Editor's Picks

Manny Pacquiao loses his crown

The boxer's anti-gay remarks lead us to take an unprecedented step: We're revoking his Salon Sexiest Man title

Steve Carell and Manny Pacquiao (Credit: AP)

We’re all relieved around here that Manny Pacquiao is not really some Leviticus-quoting loon who says that gays “must be put to death” – even if that may have something to do with the fact that he admits “I haven’t read the Book of Leviticus yet.”

But it’s nonetheless disappointing that a man we at Salon bestowed our highest honor to just six months ago has proven himself so terribly unenlightened. In an interview for Examiner.com last week, one of our 2011 Sexiest Men declared of marriage, “It should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of Old.” Oh dear. Winning lots of fights? Sexy. Getting elected to the Filipino Congress? Sexy. “Donating millions to improve living conditions in his poverty-stricken nation”? Super hot. Not being down with civil rights? Bzzzzzzt!

That is why we have decided to take an unprecedented step here at Sexiest Men World Headquarters. We have in the past fought epic, bloody internal battles over men like Zach Galifianakis, Al Franken and Louis C.K. But we have never, in our sexy, sexy history, revoked a man’s title. Until now.

We understand that the Roman Catholic boxer has to be true to his beliefs, and we would never insist that falling in lock step with Salon’s own socialist, American fabric-destroying agenda is the only criterion for making the list. It’s just that we suddenly don’t feel like going a few sweaty rounds with a dude who thinks civil rights “adulterate the altar of matrimony.”

So instead we’re passing on the crown to one of last year’s runner-ups. Like Pacquiao — and also like our beloved first Sexiest Man, Carell’s former “Daily Show” colleague Stephen Colbert – he’s a happily married, self-described “born and bred” Catholic. But this one says, “I stay clear of declaring my political choices,” insisting humbly, “I feel like my voice is no more valuable, no less valuable than anyone else’s.”

What really makes us go weak in the knees is how he turned a bumbling, inept bag-of-wind character and made us care when he said goodbye to “The Office.” And, last summer, he took a broken, pathetic, recently divorced dad and made him so tenderly romantic (and so darn good-looking in a tailored suit) he nearly made us forget Ryan Gosling in “Crazy, Stupid Love.” We’ve had a thing for him since before he became a 40-year-old virgin. We’d choose him as our friend for the end of the world. How could we ever have been so blinded by that pugilistic piece of beefcake? That’s why today, we’re asking newest Salon Sexy Man Steve Carell, will you gay marry us?

Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.

Jonathan Rauch: “We are a sideshow no longer”

At his first same-sex marriage since Obama's big announcement, a longtime advocate reflects on a decades-long fight

(Credit: Chris Howey via Shutterstock)

It’s a beautiful spring day in Washington, D.C., around 5 p.m. I am arriving at the august Peterson Institute for International Economics. Today, however, the place is not a think tank but a chapel, and the important words to be uttered are not “trade-weighted exchange rates” but “I do.”

My old friend Joe Gagnon is getting married today to Paul Adamczak, his longtime partner. How I hate that word “partner”! As if Joe and Paul were members of the same law firm. Within the hour, I am pleased to realize, they will be partners no longer. Under District of Columbia law, they will be husbands.

Today’s ceremony is freighted with extra excitement. Only three days ago, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. The subject is much discussed here at the wedding. Of course, as an invitee mentions, Obama’s endorsement alters not a jot of law, not a tittle of policy. Yet a cultural barrier has been crossed, a taboo forever retired. The highest officer in the land and, by extension, his political party and half the country have embraced today’s ceremony as their own. We are a sideshow, an outlier, no longer.

The think tank’s auditorium is transformed by draperies, flowers, gentle lighting, rows of plush chairs. Lovely. It occurs to me, as I reflect on the week’s events, that only one decoration is missing. An American flag would be very much in order.

Chamber musicians play as I take a seat. A few rows ahead of me sits a restless boy, perhaps 8 or 9 years old. My mind pitches back to an earlier time, more than four decades ago, and another boy, about the same age. He is sitting on the piano bench in his house in suburban Phoenix. I remember exactly the spot, exactly the moment, though I could not tell you the date exactly. Suddenly, out of the blue, the boy realizes that he will never be married. He does not know why marriage and family are out of his reach. He will in fact not understand why for almost 20 years, when he comes to understand he is homosexual. But children understand marriage long before they understand sex, and this boy knows, intuitively, that he is different in some way that rules out the kind of life that other people take for granted. He will always be an outsider to family life.

