crossed the river from Basra, trailing behind convoys of military trucks carrying bridge-building equipment – the Iraqis had yet to cross the Iranian Karun river north of Khorramshahr – and headed into the blistering, white desert towards the Iranian border post at Shalamcheh. I overtook dozens of T-62 tanks and Russian-made armour and trucks piled with soldiers, all of whom obligingly gave us two-finger victory signs. The air thumped with the sound of heavy artillery, and on a little hill in the desert I came across the wrecked Iranian frontier station, stopped the car and gingerly walked inside. I was in Iran, occupied Iran. No problem with visas now, I thought. It’s always an obscure thrill to enter a country with an invading army, knowing how furious all those pious little visa officers would be – those who kept me waiting for hours in boiling, tiny rooms, the perspiration crawling through my hair – if they could see me crossing their borders without their wretched, indecipherable stamps in my passport. Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini had been ritually defaced on the walls of Shalamcheh frontier station and a large pile of handwritten ledgers were strewn over the floor.
I have a fascination for the documents that blow through the ruins of war, the pages of letters home and the bureaucracy of armies and the now useless instructions on how to fire ground-to-air missiles that flutter across the desert and cover the floors of roofless factories. These books were written in Persian and recorded the names and car numbers of Iraqis and Iranians crossing the border at Shalamcheh. The last entry was on 21 September 1980, just a day before the Iraqi invasion. So although the Iraqis claimed that the war began on 4 September, they had allowed travellers – including their own citizens – to transit the border quite routinely until the very eve of their invasion.
An American camera-crew had pulled up outside the wreckage of the building and were dutifully filming the desecrated pictures of Khomeini, their reporter already practising his ‘stand-upper’. ‘Iraq’s army smashed its way across the Iranian frontier more than a week ago and now stands poised outside the strategic cities of Khorramshahr and Abadan …’ Yes, cities were always ‘strategic’ – at least, they always were on television – and armies must always ‘smash’ through borders and stand ‘poised’ outside cities. It was as if there was only one script for each event. Soon, no doubt, the Iraqis would be ‘fighting their way’ towards Khorramshahr, or ‘poised’ to enter Khorramshahr, or ‘claiming victory’ over the Iranian defenders.
But who was I to talk? My CBC tape recorder hung over my shoulder and behind the border post stood a battery of Russian 155-mm guns, big beasts whose barrels pointed towards Khorramshahr and whose artillery captain walked up to us smiling and asked politely if we would like his guns to open fire. For a millisecond, for just that little fraction of temptation, I wanted to agree, to say yes, I would like them to fire, just the moment I had finished adjusting my microphone; and the captain was already turning to give the order to fire when a moral voice shouted at me – I had just imagined the tearing apart of an unknown body – and I ran after him and said, no, no, he should not fire, not for me, not under any circumstances.
But of course, I found a basin in the sand and sat down in it and leaned on the lip of the hole with my microphone on the edge and I waited as a desert gale blew over me and the sand caught in my hair and nose and ears and then, when the first artillery piece much later blasted a shell towards the Iranian lines, I switched on the recorder. I still have the cassette tape. The guns were dark against the sky as they bellowed away and I kept thinking of Wilfred Owen’s description of ‘the long black arm about to curse’. And there were twenty, thirty long black arms in front of me, more still behind the curtains of sand. And there, I recorded, unwittingly, my own future loss of hearing, 25 per cent of the hearing in my left ear which I would never recover. That very moment is recorded on the cassette:
We can see the gunnery officer just in front of us through this desert dust storm, feeding shells into the breeches of these big 155-mm Russian-made guns and preparing to cover their ears. The guns are so loud, they are leaving my ears singing afterwards – BANG – There’s another one just gone off, a great tongue of fire about 20 feet – BANG – in front of it – BANG – They’re going off all around me at the moment, an incredible sight, this heavy artillery firing right in the middle of a – BANG – there’s another one, right in the middle of this dusty, windswept desert.
I can still hear that gun’s distant echo in my ears as I write these words, a piercing tinnitus that can drive me crazy at night or when I’m tired or irritable or trying to listen to music or can’t hear someone talking to me at dinner.
I turned on Iraqi radio. Further Iranian territory was about to ‘fall’ and Iraqi generals were announcing a ‘last push’ into Khorramshahr. Five days ago, the inhabitants of Basra were content to listen to news of the Iraqi advance on television, but now traders and shopkeepers in the city chose to supplement their knowledge by asking foreign journalists for information about the war. No one thought Iranian shells would still be falling on Iraqi soil this long after the invasion.
That evening, we were invited to tour Basra District Hospital, a bleak building of tiles and pale blue paint, a barrack-like edifice whose uniformity was relieved only by the neat flower-beds outside, the energetic doctors and, more recently, by the ubiquitous presence of Dr Saadun Khalifa Al-Tikriti, Iraq’s deputy health minister. He was saluted and clapped on the back wherever he went, a short, friendly fellow with a mischievous smile and a large moustache. Everyone greeted Dr al-Tikriti with exaggerated warmth, and when the minister made a joke, gales of laughter swept down the marble corridors. Basra hospital had taken almost all the city’s five hundred wounded this past week but al-Tikriti had more than just his patients on his mind when he toured the wards. Foreign press correspondents were greeted with a short, sharp speech about the evils of civilian bombing, and the doctor stopped smiling and thumped his little fist on the table when he claimed that the Iranian air force deliberately killed Iraqi children.
He strode into a children’s ward, a long, curtained room where tiny, awe-struck faces peered from beneath swaths of bandages while silent mothers stared with peasant intensity at the white-coated doctors. ‘Take, for example, this little girl,’ said the good doctor, pausing for a moment beside a child with beautiful round brown eyes and curled black hair. ‘She is only three years old and she has lost a leg.’ With these words, al-Tikriti seized the sheets and swept them from the child to reveal that indeed her left leg was nothing but a bandaged stump. The little girl frowned in embarrassment at her sudden nakedness but al-Tikriti had already moved on, preceded by a uniformed militiaman. In civilian life, the militiaman was a hospital dresser but his camouflage jacket and holstered pistol provided a strange contrast to the hospital as he clumped around the beds, especially when we reached the end of the second children’s ward.
For there in a darkened corner lay a boy of five, swaddled in bandages, terribly burned by an Iranian incendiary bomb and clearly not far from death. There were plastic tubes in his nostrils and gauze around his chest and thighs, and his eyes were creased with pain and tears, the doors to a small private world of torment that we did not wish to imagine. The boy had turned his face towards his pillow, breathing heavily; so the militiaman moved forward, seized the little bandaged head and twisted it upwards for the inspection of the press. The child gasped with pain but when a journalist protested at this treatment, he was told that the militiaman was medically trained.
Dr al-Tikriti then briskly ushered us to the next bed and the child was left to suffer in grace, having supposedly proved a measure of Iranian iniquity that he would certainly never comprehend. An air raid siren growled and there was, far away, a smattering of anti-aircraft fire. There were other wards, of Bangladeshi seamen caught by strafing Iranian jets, thin men who scrabbled with embarrassment for their sheets when Dr al-Tikriti stripped the bedding from their naked bodies, a new generation of amputated, legless beggars for the streets of Dacca. There were oil workers caught in the cauldron of petroleum tank explosions, roasted faces staring at the ceiling, and for one terrible moment the doctors began to take off the bandage round a man’s face. Al-Tikriti smiled brightly. ‘Some of these people speak English,’ he said, gesturing at the huddles on the beds. ‘Why not ask them what happened?’
No one took up the offer but Iraq’s deputy health minister was already ushering his guests to the training hospital by the Shatt