. The father arrested by second platoon earlier that morn- ing. We’re back to find a brother. We park the four Humvees and hear only our boots as we walk across the arid dirt. Soon we hear sobs, cries, long heaves. We turn a corner around the home where there’s a long triangle of shade—the only shade, it seems, for miles—and see them sitting in a row next to the front doorway, backs against the mudbrick wall, five women and two young girls. The older women wail loudly. Hands smacking foreheads. The girls cry softly, their red and purple dresses, checkered with flowers, stark against the brown wall. Two of the women turn and look at us; the others don’t. I feel as if I’ve barged into someone’s funeral. I’ve never felt so ashamed. No one says anything. One of the women wails louder after she sees us. It’s not the first time I’ve seen Iraqi women wailing. But this is different. We turn and go back into the sunlight, walk into the rear of the home, stepping over the blown wall foundation, the wreckage of rebar, concrete, floor tiles, blue and green artillery shell shards, colorful plastic cell-phone scraps. Everything surrounds a wide gray-black crater in the middle of the courtyard. Someone says, Let’s just go. There is no brother here. None of us is surprised. Lt. and some others walk around the wreckage. I walk back toward my truck. I had joined the Army National Guard about four months before 9/11 as an incoming high-school senior. I wanted to leave that home right then, leave Iraq, and never show my face again in that entire country.

One winter, as a fourteen-year-old boy, I walked between a patch of trees, crunching over snow, cutting through backyards to shorten the mile-long trek to the YMCA. I never thought twice about doing this. I grew up in the small suburban town of Macedonia in northeast Ohio. Like all the neighborhood kids, I’d often take shortcuts behind shopping plazas, through small residential forests and people’s backyards. It was just that kind of place. As I passed the side of a house, my head down, no sound but boots on snow, a woman—maybe middle-aged—slowly peeked out between curtains. I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from where she stood. But she didn’t just look. It was something else. As I made eye contact, I immediately felt her trepidation: the face startled, concerned. The sight of me unwelcome, worrisome. I remember this because no one, at the time, had ever looked at me like this before; I was a White male in America. The look said: What are you doing here? It said: You scare me. Hurrying my walk, I crossed diagonally into her neighbors’ yard and moved down that driveway. She’d looked at me as a threat, and that look had made me feel like one. Instantly, I felt scared, worried that I might be in trouble; after all, I was walking over someone’s property. I can only conclude that she feared my presence: a body transforming, six feet tall, broadening shoulders, long legs, maybe some vague stubble on my chin. To her, I was not the shy, self-conscious boy walking to a gym to play basketball; I looked, to her, with all its connotations and histories and baggage, like a man.

“We keep staring at the back door,” the woman writes, “locked and barricaded, hoping it will hold.   We hear steps coming up the back stairs, then those unfamiliar sounds, to our ears so coarse and animal- like.” Although she wished to remain anonymous, her name was re- vealed after her death in 2001. In the book’s foreword, the German author and editor Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who was “furious at the revelation,” explains, “The author chose to remain anonymous for reasons that any reader can understand, and I feel bound to respect her wish.” Although the woman’s name is now easily searchable, I also choose not to use it here, to honor what she wanted. Enzensberger also writes that the woman “was not an amateur but an experienced journalist.” But while I was first struck by the writing’s vividness, preci- sion, detail, as I read deeper into the book, I noticed something else. So much of the story involves women, young and old, waiting in fear as more soldiers, sometimes multiple times per day, break into apart- ments, homes. Much of her war experience is this: the author and her companions sitting in cold and silence as they shake and panic at any sound outside the door that might be another soldier about to enter: “The table freezes, falls silent,” she writes. “We stop chewing, hold our breath. Hands clenched over hearts. Eyes flickering wildly. Then silence once again as the steps fade away.” After multiple soldiers rape her, the woman makes a decision: “I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack.” She begins sleeping with a Russian officer since his presence keeps other lower-ranking soldiers from attacking her. What she does to survive, for self-preservation, is part of a war narrative that I had never heard before. Arguably, the book is anomalous: there has never been such an in-depth first-person account of wartime rape.

Writer and scholar Agatha Schwartz argues that the book “is likely the first published text by a woman to address wartime rapes.” German writer and professor Holger Pötzsch explains, “The suffering heroine who sacrifices her corporeal integrity in deploying her own body to avoid massive and unchecked abuse and to provide food and protection for those in her care do [sic] not fit even the most innovative script for a popular war story.” As I read, something startled me: I felt a strange connection to the occupiers. To those “steps coming up the back stairs.” Besides the complication that those “steps” were Russian soldiers who, historian Atina Grossman reminds us, “fought Nazi Germany and lib- erated death camps,” they also echoed forward, as I read, to my own steps—another soldier entering a home. As I saw these German women waiting in terror, then being left alone in terror, I began to imagine, more fully I think, the many Iraqi women we rushed in on.

I never saw an assault against Iraqi women, but I know this happened. The torture and assault of civilians took place a couple hours southwest of us at Abu Ghraib. In 2006 soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment raped an Iraqi girl and murdered her and her family near Mahmudi- yah. There were rumors about Iraqi women being murdered, or exiled from their marriages and tribes, after getting frisked by male soldiers. Although there have been acclaimed books of poetry published by Iraqi women, there are very few nonfiction books. However, in 2017 Iraqi poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail published The Beekeeper, an account of Iraqi women kidnapped and raped by ISIS. In the 2005 book Baghdad Burning, an anonymous twenty-four-year-old Iraqi woman documents the 2003 invasion and aftermath through a series of blog posts. Some of the most in-depth portraits of women come from journalists, like Anthony Shadid, the American writer of Lebanese descent who lived among Iraqis during and after the 2003 invasion. In Night Draws Near (2005), Shadid spends time with an Iraqi mother, Yasmine Musa, living with her family in Baghdad. Describing the bombings from American military jets, Musa asks, “Do those people up there have the faintest idea what is happening down here when they unload?” Shadid also mentions a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl, Amal, who says, “If you were sit- ting in your house and somebody attacked you, would you accept that?”