I look again at the boy in front of me and try to imagine what it is like to be him. He will never experience the desolate realization that I had long ago in Phoenix. He will never even be able to comprehend it. The wedding he now witnesses seems ordinary to him. For the whole span of his life, whether he is straight or gay, there will be a destination for his love within the folds of marriage. I find I envy him.

The grooms are walking down the aisle, Joe accompanied by his father, Paul by his mother. In front, two candles are lit for the parents who are not here. I wonder how Joe’s father feels, giving away his son to a man in a legally recognized ceremony. I think back on a conversation with my own father. This is in 1995, not so very long ago, but an eon as it seems today. He is urging me not to write about gay marriage, a subject I will soon take up for the Economist and the New Republic. He knows and accepts that I am gay; that is not the problem. It is my career he is worried about. The idea of a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman, he tells me, is such an outlandish idea that if I associate myself with it I will no longer be taken seriously as a writer. People will think I’m a nut. At the time, his prediction seemed plausible.

My gaze alights on one of the absent parents’ candles. My father lived to know and love Michael, who became like another son to him. He lived to see same-sex marriage legalized in Massachusetts and then in several other states. Alas, he died only a few months before Michael and I could legally marry in Washington, D.C. Had he been at our wedding, he would have blessed us, happy to see his prediction proved so blessedly wrong.

The officiant begins the ceremony and the grooms join hands. There are readings from Robert Frost and Plato’s Symposium. Later, Joe will admit to worrying that the readings might seem hackneyed. But the words have their intended effect as my eyes well up. They have an unintended effect, also, as I realize the improbability of what I am witnessing: a thoroughly conventional same-sex wedding.

Earlier that very day, as it happens, I had received an email that was like a bad LSD flashback. Objecting to a recent pro-gay-marriage article of mine, the writer identified himself as a member of the Stonewall generation. “I myself  was active in the Gay Liberation Movement way back in the beginning in the early ’70s and am now horrified by the whole cloying Gay Marriage issue,” he wrote. “It seems deranged that we should now want to ape straights; surely we should continue to do what we’ve always done best: standing aside from, and viewing sardonically, the straight world.”

When I began advocating gay marriage in the mid-1990s, and then well into the new century, I used to hear this kind of objection all the time. A gay couple first attempted to marry in 1970, just a few months after the famous riots outside the Stonewall Bar in New York City; but marriage was not then taken up by the gay-rights movement. Matrimony seemed not only out of reach but out of touch with the liberationist, libertine ethos of the time. We were supposed to be breaking the fetters of conventionality, reinventing sexuality and ourselves.

But then came the plague, and the discovery, too often, that we had only each other for family, yet we had none of the tools to care for one another that families need. We could not enter the hospital room; sometimes, we could not even enter the country. We would use our bodies to warm our shuddering “lover” (such was the term in those days — even worse than “partner”). We would hand-feed him as he wasted. Then, when he passed, we would be sent packing by the relatives who had never known or cared we existed.

Never again, we said. That was when we understood that real liberation lies in family’s embrace, not its rejection. Triple-drug HIV therapy and the gay-marriage movement arrived almost simultaneously. No coincidence, that.

Conservatives worry that gay participation will change marriage for the worse. Gay-liberationists (the few that remain) worry it will change gays for the worse. I wish they could all be here, as the grooms take their vows, to see how marriage has changed gays for the better. The ancient words wash over me. To have and to hold … for better for worse … until death do us part. These are words with the power not only to turn unrelated individuals into next of kin, to bond their extended families, to shelter their children, and to build communities; they are words that have reformed, and indeed re-formed, an entire culture.

As I sit here, I cannot help feeling vindicated by the rage of that aging gay objector. He has lost. It is over. Gays have not claimed marriage; it has claimed us.

The couple, now husbands, are returning down the aisle amid a commotion of hugs and smiles. Now there will be a cocktail reception, then a dinner, then a honeymoon — in Disney World, no less. It occurs to me that I have never seen so traditional and comfortingly familiar an occasion. It occurs to me that to be alive just now, seeing what I am seeing, is a miracle. The air around us is thick with the spirits of long-passed homosexual men and women, so many of them tormented and persecuted, who could never have dreamt of this future.

