Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

11:56 P.M._

The food ordered by Kold was delivered, and he took a break, shoveling down pizza and salad from a plastic container with unexpected enthusiasm. The Lawyer ate a salmon sandwich, and, as he drank coffee, asked:

“Mr. Kold, you told me about your patriotic feelings just now. Doesn’t it seem to you that your picture of the world is a little… idealistic?’

Kold wiped his oily lips with a napkin and nodded as if to say, I got your question. But he took his time with the answer. Five long minutes passed before finally he said:

“Idealism is a kind of protective reaction. That’s why so many teenagers are idealists. Cynicism comes with life experience.”

“The dispute between the physicist and the lyric poet ended with the victory of cynics,” the Lawyer smiled sadly.

“What?” Kold didn’t understand.

“Don’t pay any attention. It is our Russian, or to be exact, Soviet meme. If everything goes well, you will have time to study this and many other similar inventions of national folklore.”

“I’m ready to go on,” Kold told.

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On the bus taking new recruits to the base, we at first exchanged glances, then began to scoff.

A Latino by the nickname of El Gato, a big guy in a green shirt, reported to all the bus in broken English that the writing was on the wall: Saddam had it coming and it’s now all over.

A guy in a sleeveless leather jacket, a typical redneck, antsy and angry, lisped through his broken tooth something about a steak up the ass, and a couple of blacks, brothers I think, gave an impromptu rap on an army topic, with the refrain: ‘All day long you’ll be guzzlin’ dirt; at night you’ll be scrubbin’ the toilets!’ On the whole, it was cheerful, and the accompanying sergeant with a plastic hand had the most fun.

At last, the bus drove in through the gate of the Parris Island military base where I would have three months military training to achieve the proud rank of private 1^st class and be deployed to Iraq as part of a brigade of US marines to restore democracy and justice there.

Parris Island, also called the ‘recruiting depot’ brought together all recruits from areas to the east of Mississippi, while those from the west trained at the base in San Diego, California.

The bus rolled on for some time through the base past mesh fences, army barracks and inscriptions: ‘Warning! Restricted area! Sentries will open fire without warning!!’.

The bus came to a halt, the doors opened, and we were ordered to leave. For some reason, the bus had stopped not by the barracks or headquarters, but in the middle of a huge puddle in a yard. Several officers and sergeants in raincoats and gumboots began to yank us skilfully from the bus and shove us face-down towards the dirt. The one-armed corporal was laughing crazily in the front seat. Then we were forced to do push ups so that our faces dipped into the dirty water. While we were doing push ups, we were given a lecture about discipline in the American military, whether we have rights (no!) and what will happen to us if we’re disobedient (everything, up to the death penalty).

Then there was a communal shower and a hair salon where we were cut under the cobbles. In the dining room, we were given ten minutes to push down puttylike porridge, beans and potatoes, and sent back out to the yard to do push ups. So my first day in the military began.

In the evening, after the command ‘Hit the sack’, I dropped on to my bed and fell into a dream and if anyone had asked at that moment how to ping a computer into a local area network from another subnet, I would send his ass to hell – according to the local lexicon.

We were allowed to sleep for three hours, then roused, of course, with curses and kicks, then driven up the hill behind the base and forced to run under the moon and stars on a dusty road until dawn. Two of us were ill and the redneck that had been hysterical on the bus – his name was Ken – threw up bile.

In the morning, exhausted and hungry, we talked with the chaplain. He was a captain, already elderly, with grey temples and rows of medals.

The chaplain told us that we are all now private-recruits and will be up to the end of the initial training course. If we have problems, complaints or claims, we have to address him and only him. Exceptions are cases when a soldier feels a threat to health. In this case you go to the physicians – the medical block is to the right of the gate.

The chaplain also explained that the sergeants’ and officers’ job is to turn us civil marshmallows into hardtack. They have the right to shout at us and call us any word, but for curses connected with sexual and racial identity. Sergeants are allowed to touch military personnel, but only in strictly defined places (here someone even found strength to laugh), and only during the training process.

