You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.
Sympathy for Lynndie England
You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.
3 thoughts on “Sympathy for Lynndie England”
Comments are closed.