Foreign Terrain: Americans in Iraq

November 16, 2007

Jon Lee Anderson's article on the surge in this week's New Yorker gives a better sense than I have previously seen of what is going on in Iraq. The experience of war for most Americans over the past few years has meant the effort of trying to understand through the fog of numbers and statistics that are offered to us. Currently the question revolves around what to make of the drop in casualties and the widespread Sunni change of heart.

The article at one point described American soldiers at a "Joint Security Station" in Ghazaliya, a suburb of Baghdad. The name of the JSS is Thrasher, named for a Sergeant Thrasher who was killed by a sniper. Anderson then notes the oddly Americanized geography of their zone:

The Americans had superimposed their own lexicon on the neighborhood's geography, to make it comprehensible to themselves. Just as Ghazaliya had been divided into three areas—Casino, Thrasher, and Maverick—all the major road arteries were referred to in Pentagonese: Red Falcon, Caradine, Vernon, Cecil, R.P.G. Alley, High Tension Road, and so forth. Few of the American soldiers knew how the locals referred to those same streets.

I argue in my upcoming book (Religion, Culture, and Sacred Places, TBA) that places are created by means of stories that get attached to the land. It is inevitable that with all these American soldiers in the area, that the landscape would not start to reflect their own stories. Instead of references to saints or political leaders, their streets and regions are named after fallen comrades and vividly experiential terms. Parts of the American West have this same transparent topographic quality: Dead Man's Alley, Scotty's Peak, etc.. In the West the events of a few exploratory years have become the permanent language for referencing the landscape. In the case of the soldiers' mental maps of Baghdad, it is a geography that is bound to vanish.

At the close of that passage Anderson makes an interesting comment: "Few of the American soldiers knew how the locals referred to those same streets". This implies that there exists a parallel mental map on the part of locals: they have different names for these streets, but that is the only difference. Actually, much more than this distinguishes the mental map of a locality in the Middle East. My experience in Cairo and other places has been that although there are diminutive signs in random places that indicate a street has a name, few people actually know those names (except in the case of popular thoroughfares). People get places, but they do so without the imagined visual map in their heads that we customarily use. When the American soldiers superimpose their place names, they are not simply creating a "parallel" geography, they are actually creating a new landscape that did not previously exist. I would not be surprised to learn that in the process of naming streets there was also a degree of physical rationalizing and streamlining. Names create a map.. and a map demands that streets lead places and do rational things.

It would be a worthwhile project to interview some soldiers and have them talk through the Iraqi landscape as they knew it. In fact I would love to tackle a project like this. A soldier's geography is like a map traced in water. The words for these places that mark their lives will be erased by the Iraqis, but will surely be the stuff they talk about whenever they meet fellow soldiers: "Do you remember Thrasher and that suicidal drive down R.P.G. Alley?"