The chaplain once again summarized our duties and what is forbidden in the military. We were required to submit to sergeants and officers in everything. Anything else, including unnecessary questions, was simply forbidden.

A fight between recruits, the chaplain emphasized, would be punished by imprisonment for up to ten years. And the sergeant in whose division there was a fight would also be punished – if his soldiers have the strength to fight, he has trained them badly.

‘From now on and for the next three months, the sergeants headed by Master Sergeant Westerhausen will become for your parents, older brothers, teachers, mentors and all other people who are above you,’ the chaplain said and added: ‘I have already spoken about claims, but I think I should tell you it has not been in the glorious traditions of our base to complain since the landing on Omaha Beach. Wimps and whiners have no place in the US marines!’

…Master Sergeant Abraham Westerhausen was six foot seven inches tall, and weighed no less than a hundred kilos. Add in Boris Karlov’s physiognomy, a closely shaven skull with the tattoo of a hornet, and pack all this into camouflage and heavy combat boots – and you get ‘Devil Hornet’, the scourge and damnation of all newcomers to the military base…

Our day began with his ear-splitting: ‘Get up, bastards! Time to air your shitty asses!’, and came to an end with at least as loud: ‘Hit the sack, shit-tards! And make it so silent that when Rear Admiral Bird farts in Fort Knox, I can hear it here!”

Why the long deceased Admiral Bird passed gas, and in Fort Knox, none of us knew, but naturally nobody ventured to ask Sergeant Hornet, as we called Westerhausen.

His favourite entertainment was to order a recruit to: ‘Turn around! Attention!’ and then kick just under their tailbone as they tried to turn on the spot. The pain is so excruciating that the recruit begins to hop. So Hornet shouts: ‘Attention!’ – and how can he stand to attention when he’s writhing and hopping? So he doesn’t obey an order from a senior and collects a punishment in which Hornet was a master. Washing toilet bowls or cleaning wheels on combat vehicles is just child’s play compared with Hornet’s favourite: ‘Hunting for a dollar’.

The hunt was like this: the master sergeant threw a dollar coin into a ten-foot deep cement pool located near the obstacle course. The guilty recruit had to dive into the pool with a compressed air hose clamped to his teeth, then come up with the dollar in his hand. That was bad enough in clean water but the pool was filled with sewage.

Altogether, I remember six guys from our platoon ‘hunting’. Three ended up in the hospital with intestinal infections and were transferred to other divisions on the base because their preparation term was increased. And two made complaints to the chaplain and were moved away altogether, and as they went to the bus with their bags they could hardly walk – the chaplain hadn’t said for nothing that they don’t love complainers in Parris Island.

Well, the sixth who went ‘hunting for a dollar’ was that fine big man El Gato who had threatened Saddam Hussein. He couldn’t find the coin in the pool and when Hornet pushed him into the shit with his foot for the third time, El Gato grabbed the master sergeant by the boot and dragged him in too.

There was a big trial, the military police came, and El Gato was convicted of attacking the master sergeant, and sent to prison in Fort Leavenworth for a year. After bathing in shit the Hornet went absolutely mad, and at every chance he told us what the jailers in Leavenworth would do with El Gato.

‘He’ll become a girl on the first evening. In a week his asshole will so be fucking big he can sit down on a bottle of apple cider and not squeal. Understood, bastards?!’ shouted Hornet before lights out.

For all that, I wouldn’t say service was difficult for me or that I felt some serious discomfort. Of course, it was heavy physically, but morally I had a rest because the shouting of the sergeants and their flow of words was so primitive and plain that it provoked no emotional reaction – some ethnographic interest, but no more.

And I also really liked the fact that in the military you don’t need to think of the future at all. It is entirely predetermined for years ahead according to the contract. Here, others think for me, following rank.

Of course, it is also interesting to any man to try cunning stuff and accessories not in the normal arsenal of a civilian.

Once we were familiar with everything we had a right to use during military operations, I remember, being rather confused when it turned out that besides field and parade uniforms there was also daily and special ‘evening’ kit. The same was true of the arsenal. I understood that marines have machine guns, grenades, pistols and bayonets, but why do only police officers have a bludgeon and non-lethal weapons such as rubber bullets, stun grenades with CS tear gas or Dazzlers?