As I pass a multi-tiered wedding cake, I suddenly wish I could rectify a blunder. A couple of days earlier, in a radio interview, an interviewer asked me how I felt, as a gay man, about Obama’s announcement. I had been expecting to talk about politics and polls, not myself. Caught off guard, I rambled about being pleased and surprised and whatnot. Only now do I realize that the right answer was a single word. “Grateful,” I should have said. “I feel grateful.”

I kick myself. Why does one always think of the right answer when it’s too late? But the reproach barely registers before I am lost in the happy glow of sunshine and champagne.

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Jonathan Rauch is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America."

Let’s put Jamie Dimon on trial

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon should explain why a megabank that accidentally loses billions is good for the economy

Jamie Dimon (Credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford)

Let’s put JPMorgan Chase chairman, president and CEO James “Jamie” Dimon on trial. Mr. Dimon has a reputation for being the sagest guy on Wall Street and an expert at managing risk. JPMorgan emerged from the financial crisis not just unscathed but secure enough to step in and rescue Bear Stearns when the government asked it to. (He gets very mad when you say that his bank got bailed out by the government, and he insists that the government made him take all that free money.) Then his bank somehow accidentally lost billions of dollars last week, whoops! And he is really embarrassed, but not embarrassed enough to fire himself. So, let’s put him on trial and force him to explain what good he and his bank are.

The SEC is investigating the massive loss, but that will take a lot of time and the eventual report will probably be very difficult for novices to understand and probably they won’t put anyone in jail. Dimon might have to be hauled before Congress to answer questions, but no one watches congressional hearings, and no one likes members of Congress. I think a big televised prime-time tribunal would be best. And then maybe some JPMorgan shareholders, unemployed people, journalists and angry bloggers can just ask him some really simple questions about why he thinks JPMorgan shouldn’t be regulated at all.

While I am definitely endorsing a humiliating show trial, we don’t have to send Jamie Dimon to jail afterward, even if a jury of people who had their houses foreclosed on them find him guilty. The point of this is to mainly have him on the record, compelled to answer questions plainly and clearly, to an unfriendly audience of non-Davos people.

This very good explainer helps us to understand how exactly JPMorgan came to misplace billions of dollars, but it raises more questions than it answers. Questions like, “Wouldn’t it have been better if that $2 billion had been used for almost anything in the world besides shady mega-bank gambling that no one understands?” And, “Doesn’t it seem you guys could save a bit of money on salaries and so forth while still achieving basically the same results if you replaced your chief investment officer with some old people who play video slots all day?”

I am just not really clear on the role JPMorgan has in a healthy and functioning economy, whether it is making billions in high-stakes gambling or losing billions in high-stakes gambling. It seems like America was actually doing pretty well with there not being any such thing as credit-default swaps, which JPMorgan invented, in the 1990s, right before investment banks were allowed to merge with retail banks and do whatever they wanted with everyone’s money.

I’d also like Mr. Dimon to have to explain whether he knew he was about to have to admit to losing billions of dollars when, on May 3, he complained about the “discrimination” faced by bankers. Dimon also argued a few days later that the economy would’ve added twice as many jobs in the last 24 months if it weren’t for a “constant attack on business” from various unnamed hippies and government bureaucrats. I would like to know how many jobs were created when JPMorgan accidentally lost some unknown amount of money that is likely to end up being more than $2 billion? Also did Dimon lie during his first-quarter earnings call last month, or did he have no idea what sort of things his chief investment office was up to (even after their actions were reported in the press)? If he didn’t have any idea, shouldn’t he maybe step down to run a smaller bank, where he can keep a closer eye on everything? Dimon said initially that the stuff that lost all the money wouldn’t have violated the Volcker Rule, even though it plainly violates the spirit of the Volcker Rule but also he’s not sure if the bank broke any laws? Jamie, I think maybe you should consider retirement; this bank is too complicated for you.

Dimon gets so defensive when people trash banks and bankers because he thinks his bank makes the world a better place. He thinks that JPMorgan making as much money for itself as possible is good for everyone, because capitalism. Much as today’s super-rich, the .01 percent who are largely CEOs and financial industry professionals, are a bunch of rentiers who’ve convinced themselves that they are job-creating titans of industry, Dimon has convinced himself that his firm is making our economy function better instead of just playing incredibly complex computer games with unimaginable sums of other people’s money.

