by Mike Ferner

All last week I had a rare opportunity – to join several impressive speakers on the “Bring Them Home Now” tour’s northern route. Al Zappala, whose son was killed in Iraq last year; Tammara Rosenleaf, whose husband is due to deploy to Iraq this fall; Stacy Bannerman, whose husband has already served a tour in Iraq; Carlos Arredondo, whose son was killed during a second tour in Iraq; Elliott Adams, former Army paratrooper in Viet Nam; and two Iraq war veterans: former Marine, Michael Hoffman, and Cody Camacho, former Army Specialist.

At each stop I was with them: Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Albany, Amherst, and Boston, we explained what motivated us to be on the tour. We condemned the war and ongoing occupation. We urged people to attend the massive demonstrations planned for September 24-26 in Washington, D.C.

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD - What is the most common thing moms do? Take care of their kids?

That’s what Susan Galleymore was doing when I met her. The uncommon thing was that she’d traveled halfway around the world, to Iraq, to take care of her son. Nick is a U.S. Army Ranger, an occupation generally regarded as pretty rugged, or at least not likely to include a mother’s personal touch.

A project manager from California, this South African native may have missed her calling as a psychologist. Years ago, she developed a serious interest in what’s now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), because of her brothers’ service in the South African Army, and from encounters with South African Zionists after the Six-day War. She mentioned PTSD, and with a mother’s steely resolve, vowed, “I’m not going to lose my son to that.”

Over many glasses of tea at a Central Baghdad caf�, Galleymore described her anxiousness for her son, and her project, called “Motherspeak,” relating the anxieties of mothers on all sides of the Iraq war.

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD — Directly across the Tigris River from the offices of Al-Mada newspaper sit some of the most heavily bombed hulks of presidential palaces and government buildings from the U.S. invasion of last year. On this side of the river, concrete blast walls and razor wire extend past the paper’s offices located on Abu Nuwas Street in central Baghdad.

Zuhair Al-Jezairy, assistant managing editor, ignores the scenery as he escorts his guest past a small parking area into a modest courtyard dotted with palm trees. Sitting on the back porch of a gracious, 100 year-old house renovated into newsrooms and offices, he explained the logistics of publishing a morning daily in Iraq.

“We depend on car travel to distribute the paper,” he says, after confirming with his circulation manager that the workday begins at 3:30am for the four drivers. “We take first to the central Baghdad distribution center, and then to other main cities-from Basra in the south to Mossul in the north, all by 10:00.” He acknowledged this schedule routinely results in speeding violations and “last month two accidents.”

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

[Note: This article begins a series of reports titled “War of Terrorism.” While writing the essay, “Terror by Another Name,” I realized that we apply this most potent term in the American political vocabulary very unevenly. We define terrorism as tactics used against us, but deny that it applies to our own actions taken to purposely and unmistakably instill terror. Our denial is compounded daily when the U.S. government promotes and the media report news from a “War on Terrorism.” Our “War of Terrorism” deserves its due.]

ABU HISHMA, IRAQ - This is the farm village that Cliff Kindy, leader of the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT), refers to as the “razor wire place.” It’s actually a small town, around half of which the U.S. Army has unrolled concertina razor wire, and completed the effect with a checkpoint and curfew. Six CPT members are returning for an update from the residents on the latest U.S. raids and detentions.

On the 30-mile trip from Baghdad, the city falls away as we drive into open countryside. Approaching Abu Hishma, we pass a small house about 150 feet from the road that is now a pile of rubble. Our interpreter, Sattar, said the house was destroyed because “it was too close to the road and coalition forces destroy it.”

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD - If a “rogue nation” or swarthy men with foreign accents did it, we know what we’d call it. What the world’s most powerful military did to the village of Abou Siffa must be called the same thing: terrorism.

A small citrus grove was the last stop on our tour of this farming hamlet on the Tigris River, 30 miles north of Baghdad and Mohammed Al Taai wanted to give us a gift of fruit. I put the two oranges he gave me in my right coat pocket. In the left clinked two spent shell casings I’d just found on the ground that came from a 25mm gun mounted on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. We listened to the story of how the U.S. military came to Abou Siffa three times in one month, leaving a terrorized community in its wake.

“On December 16, at 2:00 am, on a rainy night, all the houses in this village, about two dozen, were surrounded by U.S. troops in tanks and humvees. They surrounded the fields of the farmers by tanks and they destroyed the fences of the fields,” Mohammed tells the six people from Christian Peacemaker Teams who have come to document detainees’ stories.