But these questions were rhetorical. The military doesn’t like curiosity and if I ask a sergeant about the bludgeon or CS, he’d just reply ‘You’d have it if you needed it’ or ‘Fifty push-ups in the pigsty.’ That was the hunting pool by the obstacle course.

What else do I remember from that time? My relations with my companions never changed – because I never had any. We came from very different layers in our society. You know that more than fifty percent of American marines weren’t born in the USA? And the fact that half of them can’t take the hardships and privations of military service means they break off the contract and join the ranks of criminals simply because they have no place else to go? But this is just statistics, and in general those in my platoon were the typical dregs of society, human garbage, slag and scum.

On the whole, they saw the military as a chance to escape from the ‘nomadic city’ from smelly trailers and equally smelly farms, and from the colored suburbs where human life doesn’t cost a cent and people, normal people I mean, don’t want to live.

The military gave them the chance to earn money, buy status and citizenship, and after contract completion collect a pension or maybe go on to a military career – to pass exams in a non-commissioned officer’s school, for example.

I wanted to serve our great country because I saw in it the meaning of life for each normal citizen. Ok, I understand that this sounds a little pompous, but at that time, after college and my encounter with the guys from the Garage, this is how I really felt and I was ready to go to any spot on the globe to assert the right of people for true democracy and freedom.

By the way, my relationship with weapons never really developed. At home, there were several cases of guns and rifles, since Pa liked to do some shooting – all his friends too. Both Mom and Judith, by the way, quite often went with them to the National Rifle Association training ground and fired at targets or just bottles.

Twice was enough for me. The first time I went the rifle bounced off my shoulder because I didn’t hold the butt firmly enough, and so the bullet hit a light. The second time, I was bitten by a dog, and Pa had to take me to hospital.

In the military, I shot badly, and was very slow at assembling and disassembling the Colt M4A1 automatic, and so regularly collected punishments from Hornet and threats to send me ‘hunting for a dollar’.

Meanwhile, our guys in Iraq had already taken Baghdad, but Saddam went on the run and his soldiers adopted guerrilla tactics. Our training came to an end. One day I saw a civilian car on the parade ground in front of headquarters – the same car as that Mr. Jenkins who gave a ride to me and spoke about heroism on a bench in the park. The occupant went inside and Master Sergeant Westerhausen was called so urgently he practically ran across the parade-ground.

We were cleaning weapons under the canopy, next to headquarters, and we had a clear view of the goings on. The guys began to speculate at once what the civilian cone was doing here and why our Devil-Hornet needed him.

I stood up to see better if it was the Baseball player or not, but Sergeant Gross, whose breath stank like an old drain, shouted that he would drive a ramrod up my ass if I didn’t get back to the table and clean my gun at once.

So I didn’t learn who it was for certain. Soon the unexpected guest left, and the sergeant returned and for some reason looked at me as if I had become a dead man then recovered and lunged to strangle him.

The day ended without further incident. We were driven up the hill. There was training with inflatable landing boats, then dinner, an hour of hand-to-hand combat which I successfully shirked, having gone to clean car racks, then a further hour of personal time, then lights out.

But we weren’t going to get any sleep that night. At one fifteen, Hornet and other sergeants roused us sharply. The task was simple: going through the Big Jack obstacle course in full gear.

What does that mean? Only that you put on all your ammunition, a bullet-proof vest, harness, a helmet, loaded weapons, means of chemical protection, and a machine gun – and then you run through ditches filled with dirt and stinking water, along booms and bars, climb the Destroyed Ladder, the Serpent and the Monkey ladder, you clamber over stone and wooden walls of various heights, you slither under an electric wire, you jump over ditches with shit in the bottom, you go down tunnels, you shoot at targets, you run through dirt, you fall down on command, you stand up, you put on a gas mask, you run again, and all this under fire of military weapons, in flame and smoke.

At the end of Big Jack, you’re sweating madly, your boots are squelching, your hands and legs are quivering, and your heart is beating over one hundred and twenty beats per minute. But nobody will let you rest because you need to clean your weapon, get your ammunition in shape, and get ready for the morning parade.

