SOUNDTRACK OF THE OCCUPATION, Part I
Over the next few months, Studs Ford, who served in Iraq from 2004-2005, will use music to reflect on his deployment.
In the summer of 2004, the air in central Baghdad was aswirl with particulate. The fine dust that blew in from Anbar became coated with soot as it traversed the city, floating through the oily black plumes of trash fires and the jet-fuel exhaust of a thousand armored vehicles. Atomized debris from explosions added to the mix, along with gunpowder and, now and then, the fine dust of blood. This foul mixture attached itself to the instrument case belonging to the first-chair trumpeter of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra as he walked down Yafa street toward the Convention Center, past a row of queued cars, a large bomb crater in the middle of the intersection, a gaggle of Iraqi security guards, and a parked Abrams main battle tank. At least, this is how I like to think the residue got there. After the trumpet case popped hot on our chemical swabs, I took him into a small sandbagged room outside the convention center for an interview.
“Do you know why I brought you into this room?” I asked him through a translator.
“No.”
“There is explosive powder on your trumpet case.” I asked him how the powder got there, how it might have gotten there, why he was coming into the Iraqi Convention Center, home of the Coalition Press Information Center and “High Value Asset #3,” theatre-wide.
“I play with the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra,” he said. “We rehearse today; every Tuesday. You can come see.”
At this point I apologized for the inconvenience and sent him on his way. I was a music major myself, and decided to check up on him and catch some of the rehearsal. I dumped my armor and rifle next to my cot in the company bay, strapped on a sidearm, and made my way up to the third floor of the convention center.
I was expecting a larger number from the impressively named Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, but there were only about forty players warming up on stage. The first-chair trumpet gave me a long glance. The holster on my thigh made it hard to slide into the row-seats.
The conductor looked purposefully out at the ground and tapped the stand with his baton. The orchestra continued noodling and shuffling around. The conductor tapped again. In a few minutes they would be playing Schubert’s unfinished. I would prop my right boot up on my left knee so that the Beretta didn’t poke into my leg, close my eyes as I always do at concerts, and listen. I would think of a moment a few days before when I was leading a foot patrol though the Karada district, a part of town that used to be full of Iraq’s refined elite. The patrol had moved down Soudun Street in two staggered columns, one on each side of the road, each soldier keeping ten yards between him and the next man, maintaining 100% awareness, but mainly watching his assigned sector. We had walked past a shuttered fine furnishings retailer and a still-functioning bakery. A ten foot tall black iron replica of the Eiffel tower added some verve to the thoroughfare. The heat was vise-like, and the sweat that soaked our jackets would leave behind big white deposits of salt that could be picked off in little crustlets, later on, in the air-conditioning of the company bay. I would wave to the locals and call in location updates to my Bradley so that we’d have quick armored backup in case anything exciting happened.
I would be thinking of this in the next few minutes, as I listened to the orchestra play the Schubert in a manner respectable for a small group sight-reading a piece, but which unfortunately could have been improved upon by the university symphony I’d left behind nine months before, even though these Iraqi musicians appeared to be long-time, serious players—players, you could tell by the way they noodled while the conductor stood there tapping, who individually were solid and accomplished and confident from years of post-graduate playing. The reason I was thinking of that particular patrol while sitting there in an empty theatre listening to the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra play some limp and unfocused Schubert was because of something one of my corporals said to me as we took a short halt at a corner next to a tall apartment building. I had the map out and was penciling in the location of the Eiffel tower for future reference when out of a high-up apartment window came a heavy trash bag. It rustled as it picked up speed on its trip earthward and landed with a loud, wet sound on what seemed to be a growing parapet of trash that was piled up all around the apartment complex, with the highest parts of the piles located directly under the apartment windows. The area had been a kind of West Village of Baghdad and its inhabitants must have been somehow wealthy or connected enough to score an apartment there. It now reeked of roasting trash.
The whole patrol was kneeling and facing outward in a large, rough circle, as was our SOP for tactical halts. And as the newest bag rolled down the small trash mountain and settled on the sidewalk, Corporal Frank “The Tank” Hoffman of Riverside, CA, spit out some Kodiak wintergreen and shook his head slowly, side to side. It became Hoffman’s kind of signature catch-phrase, whipped out at least once a week in that depressed, fucked-up city in the second year after the invasion when we found Iraqi soldiers fast asleep at their guard posts or witnessed screaming matches between local police over whom we had to drag a stinking corpse to the morgue.
The conductor stood there, tapping, as forty accomplished-seeming players kept honking or sawing away, ignoring him for probably a good twenty seconds. At that point in the tour it was less disappointment than resignation that I felt, a sentiment captured well by Hoffman’s little catch-phrase which we thought at the time summed up accurately the state of things. The post-invasion future of the city had finally taken shape and become visible and the slow slide into chaos and blood was obvious to everyone who figured that they knew something about Iraq. We, just like the Iraqis, figured that if there was going to be a turnaround it wasn’t happening that year and so there was nothing to do except stand out in the intersection as if we weren’t ever leaving, and cross another day off the wall calendar, trying to keep the peace and everyone’s dignity at least slightly intact, but mostly concerned with keeping one another alive. “These people are beyond help,” Hoffman had said, to which I cheerfully replied that it felt good to be relieved of that particular responsibility.
By Studs Ford