So let’s haul him before a judge (I would be fine with Judge Judy) and ask him to explain, without jargon, what positive role JPMorgan plays for the American and world economies that a few much smaller, less leveraged firms couldn’t also play while not being at risk of losing billions of dollars by accident in a “hedge” and sending world markets reeling.

I mean, I’m sure he’d never admit to any sort of culpability for our current morass (it’s the gubmint’s fault!) because he clearly believes his own bullshit and he’s never faced any sort of serious challenge to his viewpoint, but it still might be very good television.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Whitewashing, a history

From "Tiffany's" to "Khan," we look at Hollywood's illustrious tradition of casting white actors in non-white roles SLIDE SHOW

View the slide show

The extraordinary box office success of "The Hunger Games" has launched a heated discussion of Hollywood's peculiar habit of casting white actors in nonwhite roles. Why does this happen? We decided to turn to a very important studio chief for answers -- channeled here by comedian (and "Daily Show" correspondent) Aasif Mandvi.

All I have to say is that whitewashing has been going on since as long as Hollywood has existed — it’s a tradition — and rather than non-white people complaining about it, they should embrace it. It will make going to the movies so much easier and more fun. But there are just a few things you need to understand.

First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. There’s nothing that white people like more than seeing other white people in movies and on television. When you go to the movies with your ethnic “judgment” eyes, you miss my point. Watch as a white person, and suddenly your outrage turns to understanding and laughter.

Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? It’s so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you’d have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh. Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the ’60s. “Short Circuit” was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!

My point is, I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the rich guy. When you look at it through my studio executive lens, you understand how important it is that both white people and non-white people believe that Indians, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs are truly just white people in brown makeup. I don’t like thinking that way. I just don’t have the luxury not to. I’m a businessman. White people spend more money on shit than anyone else. (Except on fast food, which is mostly blacks and Mexicans … at least that’s what I have heard. I’m a vegan.) So hey, non-Caucasians, stop buying tacos and start buying Cadillacs.

White people are also cheaper to light than dark-skinned people, and just so you know, you the moviegoer end up paying for that extra cost. Sometimes it’s just too unbelievable to cast an ethnic actor. I turned away a lovely Indian actress once who auditioned for the role of a hobbit. I mean there are no Indian hobbits. Audiences would never believe that.

Now, look: I am trying to do the right thing. America has changed and Hollywood should attempt to portray a truer depiction of the ethnic diversity that makes up this country. The fact that many television shows now hire a certain percentage of non-white actors is a step in the right direction, right? I am even prepared to make a deal with you ethnic people out there. Every time you let me cast a non-Caucasian character with a Caucasian actor, I will give you two or three non-white actors in smaller supporting roles. Why not lead roles? Because I’m trying to make a living here. I have spent a lot of time and money throughout history convincing everyone that white is normal. I have even convinced non-white people that white is better, prettier, smarter, stronger, and that only white people can truly be the heroes. Everyone has bought into it, and now you want me to just abandon all my hard work? OK, I will make an exception for some of you non-whites: If you are a hot Latina, you can be the lead. Why? Because white guys want to fuck Jennifer Lopez.

Here are a few more key elements to remember when watching a movie the way white people have been programmed to react. Laugh at the funny accents, because they are funny. Ignore the source material; I’m making movies, I don’t give a shit about staying true to your comic books. And … hold on! Why the fuck is Idris Elba playing a Norse God!?

To view a slide show of Hollywood’s egregious moments in white-washing, click on the link below — and share your own most memorable moments in the comments. (Slide show by Max Rivlin-Nadler)

View the slide show

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Aasif Mandvi is an actor and writer who appears as a correspondent on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." He also co wrote and stars in the film "Today's Special" and will be appearing this summer in the films "Premium Rush" and "Ruby Sparks."

“The Aleppo Codex”: The bizarre history of a precious book

A reporter traces the shadowy fate of the definitive version of the Hebrew Bible

Matti Friedman

An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.

The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”

The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.

All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.

It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.

The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”

While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.

This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?

The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.

If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.

This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.

Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

Afghanistan, I can’t quit you

My mom pushed me to join the Marines. Now that she's gone, I'm still drawn to war zones

A child flies a kite in Kabul on Tuesday Mar. 27, 2012. (Credit: Geoffrey Ingersoll)

The heat. That’s what I remember most. Shimmery and bright. Blinding. Stifling. Heeee-eeaat.

The kind that’s not just on you, wrapped around you, but balled up and pulsing inside you — a desert blanket with teeth. It’s a type of heat that makes your skin cry and your eyeballs sweat, even in the shade; heat like a predator you can’t run away from.