To say that we didn’t love Big Jack means to say nothing. We didn’t even hate it. If there was a word for a stronger emotion, maybe, but I don’t know it.

And so they kicked us out of the barracks, mustered us and sent us running to the strip. There was already a sheer hell of burning, smoking and blowing up.

Master Sergeant Hornet raised a hand and shouted:

‘Get on with it, you bastards! Faster. Faster! Remember: slackers will envy the dead!’

And we ran…

Somewhere in the Serpent, only a third way through Big Jack, I realized I had no strength left any more. It felt as if my boots were lead, and I had a couple of twenty-kilogram pancakes on my back.

I crept under the wire on my last legs. But I couldn’t jump off in the tunnel, and fell down like a limp sack. There, in the dark, I got my breath back, but the guys following me were already banging their soles on the steel crown of my helmet and I had to twist like a worm in the wet cement pipe to get out upward, then shoot, pull myself on to the Horizontal Rope and take the Destroyed Ladder with a running start to jump in a ditch and get away up the slippery cliff.

The Swing came next. It is something like the Destroyed Ladder, only all the beams are at one height and suspended on chains. In principle, the Swing wasn’t thought of as a difficult element. The main thing here was that your leg didn’t slide off – and if it did, you had to grasp the beam to avoid a fall on to the concrete blocks piled below. They were only four feet down, but they are not heaps of sand, like under the Destroyed Ladder, so no one wanted to fall from the Swing.

I jumped onto the first ‘swing’ and found to my surprise that my weakness had gone. My legs and body seemed to obey me, and the ringing in my ears was not mind-numbing fatigue, but the thunderclaps of explosions.

I remember thinking that this was the notorious ‘second wind’, and I began to scamper along the beams like a squirrel, rejoicing that at last I was becoming a real marine.

Whether in euphoria, or through congenital carelessness, I noticed Sergeant Hornet too late. He emerged from the smoky haze like a demon of evil punishing the ‘sleep of reason’. He glared at me and stuck out a bamboo pole towards the beam on which I was going to land in a fraction of a second. The beam swayed aside, the chains rung out and as though from the outside, I saw my right boot with its ribbed sock sliding from the beam and falling into emptiness. Then afterwards, waving his hands ridiculously, all the rest of private-recruit Joshua Kold followed…

I fell very badly. It is hard to imagine a worse fall. The height I fell from was just enough to ensure I twisted in the air so that I fell at a sharp angle onto the filthy concrete slab. My helmeted head struck first, then my left shoulder, then my hand and then all the rest. Finally, my legs jerked to the lowest point of fall and my shins twisted above my boots in the wrong order on the slab.

Wild pain lashed me like a bicycle chain. My mouth went dry, and my eyes darkened. I became deaf and went blind, lost orientation in space and, like a dying animal, began to twitch desperately. I tried to get up. The doctor in the hospital told me that was a big mistake and seriously worsened my condition.

The pain that shot through me at this attempt was so intense I fainted from shock and only came round in the military hospital in Charleston.

The diagnosis was unfavourable: fracture of both legs with an offset. In the first day several officers from our unit led by the chaplain visited me. They were accompanied by two lawyers.

I was told that it was an accident, and that I should sign a paper agreeing that I had no claims on the powers that be. I was assured that I would receive an insurance payment to cover all expenses for transportation by helicopter and for treatment. I would get compensation and everything would be great.

I hadn’t recovered fully from the effect of the anaesthetics and the comforting medicines I was being drip-fed so I was not really thinking clearly. I managed to mumble something about a pole in the hands of the Sergeant Westerhausen, but no more than that. In reply, the chaplain assured me that it was standard procedure when passing the Swing and that the Master Sergeant fulfilled his duty and naturally, without malice – especially as I had never had any conflict with him during service.

The last argument finished me off. It was airtight, and so I signed their devil’s papers and dropped off. When I woke up next morning, it became clear that in addition I had signed the official report with a request to resign for health reasons.

