1984



 The growing rhythym of the rotor blades has a comforting effect, the gathering din slowly dampening the sound of the war. The crash of the artillery becomes a dull thimp, the wind shears away from the blades, the first nudge off the ground and the sudden rise above the sand and it is the most normal thing in the world. We are immortal. Our helicopter moves round, faces east, then west then east again and then turns at 180 degrees to the ground, levels off and streaks between the artillery. And as we pass through the gun line - our door remains wide open because of the heat - there is a crack-crack-crack of sound and long pink tulips of fire grow out of the gun muzzles, a barrage as beautiful as it is awesome.. One of these big flowers moves ineorably past the starboard side of our chopper and for a moment I think I feel its heat. It hangs for a moment in the air, this magnificent blossom, until we overtake it and a line of palms curls beneath us and then the Shatt al-Arab, so close that the skids of the chopper are only a foot off the water.

 

I sit up and squint out of the pilots window. I can see a smudge on the horizon, a black rime across the paleness of the river and a series of broken needles that stand out on the far shoreline. The water is travelling below us at more than a hundred miles an hour. We are the fastest water-skiers in the world, the rotors biting through the heat, sweeping across this great expanse of river; we are safe in our coccoon, angels who can never fall from heaven, who can only marvel and try to remember that we are only human. We fly through the smoke of two burning oil tanks and then Labelle bangs me on the foot with his fist and points to a mountain of mud and filth that the helicopter is now circling and onto which it gingerly, almost carelessly sets down. 'Go, go, go!' the pilot shouts and we jump out into the great wet mass of shell-churned liquid clay that tears of our shoes when we try to move and which sucks at our feet and prevents us even moving clear of the blades when the chopper whups back into the air and leaves us in a noisy kind of silence, Labelle and I trying to hold our trousers up, the mullah's robes caked with muck and then, as the chopper turns fly-like in the sky, we feel the ground shaking...



 

'War against war' And The Fast Train To Paradise,
from The Great War For Civilisation by John Pilger