I notice it right as I get off the plane — not just the degrees but also the dust. Dust you can smell, kicked up by a thousand years of struggle. In a region this old, I’m sure each breath carries a dose of unintended history: Inhale, Alexander the Great; exhale, the Ottoman Empire; inhale, the USSR; exhale, the Taliban.

And now, at 90,000 troops, it’s America’s turn.

I have my own history.

A week from now, it’ll be a year since my mother passed. Horrific car accident, traumatic brain injury. It wasn’t the first TBI I’d seen, but I hope it’s the last.

She’s the reason I and my brothers joined the Marines.

The last time I was in a war zone, though, it was Iraq. Anbar. Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was also a journalist — Marine combat correspondent, a Private Joker, like Full Metal Jacket.

“Get rid of that peace pin and get with the winning team, kid,” the Colonel says to Joker.

Yeah that was me, Raptor Man and Joker rolled into one person, hopping around the combat zone with a camera. By the end, I could tell you the type of helicopter approaching just from the sound alone.

I remember we were all terrified of roadside bombs. Nothing could rip the life out of you as quick as an improvised explosive device. Practically invisible. Pressure plates. Propane tanks. Shaped charges and command det. Incendiary bombs frying the flesh right off your bones, and tank mines turning tons of Humvee steel into an indistinguishable mess, quick as a red-light-running SUV.

Mom’s car was like that, nearly indistinguishable. Her crimson “Marine Mom” plate was bent and hanging from the front. In the backseat, purchased moments before impact, was a mangled case of Rolling Rock, the beer we all loved to drink together when the boys and I were home. When it happened, Mom was getting ready for us to come home again. The green glass from the bottles spread around the demolished Ford at a scarred Pennsylvania crossroad.

She told me once that she had cried every night during my first deployment in 2006. I deployed again in 2008. Long before I even went to bootcamp, though, she had told me she always pictured me living out of a backpack in some foreign country, carrying around a camera and a notepad.

I land in Kabul with a bit more than that. I have a pelican case of camera gear, a backpack, a duffel bag and an old Corps Alice pack. Double of everything; redundancy is key.

The big difference here is that I don’t have the Marine Corps to back me up. I’m alone in my own zone, no Conex box full of extra camera bodies, batteries and lenses. What I have is what I got.

I’m used to freedom. During deployments as a combat correspondent, or “CC,” I had an almost insane amount of freedom. I could be in Baghdad on Sunday, Ramadi on Wednesday, and Mosul by the weekend. I was one of a very select group of “non-rate” entry level Marines who could justifiably look in a colonel’s eye and ask, “Why?”

Also, I had a top-down, bottom-up view of the battlefield. I was included in high-viz command briefs as well as presence patrols.

The only problem was the multilevel public affairs web, a dicey bureaucracy hell-bent on “happy glad” editing and stories that reflect rosily on the command staff. It’s like the scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” written by a former combat correspondent in a short story called “Short Times”:

“So you didn’t see any enemy bodies, no casualties?” says the public affairs officer.

“They must have carried them all away,” says Joker.

“No blood trails?”

“It was raining.”

“Well, throw in one casualty, say, a dead officer; grunts love to read about dead officers,” says the PAO.

“How ’bout a General?”

Yes, I’ll admit, Military Public Affairs was a spin machine I desperately wanted to be free of. Full of “command messages,” clever omissions and helpful little edits.

Criticism at all was out of the question. I guess the idea was that we got enough of that from the civilian side of coverage. But to even call what we did “coverage” would be a bit of a misnomer. It was more like public relations with a journalism arm.

It’s like this. Ribbon cuttings: The General stands there smiling in front of a new clinic, and I take the standard big-scissor picture — snap. He and some Iraqi leader shake hands then — snap snap — and everyone’s happy right? But there are no details about how much we paid and how long it took to finish the project. I can’t even mention that there’s no electricity or acknowledge the smell of shit in the air, wafting from a waterless outhouse just meters from the building.

I saw a little boy come running out of it, smiling, excited the Americans came to visit, and I walk over to take a look inside. A huge pile of human shit intermixed with, strangely enough, pages from prominent American magazines. A smeared Vogue cover; I think I see Esquire, too, and then Johnny Depp peers at me from between turds, flies kissing his face like teenage girls probably do to their posters back home.