Lying in the hospital with broken legs, I had suddenly turned from a gallant marine into a helpless being with a urine bag. I thought a great deal about those guys I’d trained with who were now off to Iraq without me.

It was dangerous there. Scorching winds whip across the desert, and marines with machine guns peer from under their helmets in the military convoys that bump along the roads in clouds of dust – squinting into the yellow haze, and every second expecting from somewhere a rocket fired by the mobile Soviet RPG-7 launcher which in Russian slang goes by the unpronounceable name granatomiot. This rocket could come at any time from any direction and pierce the armour of their Humvees. It will burst clean through the emblem representing the globe and anchor over which the fearsome American eagle spreads its wings, and the hot jet stream, hot as the inside of a star, will burn through the metal and reach the ammunition. Then ‘bang!’ and the heavy Humvee will flip over and rip open in the explosion like a can of sardines.

In such a scenario, we were told, the best chance of survival is to be the one manning the machine gun. The chance is scant, but there had been cases were the gunner was blown away from the car by the blast wave to land in the dunes and suffer only a spinal compression fracture.

When I thought about it, looking at the white hospital ceiling and the round lamps with their opaque plafonds, it made me angry. It was such a shame that it made me want to cry. Those guys from my platoon, those rather stupid, uneducated, loutish rednecks and Latinos, black and white, had gone to protect their homeland and were ready to give their lives for it.

Maybe they didn’t even think about it, never thought about it… yet they did it, and deeds will always mean more than words. Words meant nothing. People were judged by what they did, and it turned out that I, Joshua Kold, the one who had signed his contract consciously and joined the military with a point to prove… I wanted to prove first to myself that all are equal in the fight for freedom and democracy, and that in a free country there is no ‘gun meat’, there is no payment in blood for citizenship, there is no caste on national and social grounds… Well…

The result was clear. While my platoon is fighting in the Iraqi deserts against the saddamites… me, the big intellectual, white collar Joshua, I’m lying on a white bedsheet and looking at a white ceiling.

I had proved nothing to anybody. Life had taken me by the scruff of the neck and killed my idea in the form of Master Sergeant Westerhausen. He’d aimed at the head, got my legs – but what’s the difference, the result was achieved.

The first days I was obsessed with the injustice and my own bad luck, constantly, and even at night I couldn’t drive the thoughts from my head. In the special ward for patients with heavy leg injuries where I was lying, there were three more beds, but all empty because no one was interested in breaking their limbs but me.

And so I lay, gritting my teeth with rage and powerlessness, hesitating to press the call key for the nurse because in the afternoon it was a young girl, a mixed race girl with very beautiful lips and eyes like a cat’s.

And so I suffered on, with ringing ears, gripes in my stomach and only when it became absolutely unbearable and spots were whirling in front of eyes did I press the damned button. She came with an astounding dancing gait and undulating hips, and at once said with a deep chest voice, ‘Hi!’, dexterously handed me the urine bag, then delicately turned away to the window to chat on the phone to some Nick. It was meaningless chat, small talk between lovers whiling away the day until the evening when they would merge later in one being groaning with passion and pleasure.

To me, that Nick was for some reason the sergeant from our base – a strong, stately black demigod who’d been through a couple of wars, was confident in himself and what he did.

The nurse – her name was Kelly – was proud for certain that she had such a boyfriend, a white-toothed athlete never at a loss for words, capable of beating off two or three Puerto-Rican addicts/robbers on the street, and as good as a stallion in bed.

I narrowed my eyes, urinated into the urine bag, and listened as Kelly sang into her phone: ‘Da-arling, my honey…’, she cooed, and my face reddened, and my ears reddened, and even my dick seemed to become red, because of the burning shame, rage and offense – for myself, for the world, for the damned Iraqis and Russians, for the redneck Ken and the other guys from my platoon which already was not mine, for that unknown Nick and the beautiful Kelly whose intelligence was probably not much higher than of a monkey’s in a zoo. In a word, for the whole world!

I envied them all! I envied them because it turned out that I, educated and possessing huge knowledge of computers and hacking, in my mature years lie like a helpless doll with broken legs in a hospital while life passes by. And all of them, insignificant small fry whose existence doesn’t make any more sense than the existence of amoebas or cockroaches makes sense, live and feel pleasure, and even bring benefit.

