Reality Check

Behind the lines, the body bags arrive

James Meek in Al Qadisiyah province sees how the US army is dealing with the dead

Friday March 28, 2003
The Guardian

Heavy, black, slightly shiny fabric, the kind they use for expensive extreme sports gear; a zip running round the sides; and three carrying loops. It's about two feet by six, flat like a giant wallet, unless it's full, of course. This is the 2003 body bag.
They were unpacking them and folding them out yesterday at a US Marine supply halt in the desert, to receive the corpses of the 23 dead Iraqis who died in a battle on Tuesday.

Staff Sergeant Eric Anderson, of the marines' mortuary affairs section, was in charge. Away from journalists, he had already bagged and dispatched a senior Marine officer who, the previous night, had been accidentally run over and killed by a marine armoured amphibious vehicle.

When mortuary affairs got the body of a US service person, he said, they were already certified dead. "We annotate their personal effects, place them in pouches, take the remains, treat them with the utmost respect and evacuate them back to the States."

A full procedure had been worked out in advance for the far more numerous Iraqi dead, frozen in peaceful attitudes and sprayed with a fine layer of mud at the bottom of the ditch, like latter-day terracotta warriors some modern emperor was taking with him to the grave. Except that they were real people, lives stopped before their time.

"Originally our plan was to stage them all in a centralised area, go through and find their identification, get a translator to annotate their names, and that was going to go to civil affairs," said Sgt Anderson.

"We were going to make a list of those who had ID, of those who did not have ID, keep the two categories apart."

It didn't happen. The tactical situation, as the sergeant put it, didn't allow it. Nor did the burial of the Iraqis, on their right shoulders, with their heads pointing towards Mecca, in the Muslim manner.

The sound of birdsong and the sound of zips while the mortuary men were at work were regularly interrupted by the sound of B52 strikes up ahead, and by the sound of missiles from Cobra gunships striking suspected Iraqi positions just a few miles down the road.

At one point, the Cobras were flying overhead every 15 minutes or so, as they fired their missiles then returned to a forward base to reload.

The great bureaucratic system for processing the Iraqi dead had been shelved, and they were simply being concentrated in one part of the ditch in the hope that the military bureaucrats would catch up with them later and somehow dispose of them.

"All the information is passing through the chain of command and the right people, in the right places, will know," said Sgt Anderson.

It is living Iraqis who are hindering the proper burial of dead ones. In the morning, a medic with a green ledger marked CASH ticked off the names of seven injured soldiers, a mixture of marines and Iraqis, as Blackhawk helicopters evacuated them from the base.

Wounded


They had been wounded in one of the firefights which are crackling up and down the routes the US military is trying to secure to supply its units as they advance towards Baghdad.

The Iraqi attacks are failing to kill many Americans or even damage their vehicles. But they are slowing the advance, as convoys halt while ambush areas are saturated with US fire from aircraft, helicopters, tanks and artillery.

US forces could move faster, but only at the risk of exposing their fuel tankers, ammunition trucks and food and water supplies to continued harrying and greater loss at the hands of Iraqi fighters.

The supply unit the Guardian was with travelled a few miles north yesterday, only to have to return to its starting point after coming under light fire. No one was hurt and none of the vehicles was hit, but it was enough to make commanders call in aviation.

"What probably happened was that they [the Iraqis] waited till the tanks and heavier vehicles went by and then shot at the thinner skinned vehicles," said Colonel John Pomfret, commander of the unit, which is designed to keep marines supplied a few miles behind the front line.

"The enemy's using guerrilla-like tactics to slow our advance. It's a tough road if you have to clear it mile by mile."

Nor does clearing an area and moving forward mean that the attacks will stop. The supply unit came under sporadic mortar fire overnight. Since the Iraqis so far have not fired more than a handful of shells at a time, they haven't hit anything.

"We cleared this area and they snuck in and fired some mortars," said Col Pomfret. "They didn't hit anybody, but it slows the advance ... it's harassment, but the question is, do you risk full ammunition trucks? I don't think we're being cautious. I think we're being deliberate. What we don't want to do is have the rear area insecure."

Out on the sand wall overlooking the ditch where the dead Iraqis were, Corporal Matthew Filbeck was sat behind a .5 calibre machine gun. "Last night we could see the mortars leaving the tubes and it was like 'Thoog! Thoog!'" he said. "There were probably about three or four. We were still trying to dig in, and it didn't help. It made us dig a little bit faster."

On Cpl Filbeck's helmet was written: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

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