It was all so very strange, ignoring details like this, simply because “civilian journalists” don’t want to reflect harshly on command or the military, in general.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not here to pull the rug out from anyone’s feet. I’m not looking for a runaway general, or a hard-hitting expose.

See, I understand that despite what the news media, pundits and commanding generals say, the reality of war is wall-to-wall gray. It may look cut and dry, good and evil, right and wrong, but on the ground, the moral abyss that stretches between weapon sights and targets contextualizes even the most distilled aspect of human struggle: Kill or be killed.

Death, like a black hole, distorts everything around it.

Speaking of death, once I arrive in Kabul city, what I’m wishing for is a little more security. As an independent operator, I’m not as comfortable as I once was rolling around with 50 well-armed 19-year-old Marines.

My travel isn’t so structured. Sit. Stand. Sleep. Get the bags off the truck, Private. Move the bags over here. Now over there. Eat. Form up. Go away. Get together. Load up. Strap in. I said: Strap. In. A C130 from Kuwait, and then you’re in the shit.

Not so now. I land in Kabul a disoriented mess. I’m not with DynCorp or Raytheon. I’m not a former SEAL with Blackwater. There’s no burly white guy waiting at the gate with a sign bearing my name.

I’m a freelance journalist. I have to rely on some tiny, jumpy Afghan who’s looking to make a quick buck to help me get my bags, fill out forms and register with the government. Then my “fixer,” a journalist facilitator, shows up with his driver and car.

Still, they are Afghans, it is not a Humvee and I am not surrounded by armed service members who are eager to dispatch my enemies.

I’ve come a long way from being that aimless college grad living in his mom’s basement. I remember I had recently become a Teach for America reject. She called me upstairs not long after I got the rejection letter. It was the afternoon. I probably still had bed hair, my breath a mixture of cold pizza and coffee.

I’ll never forget her ultimatum: “Either you go back to school …”

With my habit for whiskey? No. No more school.

“you get your teaching credentials and teach down by your father …”

In South Carolina, nah, I’ll pass. What’s the last one?

“or you enlist in the Marines.”

What? Really?

“I know a recruiter …” — undoubtedly from her days as a high school front desk secretary — “Gunnery Sergeant Fannel. You can call him right now if you want.”

Hmmm … “What’s the number?”

Years later, seeing me as a success, my two brothers would follow suit.

When I do finally meet a service member in Kabul to pick up my media credentials from the local base, he drives out of the entry control point in a lumbering “hard skin” vehicle (one that looks like a regular SUV except it’s armored).

He gets no farther than about 50 feet from the ECP, parks and gets out. He’s totally covered in protective equipment.

I see now how ridiculous we Americans sometimes look to the locals. Obsessed with protection to the point that the protection itself actually makes us slower and more apt to trip, stumble, or get caught up — in a lot of ways more vulnerable.

Also, it acts as a very ostentatious barrier between us and the Afghans.

This is not the first time I get the perspective of the locals. Another big difference this time is that I’ve given myself a week in the mix before I have to meet up for my flight out to Camp Leatherneck and the Marine units with whom I’ll embed.

So I have a week to tool around Afghanistan, free as a bird flapping in the breeze, and my perspective is not solely limited to that of the military. It’s important, I believe, to talk to the people and get to know them. I think the Marines would agree that talking to the people was no small part of their success in Anbar during the “Awakening” in ’07 and ’08. I hope it will be a part of my success as a reporter, this time on the civilian side.

The first time I was in Iraq, I’ll admit that I hated all of them. A deep, scornful hatred, like black syrup pumping thick through my heart. A hawk that eats foreign policy hawks for breakfast, I wanted to glass the whole country.

Second time around, tasked with transition teams, I got to know a lot of Iraqis. Picked up a little Arabic. I began to understand them as a people, their generational struggle to exist beneath the iron arm of Saddam’s royal tyranny.

You can Monday-morning-quarterback the shit out of our operation — whether it was legal or not, how it was handled, etc. But in between the lines of the opinion sections of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it’s prudent to understand that real people with families, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, dreams and nightmares — actual human beings — are trying to exist and cope with a never-ending cycle of trauma.

The Iraqis used to laugh at the American concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. Actually laugh. They’d say, “PTSD? Look at our children; they’ve grown up with PTSD.”

The Afghans are no different. In fact, they’re worse.