—Sadiyah, Iraq, 2004

Our first raid in Iraq: On the radio, our lieutenant calls me in to help search the roof. It’s just past midnight, and I climb over a brick wall, run across a courtyard and through the open door of a large home with many rooms and a long wooden U-shaped staircase. From an adjacent room, I hear loud cries from multiple women. This is my first time hearing them. I know someone in the platoon is standing there watching the women, making sure they don’t leave the room. I grab the railing with my left hand—my other holds the rifle, index finger on the trigger—and bound up the staircase, two or three steps at a time. As I turn on the staircase—my rifle’s muzzle pointed out ahead of me, the desert boots leaving caked dirt beneath my footsteps, the night-vision goggles bouncing heavy against my Kevlar—I come to a dark landing and turn: a woman, all but her face covered in dark fabric, stands flat against a wall, cradling an infant asleep wrapped in linen. The child doesn’t make a sound. The woman’s eyes, wide and white, stare unmov- ing at mine. She’s completely silent. I sidestep, walk down the hallway toward a room where I hear the voices I know. After ten minutes of searching, we find nothing. We arrest a middle-aged man in a white dishdasha—I don’t remember for what. Two of our guys zip-tie his hands, lead him outside to the trucks. With my lieutenant and another soldier, I walk down that U-shaped staircase. The only sounds are our boot-steps and the cries from the women in the living room. When we reach the landing, one of the women argues in Arabic with our terp. We walk out the front door, and the cries fade as we get farther from the home. This is how most raids began and ended: screams and cries as we entered, screams and cries as we left.

“We hear steps coming up the back stairs,” the German woman writes. I kept thinking of those steps, of what they meant. At twenty years old, I couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t fathom how they reflected asides from some of Western literature’s classic texts. In The Iliad, the abuse of women is common but often vague and secondary. Offhand, Agamemnon prom- ises one of his soldiers “a woman, who will go up into the same bed with you.” Women like Briseis, who is captured by Achilles and made a concubine, are traded and exchanged as chattel. Homer’s poem is trig- gered by Menelaus’s attempt to capture a kidnapped woman, Helen, but most of the poem focuses on the men and their fights. In Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece,” based on the classical Roman story, Lucrece commits suicide after Tarquin rapes her, which ultimately changes the course of Roman history. In Livy’s history of ancient Rome, Romulus’s men abduct Sabine women and force them into marriage. In Greek mythology, Apollo attempts to seduce Cassandra by giving her the gift of prophesy. After Cassandra rejects his advances, in some versions of the myth, Apollo spits—of course it’s not just spit but a curse—in Cas- sandra’s mouth, which ensures that no one will believe her.

In his poem Robert Hass suggests our connection to this history: the assault and spitting in the woman’s mouth in 1945 echoing an ancient myth. Feminist scholar Susan Brownmiller explains that the male body and its threat as an instrument of assault and rape can put women in “a conscious process of intimidation.” Brownmiller goes further and argues: “One of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men.  Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times.”

See the lady dressed in white—Makes her living late at night 
See the lady dressed in black—Makes her living on her back 
See the lady dressed in blue—Makes her living loving you

For me and for the hundreds of boys marching around Knox—always homesick, missing girlfriends real and imaginary, often so tired we’d fall asleep on rifle ranges—this was just another cadence. Years later, a Vietnam veteran asked me how female soldiers reacted; I told him there were none. During my fifteen weeks at Fort Knox, I saw maybe three female civilians serving food in the chow hall and two female soldiers working in supply. All of us were training for combat positions, M1A1 Tankers: drivers, loaders, gunners, eventually, tank commanders. Some boys would hum that song softly while buffing the barracks floor late at night. Even years after Basic, I’d find myself walking through a grocery store, driving down a freeway, humming, See the lady dressed in blue…

Eventually, I removed the screaming women phrases from my manu- script. Sometime during my reading of A Woman in Berlin, I figured out, reluctantly, that I was those steps. That was me. As I read about this woman and her companions and the many afters when the soldiers would leave the apartment and she would, again and again, be alone with what had happened, I instinctually felt that that was not me. I was with those soldiers. I was the one leaving, like I had many times. I had never—I could never—know what it was like to be in a home after we, the dozen or so soldiers, had walked out, our boots and rifles and gear and scent all vanishing into the dark but, perhaps: all of it, all of us, remained in those homes as American ghosts. Sometimes, you can be someone’s nightmare and not even know it. If I had stayed, maybe hidden in a closet or an empty corridor, I imagine I would have heard the women cry and wail after we left. I imagine they’d hold each other and maybe one of them might yell about how much she hated us, hated me. I imagine, maybe, one of them, so exhausted from the shaking and crying and fear, would take one deep breath and go and pour a glass of water, pour it and bring it out to one of the women still crying, dried out, tired. Maybe one of the women takes out, from under a couch cushion we’d overlooked, a Kalashnikov and waits by the door. I do not think they would sleep. I do not think they would sleep the same for some time, if ever again. I imagine one of those women, perhaps the bravest one, slowly creeping around her own house, checking every corner, every space under a bed or behind a curtain, opening each door in each room to make sure all those men are gone.

Read more from Issue 18.1.