It’s they who fight for democracy, freedom and justice, fuckit, and do what I had dreamed of since that moment I left the damned Garage!

When Kelly carried the urine bag away, I usually fell asleep, but those thoughts remained with me even in my dreams. They were transformed into fancy images, into some whirling dance of cleavers and ridiculous but extraordinary charming beings cheerfully hopping along a wide road through green fields to mountains over which the sun shines. In those dreams I looked like a reptile, a creeping reptile, or even some pathetic worm or caterpillar crawling in the dirt-filled ditch beside the road.

Pa came to see me a few times. He brought a wall TV, a computer and a hi from sister. I asked him whether Mom knew I was in hospital. Pa, in his usual way, answered quickly and directly:

‘There’s no need for her to know. She has no relation to our family.’

But Mom, of course, found a way to meet me, and regularly came with delicious food, but always cautiously, as if I wasn’t in hospital, but in prison and she was doing something illegal.

I set up several news channels on the TV and watched them day and night. And online it was forums and chats where our soldiers in Iraq communicated among themselves. They usually posted photos against a background of the desert or urban landscapes, or looked for acquaintances or told stories, not often funny but terrible in their realness.

Sometimes there are garage rabble – pacifists and anarchists, or just trolls, psychopaths and perverts who derive pleasure from slinging mud at something precious to others.

Those who swore straight off were banned at once, but there were others planting propaganda and talking of the injustice done by ours marines and GIs. Some said that Iraq was a peaceful and even prosperous country, and Saddam Hussein was its legitimate head. Those little fools made me laugh, and I always got deeply involved in discussions and posted the materials about the chemical attacks of saddamites on civilians, and data on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the methods of killing dissidents in the jails of Iraqi counterintelligence.

Some people agreed – there are still some smart people in the world. Someone were dead opposed, saying, I believe in his innocence, and that my arguments are unconvincing. I was very much amused by those who said ‘I believe’ as though it was a question of religion.

But there were also those who didn’t just argue, but tried to prove me wrong. They posted statistical calculations, translations from Arab or even Russian media, but we – me and those real Americans who hang out on forums – understood that all this is blatant propaganda in the spirit of the Cold War, which wasn’t over for these people.

My legs gradually ceased to hurt and began to itch terribly under the plaster. Doctor Gilbert, a fat, grey-haired man with a colonial moustache, told me that this was very good because it meant that the process of healing had started.

‘Josh, my boy,’ he said, as he puffed against his moustache, ‘My grandma always said: if it itches it doesn’t hurt and will heal soon.’

The words of Dr. Gilbert’s grandma helped, of course, but I would have preferred him to base his data on modern medical devices and magnetic resonance tomography.

Still, time passed, and it worked for me, in a sense, and my legs. And everything else went on – the war in which our guys perished, the chat online and the skirmishes with pacifists and anti-Americanists.

And then someone with the username Passerby joined the forum. He wrote little, just short captions. But he posted photos. Lots of them, lots of photos. Of Iraqi settlements and villages, cities. Streets, houses. And corpses. There were a lot, a lot of killed people. Not soldiers, not military. Mostly not men. In Passerby’s photos it was mostly women, old men, children… They were poorly dressed, sprinkled with dust or partially covered by brick crumb and pieces of concrete from blown-up houses. They had perished from the bombings, from the bullets and shells released from our weapons.

They were unplanned losses, but judging by the photos, there was too much. I don’t know if Passerby took those pictures, or someone sent them to him, but one thing was clear – firstly, they were not fake, nor staged, and secondly, something in that war had gone wrong.

Dead children – grey faces with cheeks pierced by splinters, half-closed eyes, blood clotted hair, crooked fingers – it was awful. Shock and, yes, exactly shock – that was the word for what I experienced.

In a war with soldiers, men have to perish; it is their work and their debt, so my old man always said so and I always thought.