I cruise out west, to Kunduz, to the farms and the bazaars. I talk to farmers, fishermen and kids. Inside the city, I talk to prominent businessmen and city officials. In the park, I talk to regular citizens and even senior citizens as they play chess.

I go up into the mountain slums and give bubblegum to the children. I ask them what they want to be when they grow up, what they learn at school, and who their heroes are.

“John Cena!” Yells one kid, scrunching into a wrestler pose and smiling.

What amazes me is the amount of hope. It’s understandable when a kid in New Jersey tells you he wants to be a firefighter or a doctor. Every kid here either wants to be a doctor or an engineer. It strums a chord of sorrow in me so deep that it takes all I can to ignore it; as I watch a toddler paw through an open sewer, it takes all I have to keep a straight face while I carry on a conversation with children who have lived nothing but war.

The city scene is what we would think of as post-apocalyptic. So is most of the countryside and suburbs, all the bazaars and farms. There is tinge of post-apocalypse everywhere. Not like Iraq, though. In Iraq, in Baghdad, they remembered once that their city was beautiful.

Here it is not so much post-, but also during, maybe even pre-. Even the parents of those children grew up in war. The Russians held ground in the ’80s. The Taliban ran a regime of fire in the ’90s. Now unfinished, unoccupied buildings dot the landscape as proof (alongside the looming U.S. withdrawal deadline) that the crooked fingers of 2008′s economic apocalypse reach even into the darkest depths of war.

And once we go, where does that leave them? Most of them think Pakistan or Iran will take over. The optimists hope Russia or China will gain influence. Either way, the vast majority want the U.S. to stay.

It’s funny, they refer to their country as the football field where armies come to compete for global dominance.

Regardless, I find they are a proud, strong and courteous people. They are also willing to fight for their country, which I find out once I get to Delaram II, a Marine base in Helmand.

After spending a week in Kabul and the surrounding area, I meet up with my military liaison and catch a flight south, to Camp Leatherneck and then down to Delaram II, to embed with a Marine Advisory Team.

I realize things are really different once a Marine — one who would have drastically outranked me –calls me “sir.”

“You don’t have to call me sir, dude. Geoff will do just fine.”

I realize I’ve just called a Gunnery Sergeant “dude.” Yes, as opposed to being a guy in uniform with a camera, now I’m just a guy with a camera. The distance, regardless of my history, is palpable, typified by an intelligence lieutenant who stammers through an interview, unsure exactly of what to divulge.

Finally, for me, it begins to sink in that the phrase, “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” is literally just that: a phrase.

The unit here is “advising” a brigade of the Afghan National Army. My first day there, the Afghan army simultaneously repels an enemy assault and finds some IEDs. They do both to a degree satisfactory to Marine standards, except they bring the IEDs back on the base, sending the Marines into a tizzy.

Marine explosive ordinance disposal appears to take care of the bombs (it turns out, they were inert anyway), and I find myself an interpreter so that I can talk to the Afghan chain of command. I think I’m going to focus on them more than the Marines, who are due to leave in the next two years anyway.

Inside the Afghan command center, I am alone, aside from the interpreter. No Marine Gunny. No PAO.

So there is freedom, and there is also more of a degree of objectivity, but objectivity is a relative concept. I know I have more latitude, but I also have more time. There’s no quota. I can focus on whatever I want (there’s a motorcycle-riding General here whom I’ve pretty much pegged for my next piece).

I guess that just leaves the question: Why? Why did I come back?

I’ve wondered that myself quite often. I remember on that last plane ride out, after my second deployment, there was a soul-deep sigh when the bird finally left the ground. Thank God, I thought, I have all my fingers and all my toes, all my limbs, all my skin, and I’m out. I don’t ever have to come back.

But here I am. Again.

Maybe I want action. Or maybe it’s that writers write what they know. It could even be that I miss the Corps. But that’s not quite right.

I know that I want to offer a voice to voiceless people. I know that I want to see the truth — report the truth — in depth. And I know that, if not for anyone but my little brothers, I want to tell the stories of 19-year-old Marines — Americans who were as old as those Afghan children when the planes took down our towers.

The truth is I don’t really know why. It could be many things.

It could even be my mother, whom I still see in my dreams, and the drive to be the man she dreamed me to be. I wish the nearest Rolling Rock wasn’t 4,000 miles away.

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Geoffrey Ingersoll is a freelance journalist, documentarian, writer, photographer, and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is the recipient of the Sam Stavisky Award for Combat Reporting.

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