When soldiers meet face to face – even if one goes in Humvee armour, while the other is skulking behind a wall with an RPG-7 – it is fair and correct. But when you try to destroy a group of fighters you suppose are in the middle of a residential block in Basra with three hundred ‘saddamitovs’ – no, not marines or GI, but large-calibre shells… they destroy the entire block, leaving a heap of ruins, a concrete medley and bent fittings. It is wrong, unfair…and reminds me of the methods of the Nazis in World War II.

Passerby also posted photos of captured Iraqis – pathetic, ragged men with sallow faces, rather like illegal Mexican immigrants. They huddled close to each other in fear, and our soldiers towered over them. In their bullet-proof vests and helmets, wielding their high-tech weapons, our soldiers looked like mythical Atlases rounding up savages.

But in some photos our Atlases behaved bestially. They kicked the legs of prisoners lying on the ground. They spat on them. They even urinated on them. It was disgusting, mean, but, alas, they weren’t staged either. I recalled Ken at once and he easily could have done this. And many other guys from our platoon too.

Many on the forum tried to ban Passerby from uploading all these photos and complained to the moderators, but when the question was put to a vote, I, surprising myself, wrote that if we ban the publication of Passerby’s photos, then we ourselves are like Saddam and any other dictators – Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-il – and will stop being citizens of a democratic state.

People grumbled a little, but nobody wished to speak against democracy, since that’s why we were fighting a war in Iraq.

But my conviction in my own correctness and the correctness of my country was especially badly shaken the day when Passerby uploaded the next set of photos – a small one, just a few frames. In them were hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi women, dressed in black scarves.

They were going down a street in a big city against a background of partially destroyed houses. Many of the women were carrying placards in the Arab language and portraits of Saddam Hussein. The laconic caption said:

In the following pictures, I saw appalling things. Marines smashed into the women, my marines. I could not be mistaken. I had served two months and could not confuse regimentals and details of equipment. Clad in camouflage armor, the marines beat the protesters with rifle butts, bludgeons, fists and boots – protestors who were mostly old women, old enough to be the soldiers’ Moms.

I looked at the pictures, I looked at the blood-stained women’s faces distorted by pain and anger. I looked at the guys from our platoon laughing, dragging a grey-haired old woman through the dirt by the hair, at the bludgeons raised in the air, at the women tangled in hems of black dresses, trying to protect themselves with thin hands from the blows…

Several minutes later I removed my account from the forum and closed the computer. Chaos danced in my head, and my thoughts were tossed like autumn leaves on the wind. Gradually the realization came: we did something wrong. And maybe to some this realization came earlier – it wasn’t for nothing that there were so many opponents of war around the world. Not supporters of Hussein, as I began to understand now, but opponents of war because war is terrible, it is death and pain. It is ruin. It is diseases. It is hunger. And again death.

Yes, Iraq, probably, was a totalitarian state, aggressive and dangerous to the whole world. Probably… but I am not sure of anything at all. And… again, probably… the people of Iraq lived in servitude, under the heel of a cruel dictator, in perpetual fear, and everyone, including the most high-ranking officials, was afraid for their lives daily. How else do you explain that many Iraqi statesmen came over to our side as soon as the opportunity was presented? Or is it the truth that a donkey loaded with gold is the best battering ram against the castle gate?

Anyway, when we brought democracy to Iraq, it had to become an important, even a great event, for all Iraqis.

But it turned out that Iraqis thought differently. Perhaps, they would have been happier with some other form of help, but not bombings and retaliatory raids. But the main thing was not even that.

To establish democracy, we agreed that for some time we would forget about it. Yes, yes, it was a very dangerous paradox: to establish democracy you forget about democracy! And if there is no democracy, everything is possible: killing, raping, urinating on prisoners, dragging old women by the hair…

And suddenly I was delighted that I had broken those fucking legs. And that in a semi-conscious state I had signed those papers palmed off on me by the chaplain. I was delighted because if not for the accident and the hospital, I would now be there, in Baghdad, Basra or El-Nadzhaf, and I would be shooting at children and thrashing old women with a bludgeon.

My broken legs preserved my honour and delivered a wake-up call to my brain – that’s what I understood in the hospital. And from now on my life will go differently.”